Author: Badalian Vardan

UN VETERAN DE LA GUERRE QUALIFIE LES ACCUSATIONS DE ” POLITIQUE ”

ARMENIE

Un colonel de l’armee armenienne a la retraite qui a ete arrete le
mois dernier après avoir organise des manifestations de rue avec
d’autres anciens combattants de la region du Haut-Karabagh a rejete
comme infondees les accusations portees contre lui et les a qualifie de
” politiquement motivees “.

Volodia Avetisian a ete inculpe le 20 Septembre pour avoir ” detourne ”
2000 $ d’un autre homme avec une fausse promesse d’avoir son petit-fils
exempte du service militaire obligatoire. Ni Avetisian ni son avocat
n’ont fait de declaration publique sur cette affaire.

Dans une declaration ecrite, Avetisian a accuse les autorites
armeniennes d’avoir fabrique l’affaire pour arreter la campagne pour
une augmentation importante des pensions modestes verses a des milliers
de veterans de la guerre du Karabagh. Il s’est engage a poursuivre
sa campagne qui a recu une large couverture mediatique independante
au cours des derniers mois.

La declaration a ete diffuse quelques heures après qu’il est apparu
que Volodia Avetisian sera couvert par une amnistie generale prevue
par les autorites. L’avocat du colonel, Ara Zakarian, a nie tout
lien entre l’amnistie et la première reaction tardive de son client
a son arrestation.

Volodia Avetisian a accède a la notoriete après avoir organise une
protestation solitaire sur la Place de la Liberte a Erevan en mai
pour reclamer des hausses de retraite. Des dizaines d’autres anciens
combattants ont rejoint sa campagne sur une base presque quotidienne.

Tout au long de l’ete, ils ont manifeste a plusieurs reprises devant
le bureau du Premier ministre et d’autres edifices gouvernementaux
a Erevan pour appuyer leurs revendications. Les manifestants diriges
par Avetisian ont egalement attire des centaines de personnes a des
manifestations hebdomadaires organisees par eux sur la place en août.

” Nous pensons que cette arrestation vise a etouffer notre lutte
sociale ” a dit l’un des veterans qui protestait, Karen Melikbekian,
au service armenien de RFE /’RL (Azatutyun.am). ” Ils ont arrete notre
leader. Mais dans cette lutte chaque combattant de la liberte est un
chef de file. Peuvent-ils arreter tous les autres ? ”

Un autre veteran, Gagik Sarukhanian, a affirme que Volodia Avetisian
a ete emprisonne parce que sa campagne devenait un combat pour un ”
changement de regime “.

mardi 8 octobre 2013, Stephane ©armenews.com

UNCOVERED: “COVERED MARKET” OPENS AFTER TWO-YEAR RENOVATION AND AMID CHARGES OF ILLEGALITY

Yerevan’s “Covered Market” under repair for the past two years and
an apple of discord between the new owner and civil society, Monday
opened its doors and welcomed the first customers.

Enlarge Photo Yerevan’s Pak Shuka (“Covered Market”), February 2011.

The market exterior has remained unchanged, however underground parking
lots have been built, a new two-storey glass structure has emerged in
the back, as for the interior, it looks like one of new owner Samvel
Alexanyan’s Yerevan City supermarkets â?” the product layout is the
same as in that chain of hyper markets, there are around two dozen
cash desks; Natali Pharm pharmacy, again belonging to Alexanyan,
is in the left wing of the market, there is the typical Yerevan City
supermarket’s escalator to the second floor. Former fruit and vegetable
vendors are given a very small part of the market, in the right wing,
to sell their produce.

During the two years of its repair numerous acts of protest have
been held against its reconstruction, with participation of renowned
architects and civil activists. They repeatedly claimed that the
reconstruction was proceeding with major violations of the law on urban
development and monument preservation. A former chief architect of
Yerevan even said that the Covered Market as a historical-cultural
monument could be regarded as lost. City Hall, the culture and
urban development ministries, as bodies in charge of the sphere,
made statements that they granted no license for such construction,
however it led to no legal liability for the construction implementer.

During ArmeniaNow’s visit today to the market, Alexanyan himself was
there. (He had claimed that he possessed no businesses, and that his
wife was running some.) Today Alexanyan claimed he had come to shop
for fruit and told ArmeniaNow that the supermarket name was still
Covered Market (countering speculations that it would be renamed
into Yerevan City). The plastic bags and carts, indeed, had Pak Shuka
(Covered market) printed on them.

The employees of the market said the official opening is planned for
October 9.

Meanwhile, “Liberate the Market from the Oligarch” civil initiative
states its determination to continue the fight and will start daily
acts of protest next to the market building ‘to stop the illegality’.

While the re-opened market and newly opened supermarket was slowly
taking its natural course of operation, members of the initiative
held a discussion in an attempt to determine which state body had
licensed the construction.

Sevada Hayrapetyan, head of the state department for urban development
at the Ministry of Urban Development, partaking in the discussion
said the permission was granted for the construction from point zero
only. RA Police’s Legal Department head Meruzhan Hakobyan said they
could have interfered and suspended the construction if City Hall had
made a respective request, with a statement that they were unable to
stop the illegal construction by their own means.

The initiative member Garegin Chugaszyan says they are planning to
turn to court to disclose the illegality.

THREE AZERBAIJANIS INJURED BY LAND MINE BLAST

Country – Monday, 07 October 2013, 11:12

Three Azerbaijanis were injured by a land mine blast at the border
with Armenia, Gazeta.ru informed. All the three are from the village
of Mezem, Ghazakh region of Azerbaijan bordering with Armenia.

RUSSIA HALTS LITHUANIA DAIRY IMPORTS IN TRADE ROW

7 October 2013 Last updated at 17:37 GMT

Russia is a major market for Lithuanian dairy exporters

Russia has halted imports of Lithuanian dairy produce amid tensions
over EU plans to forge closer ties with ex-Soviet republics.

Russia’s consumer watchdog said the levels of yeast and mould in
Lithuanian dairy produce were unacceptable.

Lithuania is already involved in a bitter dispute with Russia over the
cost of Russian gas, which Moscow’s former Soviet bloc allies rely on.

Lithuania is leading EU efforts to sign new trade deals with those
countries.

Russia’s consumer watchdog Rospotrebnadzor has previously imposed
various bans on food and drink imported from former Soviet neighbours,
for example on wine from Georgia and Moldova, citing health concerns.

In July Russia halted imports of chocolate from the big Ukrainian
firm Roshen.

Such actions have been widely seen as Russia using trade to put
political pressure on its neighbours.

In recent weeks Russian customs officers have imposed time-consuming
checks on Lithuanian lorries on the Russian border, leading to long
delays and queues.

Last week Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius warned that
Vilnius could retaliate on the border with Kaliningrad, a Russian
enclave surrounded by Lithuania and Poland. The city of Kaliningrad
is a major port on the Baltic.

Speaking to Reuters news agency, Mr Linkevicius said: “The Kaliningrad
region is isolated, geographically isolated, so we could apply some
measures also to cut something”.

“We could cut off trains, but not only trains, also the supply of
goods, whatever. It is theoretically possible. It was not discussed,
it’s not our way of thinking, it’s not our methods,” he said.

The European Commission is investigating Russia’s gas monopoly Gazprom
over alleged market-rigging in Eastern Europe. Last week Lithuania’s
Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius said that in 2006-2012 the cost
of Russian gas had soared by 600%, seriously undermining Lithuania’s
competitiveness.

EU forges closer ties

Russia is a major export market for Lithuanian dairy produce, the
bulk of which is cheese, Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency reports. In
2012 Lithuania exported 370,000 tonnes of dairy produce to Russia,
worth $193m (£120m).

The Russian market also accounts for almost 85% of all Lithuanian
exports, Itar-Tass reports.

The EU and Ukraine are preparing an association agreement, with plans
to sign it in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in late November. Such
agreements, along with a free trade partnership, are seen as key
steps towards eventual EU membership.

Moldova and Georgia – also former Soviet republics – may initial
association agreements with the EU.

Russia has been urging former Soviet republics to join a Russian-led
customs union, and Armenia recently said it would do so. The EU had
been expecting Armenia to sign an association agreement, and told
Yerevan that it could not join both trade blocs.

Only Belarus and Kazakhstan have joined Russia in the customs union so
far, which Russian President Vladimir Putin sees as a step towards a
“Eurasian union”.

Erdogan taking Turkey back 1,000 years with `reforms’

By Amir Taheri

October 4, 2013 | 10:08pm

Modal Trigger

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses the media in
Ankara on Sept., 30, 2013

Photo: Getty Images

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan this week unveiled his
long-promised `reform package’ to `chart the path of the nation’ for
the next 10 years – that is, through 2023, 100 years after the
founding of Turkey as a republic.

Which is ironic, since Erdogan seems bent on abolishing that republic
in all but name.

His plan to amend the Constitution to replace the long-tested
parliamentary system with a presidential one (with himself as
president and commander-in-chief) is only part of it. He’d also undo
the key achievement of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

In the 1920s, Ataturk created the Turkish nation from the debris of
the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk and the military and intellectual elite
around him replaced Islam as the chief bond between the land’s many
ethnic communities with Turkish nationhood.

Over the past 90 years, this project has not had 100 percent success.
Nevertheless, it managed to create a strong sense of bonding among a
majority of the citizens.

Now Erdogan is out to undermine that in two ways.

First, his package encourages many Turks to redefine their identities
as minorities. For example, he has discovered the Lezgin minority and
promises to allow its members to school their children in `their own
language.’

Almost 20 percent of Turkey’s population may be of Lezgin and other
Caucasian origin (among them the Charkess, Karachai, Udmurt and
Dagestanis). Yet almost all of those have long forgotten their origins
and melted in the larger pot of Turkish identity. What is the point of
encouraging the re-emergence of minority identities?

Meanwhile, Erdogan is offering little to minorities that have managed
to retain their identity over the past nine decades. Chief among these
are the Kurds, 15 percent of the population.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, the AKP, partly owes its
successive election victories to the Kurds. Without the Kurdish vote,
AKP could not have collected more than 40 percent of the votes. Yet
his package offers Kurds very little.

They would be allowed to use their language, but not to write it in
their own alphabet. Nor could they use `w’ and other letters that
don’t exist in the Turkish-Latin alphabet but are frequent in Kurdish.

Kurdish leaders tell me that the package grants no more than 5 percent
of what they had demanded in long negotiations with Erdogan.

Another real minority that gets little are the Alevites, who practice
a moderate version of Islam and have acted as a chief support for
secularism in Turkey. While Erdogan uses the resources of the state to
support Sunni Islam, Alevites can’t even get building permits to
construct their own places of prayer.

Armenians, too, get nothing – not even a promise of an impartial
inquest into allegations of genocide against them in 1915.

The second leg of Erdogan’s strategy is to re-energize his Islamist
base. Hundreds of associations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood
are to take over state-owned mosques, religious sites and endowment
properties – thus offering AKP a vast power base across Turkey.

Indirectly, Erdogan is telling Turks to stop seeing themselves as
citizens of a secular state and, instead, as minorities living in a
state dominated by the Sunni Muslim majority. Call it neo-Ottomanism.

Erdogan is using `Manzikert’ as a slogan to sell his package. Yet this
refers to a battle between the Seljuk Sultan Alp Arsalan and the
Byzantine Emperor Romanos in 1071, the first great victory of Muslim
armies against Christians in Asia Minor. It happened centuries before
the Ottoman Turks arrived in the region.

Invoking the battle as a victory of Islam against `the Infidel,’
Erdogan supposedly has an eye on the battle’s thousandth anniversary.
Does he mean to take Turkey back 1,000 years?

The Ottoman system divided the sultan’s subjects according to
religious faith into dozens of `mullahs,’ each allowed to enforce its
own laws in personal and private domains while paying a poll tax.

It’s doubtful most Turks share Erdogan’s dream of recreating a
mythical Islamic state with himself as caliph, albeit under the title
of president. His effort to redefine Turkey’s republican and secular
identity may wind up revitalizing it.

French MP visits Karabakh

October 05, 2013 | 15:54

STEPANAKERT. – Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), or Artsakh, Minister
of Foreign Affairs Karen Mirzoyan on Saturday received Francois
Rochebloine.

Rochebloine, who is Chairman of the France-Artsakh Friendship Circle
and member of the French National Assembly, is visiting NKR capital
city Stepanakert.

The activities of the Friendship Circle, and the prospects and
possibilities of cooperation between France and NKR in variety of
domains – specifically, in politics, culture, and education – were
discussed during the meeting, informs the NKR MFA press service.

At the request of the guest, the NKR FM also spoke about the current
phase in the peace process between Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan.

British diplomat: It’s time to recognize Nagorno Karabakh as an
independent state

by Tatevik Shahunyan

ARMINFO
Saturday, October 5, 17:26

It’s time to recognize Nagorno Karabakh as an independent state, said
a human rights barrister, top QC Geoffrey Robertson at an
international conference Artsakh Liberation Struggle: From Gulistan
Till Our Days that has kicked off in Stepanakert.

He said that the international legislation is developing a clause
stipulating for bypassing of the territorial integrity principle where
a crime against humanity was perpetrated. As he noted, the
international law provides a right for secession when the nation’s
fundamental rights are violated. He said that Nagorno Karabakh became
part of Azerbaijan as a result of historical injustice. “It’s time to
recognize Nagorno Karabakh as an independent state,” he said and
recalled Monaco and Liechtenstein and even Vatican.

He recalled the final criteria of statehood set in the Montevideo
Convention: permanent population, a defined territory; government; and
capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
Nagorno-Karabakh has all criteria to be named an independent state, he
said for conclusion.

Z. Postanjian makes complaints to PACE against NA speaker

Member of Heritage faction of the Armenian parliament Zaruhi
Postanjian applied to the procedure rules commission of the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). She said that
the speaker of Armenia’s National Assembly wants to remove her from
the Armenian delegation to the PACE because of the question she asked
Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, according to Azatutyun.am.

According to Z. Postanjuan, she received explanations from that
commission of the PACE. The commission said Hovik Abrahamian has no
authority to make changes in the composition of the Armenian
delegation because the delegation’s composition was already approved,
and if the speaker makes an attempt to hinder her activities, the
Council of Europe will react.

The opposition deputy expressed confidence that H. Abrahamian will not
be able to exclude her from the Armenian delegation in the future as
well because all the factions of the Armenian parliament shall be
represented in the PACE. If any problems arise in January of next year
when the composition and powers of the new delegation are approved,
then the European institution will react.

The Council of Europe has not yet received any official document from
the speaker of the Armenian parliament and it therefore cannot take
any actions.

Meanwhile, another member of the Armenian delegation to the PACE,
deputy of Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) faction Ms. Naira Zohrabian
said that Postanjian’s question shocked PACE deputies. `None of the
parliamentarians said that it was a good question. It was unacceptable
to everyone, including those deputies who are famous for their
anti-Armenian sentiments and who always gloated over unpleasant
incidents concerning Armenia. Even to them, that statement was
absolutely unacceptable. But if any actions are organized in the
airport, I will consider this unacceptable, too,’ she noted.

We would remind you that in response to the press reports that the
youth wing of the Republican Party of Armenia plans to stage a protest
against Heritage faction deputy Zaruhi Postanjian upon her return from
Strasbourg and to pelt her with eggs and tomatoes, the spokesman for
the Armenian president Arman Saghatelian said that the presidential
office considers holding such actions as incorrect.

`We don’t accept the intentions of various sides to stage a protest
against Z. Postanjian at the airport and consider them incorrect. We
appeal to everyone to refrain from such initiatives,’ Arman
Saghatelian stated.

Over 100,000 sex slaves in Turkey, half are children: NGO

10:08 ?¢ 06.10.13

There are over 100,000 women working as sex slaves in Turkey, of which
half are children, a non-governmental organization has revealed in an
extensive report on prostitution in the country, The Hurriyet Daily
News reports.

Up to 3,000 prostitutes work in brothels located in 55 of the 81
provinces of Turkey and 15,000 other registered prostitutes work with
an official document, according to the report prepared by ?Å?efkat-Der,
a civil association founded to help marginalized segments of society.

The most shocking aspect of the report, however, is that the number of
women selling sex on the streets has climbed to over 100,000, half of
whom are children. It stated that many underage girls from
impoverished families, especially in eastern and southeastern
provinces, had become victims of the “prostitution mafia.”

Vulnerable children who have been the victim of abuse inside their own
family, orphans, and mentally challenged children are also often prey
for organized crime rings.

The report added that women up to the age of 60 are working in brothels.

?Å?efkat-Der attracted media attention last spring when it filed a
petition to Parliament to ask for permission to open a brothel
employing males, in protest at brothels where women are employed.

For ?Å?efkat-Der and women’s associations, the fact that there are more
brothels in Turkey than women’s shelters has long been a cause of
criticism of both the state and local government.

Armenian News – Tert.am

RUSSIE-AZERBAÏDJAN
La Russie a remis à l’Azerbaïdjan le centre militaire de contrôle
radar de Kabala

La Russie vient de rendre aux forces armées d’Azerbaïdjan le centre
radar de Kabala. Le chef des forces armées aériennes azéries le
général Altay Medhiev a confirmé cette remise du centre qui se trouve
en Azerbaïdjan. Il a également affirmé que l’ensemble des militaires
Russes ainsi que leurs familles ont quitté l’Azerbaïdjan et que « le
centre est sous notre surveillance ». Le centre radar de Kabala
construit sous le régime soviétique en 1984 était sous l’autorité du
ministère de la Défense de la Russie par un accord signé le 10
décembre 2002. Le radar permet de contrôle aérien des missiles
balistiques sur un rayon aérien de 6 000 km.

Krikor Amirzayan

dimanche 6 octobre 2013,
Krikor Amirzayan ©armenews.com