Author: Badalian Vardan

FEDERAL APPEALS COURT REJECTS SUIT OVER U. OF MINNESOTA WEBSITE
Scott Jaschik

May 4, 2012

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday [1] that the University of
Minnesota could not be sued because the website of one of its research
centers had labeled another website “unreliable.”

The statements made by the University of Minnesota website were
protected legally — either by being true or by being opinion — said
the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The
website that prompted the suit is run by the Center for Holocaust
and Genocide Studies at Minnesota. Scholars there, consistent with
the consensus view of historians of genocide, include the slaughter
of Armenians during World War I as a case of genocide. The suit
challenged the right of the center to label as “unreliable” a website
of the Turkish Coalition of America that cast doubt on whether the
Armenians experienced a genocide.

Not surprisingly, the case has been closely followed by historians of
that period in history. But the case has also been tracked by scholars
concerned about academic freedom generally, some of whom worried that a
dangerous precedent could have been set by a suit against an academic
center for expressing its views on areas of scholarship. The Middle
East Studies Association, for example, has called [2]on the Turkish
Coalition of American to withdraw the suit.

“We fear that legal action of this kind may have a chilling effect
on the ability of scholars and academic institutions to carry out
their work freely and to have their work assessed on its merits,
in conformity with standards and procedures long established in the
world of scholarship,” said a statement from the group.

An irony of the case is that the label of “unreliable” was removed from
the Minnesota website — at about the time the Turkish coalition was
criticizing it but before the suit was filed in 2010. [3] Minnesota
officials said that they didn’t want to send anyone to the websites
that cast doubt on the Armenian genocide, so they removed the list
of “unreliable” websites from a webpage with teaching and research
links. However, the university has defended the right of the research
center to have had the list up in the first place, and most of the
appeals court decision is written as if Minnesota still had such
a link.

Last year, a federal district court ruled that academic freedom
protected the Minnesota website, [4] but the Turkish coalition
appealed, setting up Thursday’s ruling.

The appeals court rejected arguments in the appeal by the Turkish
coalition that the university violated its First Amendment rights and
defamed it by identifying the coalition’s website as unreliable. A
central argument by the coalition was that students at the university
would be denied access to the coalition’s ideas, and thus that the free
exchange of ideas was hindered when a center at a public university
labeled the website unreliable.

On the First Amendment issue, the Turkish coalition cited court rulings
in which, for example, secondary schools were found to be violating
First Amendment rights of students by removing certain books from
the library. The appeals court noted that those cases were based on
blocking access to information — something that the court said the
University of Minnesota never did.

“There is no allegation that the defendants impaired students’ access
to the TCA website on a university-provided Internet system,” the
appeals court’s decision says. “There is no hint in the complaint
that university students were not free to, for example, read the
TCA website, e-mail material from the TCA website to their friends,
regale passers-by on the sidewalk with quotes from the TCA website,
and so forth. In short, TCA’s website was not ‘removed’ from the
university in any sense.”

The Turkish coalition’s appeal argued that the Minnesota website
defamed the coalition by saying it engages in “denial” of the Armenian
genocide, by calling it “unreliable,” by saying that it features a
“strange mix of fact and opinion,” and that it is “an illegitimate
source of information.”

The coalition argued that by labeling its website a “denial” website,
the Minnesota center was maligning it because the term “denial,” in the
context of the study of genocide, “implies denial of well-documented
underlying facts associated with a genocidal event.”

The appeals court ruling, however, says that the issue here is whether
the coalition denies the Armenian genocide. “Because the TCA website
does, in fact, state that it is ‘highly unlikely that a genocide charge
could be sustained against the Ottoman government or its successor’
based on the historical evidence, the center’s statement under this
interpretation is true and, thus, still not actionable,” the appeals
court decision says.

“The remaining three statements can be interpreted reasonably only as
subjective opinions, rather than facts,” the opinion adds, rejecting
the defamation charges there as well.

A lawyer for the Turkish coalition did not respond to a request
for comment.

RELATIVES OF CONVICTS RECEIVED DEFINITE ORDERS DURING CAMPAIGN

03:06 pm | Today | Politics

About 70% of headmasters in Armenia’s 25 cities (600 schools) are
Republican Party (HHK) members.

“Half of them became HHK members in the past ten years. This is heinous
abuse of administrative resources. People had to become affiliated
with the ruling party [HHK] for fear that they might lose their jobs,”
says President of “Asparez” Journalists’ Club Levon Barseghyan.

On the threshold of the May 6 parliamentary elections, five NGOs
dealing with human rights issues have conducted surveys which revealed
disturbing findings.

For example, the relatives of convicts were ordered to ‘collect
signatures’ in order to have their loved ones paroled, says human
right activist Avetik Ishkhanyan.

The only positive thing recorded by the human rights NGOs was the
efficient work of media.

PEOPLE DETAINED AFTER FIGHT IN YEREVAN KARAOKE CLUB

news.am
May 04, 2012 | 16:54

YEREVAN. – Young people fought in a karaoke-club in downtown Yerevan
on Friday. As a result, one man was hospitalized while the others
detained, Armenian News-NEWS.am source informs. Police confirmed having
detained people from the club, adding an investigation is underway,
while the club rejected to comment on the incident.

WAR OF PIPES AND KARABAKH ISSUE: WHAT WILL MORNINGSTAR BRING INTO ENERGY AND GEO POLITICS OF THE REGION
By Naira Hayrumyan

ArmeniaNow
04.05.12 | 11:27

United States President Barack Obama last week named the secretary
of state’s special envoy for Eurasian energy Richard Morningstar as
ambassador to Azerbaijan to succeed Matthew Bryza, whose short lived
tour of duty in Baku ended late last year amid opposition from the
Armenian lobby at the Congress. Morningstar’s nomination also has to
clear the Congress before he can get the post.

Azerbaijan has already expressed its approval of Morningstar’s
nomination, but the Armenian lobby is apparently still looking into
the situation and trying to understand why Obama has nominated such
an influential person to serve as envoy in a small, but oil-rich
South Caucasus country.

Morningstar has had contacts with Azerbaijan before as he visited
Baku on various occasions. Apparently, the United States is intent on
“convincing” Azerbaijan to be friends with the West energy-wise at the
expense of such friendship with Russia or the possible Russo-Iranian
alliance.

Now the Caspian region is seeing a so-called “war of pipes” in which
Russia is trying in every way to prevent the construction of the
Trans-Caspian gas pipeline supposed to join the Nabucco project to
deliver natural gas from Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan to Europe via
Turkey, bypassing Russia. Moscow is trying to persuade Azerbaijan
to sell its natural gas to the South Stream, an alternative pipeline
that is under construction now to maintain Russia’s dominant position
on Europe’s natural gas market.

In the West, there is already talk that the Nabucco project is likely
to fail, and the United States, apparently, seeks to revive this and
other projects by appointing an experienced negotiator as ambassador
to Azerbaijan.

So far, Azerbaijan has made no secret of its linking its energy
preferences with the Karabakh issue and that it will enter into
an alliance with those forces that will undertake to put pressure
on Armenia.

In a recent interview with Mediaforum the head of the department on
socio-political issues of the presidential administration of Azerbaijan
Ali Hasanov described Morningstar as an experienced diplomat familiar
with the region, at the same time he noted that Baku expected first
of all “objectivity” from ambassadors of other countries.

“Some of the recent actions by the diplomatic missions of a number
of countries in Azerbaijan have been regrettable. Sometimes diplomats
come under the influence of subjective judgments and present to their
country biased and incomplete information about the host country,”
Hasanov said.

The Azeri official apparently referred to some unflattering opinions
of foreign diplomats about the level of democracy in Azerbaijan and
the unwillingness of the international community to have a solution
to the Karabakh issue that would favor Baku.

Head of the Department of External Relations of the Azerbaijani
presidential administration Novruz Mammadov this week said that
Azerbaijan may reconsider its pro-Western stance and form a “new bloc”,
if it gets no broader support from Europe and the U.S., especially
in the issue of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Bloomberg Businessweek
quoted Mammadov as saying that Azerbaijan wants the U.S.

and Europe to put pressure on Armenia “in the issue of the
withdrawal of occupying forces from Azerbaijani districts surrounding
Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Bryza, apparently, was supposed
to solve this problem for Azerbaijan, but the Armenian lobby in the
United States managed to get his nomination blocked in the Congress.

He worked in Baku for a year by Obama’s appointment bypassing the
Senate’s disapproval, but appears to have failed the U.S. energy
problems as he concentrated on the Karabakh problem and
Armenian-Turkish relations.

At the beginning of this year, Bryza gave an interesting interview
to the Turkish Hurriyet newspaper, in which he warned the current U.S.
administration that the “artificial” assertion that there is no
link between the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and
Turkish-Armenian normalization dooms the prospects for resolving
the Karabakh conflict, as, according to the former OSCE Minsk Group
cochairman, it makes reaching a compromise on the Armenian side
impossible. “They [Armenia] are given a huge benefit [opening the
border with Turkey] without making any compromise. So we need to
manage the two processes together at the same time,” said Bryza.

Such frankness of the American diplomat may be evidence that, as an
ambassador who served in Azerbaijan for a year, he was doing everything
for the Karabakh problem to stand in the way of Turkish-Armenian
relations. And he did so in defiance of his administration, which has
repeatedly stated that these two issues should not be linked together.

Morningstar, meanwhile, is likely to try to separate from the Karabakh
conflict not only the Turkish-Armenian relations, but also the energy
projects. Azerbaijan remains a key U.S. ally in terms of regional
energy policy, said Morningstar still prior to his nomination.

PRESIDENT OF ARMENIA ORDERED TO TIGHTEN MILITARY DUTY IN THE ARMENIAN-AZERBAIJANI CONTACT LINE

ARMENPRESS
4 May, 2012
YEREVAN

YEREVAN, MAY 4, ARMENPRESS: President of Armenia, Supreme commander in
chief of Armenian armed forces Serzh Sargsyan visited the Ministry of
Defense of Armenia on May 4. Armenpress was informed from President’s
press office that the President listened to reports of the Minister of
Defense, head of the general staff of Armenian armed forces about the
works in the sphere of army building, increasing combat readiness of
armed forces, as well as about army political situation in the region
and beyond it, operational situation in Armenian-Azerbaijani contact
line, development trends and necessary measures taken to preserve
peace on the border.

Serzh Sargsyan ordered to tighten military duty in Armenia-Azerbaijani
contact line, take continuous measures for discipline and combat
readiness rising.

SPECIAL SQUAD SOLDIERS, HELICOPTER IN MASSIS: TENSION GROWS ON THRESHOLD OF ELECTIONS

TERT.AM
04.05.12

The police department of Armenia’s town of Massis received a call
from a hospital on May 3 at about 10.50 pm about a person with a head
injury transported to the hospital.

The police task force that arrived on the scene found out that at
10.00 pm an unknown person hit Karen T. on the head. Investigation
is under way.

Photojournalist Gagik Shamshyan reported about a skirmish between
the representatives of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA)
and Prosperous Armenia party (PAP) in one of cafes in Massis. Police
officials, including from Chief Department of Criminal Investigation
armed and in masks arrived at the Euro+ cafe. The road police officials
were at the scene too.

Massis residents told Tert.am that the yesterday’s situation in their
town reminded shots from American thrillers – large number of armed
policemen in masks, a helicopter.

Police press service gave no information about the shooting.

The RPA candidate in Massis is former nature protection minister
Murad Muradyan and the PAP is represented there by acting candidate
Tigran Stepanyan.

Speaking to Tert.am Tigran Stepanyan said he was not aware of
details of the incident and was going to his headquarters to learn
the details. Later he did not answer the phone calls.

URUGUAY’S FM CONDEMNS PROVOCATIONS OF AZERBAIJANI SIDE

news.am
May 04, 2012 | 13:19

YEREVAN.- The Karabakh conflict should be settled peacefully, there
is no military solution, Uruguay’s Foreign Minister Luis Almagro said
in Yerevan.

Asked about the attitude of the world community, and in particular
Uruguay, to recent aggressive actions of Azerbaijan, the Minister
underscored his country strictly condemns aggression and violation
of ceasefire.

“It is unacceptable, we condemn such actions,” he told journalists
on Friday.

In April Dovegh village in Armenian Tavush region was attacked by
Azerbaijani military units. The fire was focused on the small square
of the village, where the kindergarten and school is located. A day
before an ambulance was fired. On April 26 Azerbaijani saboteurs
penetrated into the territory of Armenia and opened fire at a vehicle
killing three soldiers.

ARE CRIMINALS BEING SET FREE?

Story from Lragir.am News:

Published: 11:28:09 – 04/05/2012

The press has repeatedly reported that the authorities promise freedom
to criminal elements in exchange of maximum votes for the Republicans
party in their towns. The power is found out to have already started
fulfilling its promise.

We have information that the authorities promised to set free Artak
Petrosyan from Nerkin Bazmaberd village of Aragatsotn region, who was
sentenced for smuggling, if RPA receives maximum votes in the village.

The same pledge was given to the residents of the Arteni village
promising to set free Vahram Khachatryan, sentenced for the murder
of the director of Khosrov forest Samvel Shaboyan.

Today, Artak Petrosyan was seen in freedom in his home town.

Officially Artak Petrosyan has been given a short holiday. If his
holiday is “effective” for the RPA, charges against will be dismissed
and he will be set free.

AN ACADEMIC RIGHT TO AN OPINION
By Scott Jaschik

Inside Higher Ed

May 4 2012

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the University of Minnesota
could not be sued because the website of one of its research centers
had labeled another website “unreliable.”

The statements made by the University of Minnesota website were
protected legally — either by being true or by being opinion — said
the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The
website that prompted the suit is run by the Center for Holocaust
and Genocide Studies at Minnesota. Scholars there, consistent with
the consensus view of historians of genocide, include the slaughter
of Armenians during World War I as a case of genocide. The suit
challenged the right of the center to label as “unreliable” a website
of the Turkish Coalition of America that cast doubt on whether the
Armenians experienced a genocide.

Not surprisingly, the case has been closely followed by historians
of that period in history. But the case has also been tracked by
scholars concerned about academic freedom generally, some of whom
worried that a dangerous precedent could have been set by a suit
against an academic center for expressing its views on areas of
scholarship. The Middle East Studies Association, for example, has
called on the Turkish Coalition of American to withdraw the suit.

“We fear that legal action of this kind may have a chilling effect
on the ability of scholars and academic institutions to carry out
their work freely and to have their work assessed on its merits,
in conformity with standards and procedures long established in the
world of scholarship,” said a statement from the group.

An irony of the case is that the label of “unreliable” was removed
from the Minnesota website — at about the time the Turkish coalition
was criticizing it but before the suit was filed in 2010. Minnesota
officials said that they didn’t want to send anyone to the websites
that cast doubt on the Armenian genocide, so they removed the list of
“unreliable” websites from a webpage with teaching and research links.

However, the university has defended the right of the research center
to have had the list up in the first place, and most of the appeals
court decision is written as if Minnesota still had such a link.

Last year, a federal district court ruled that academic freedom
protected the Minnesota website, but the Turkish coalition appealed,
setting up Thursday’s ruling. The appeals court rejected arguments in
the appeal by the Turkish coalition that the university violated its
First Amendment rights and defamed it by identifying the coalition’s
website as unreliable. A central argument by the coalition was that
students at the university would be denied access to the coalition’s
ideas, and thus that the free exchange of ideas was hindered when a
center at a public university labeled the website unreliable.

On the First Amendment issue, the Turkish coalition cited court rulings
in which, for example, secondary schools were found to be violating
First Amendment rights of students by removing certain books from
the library. The appeals court noted that those cases were based on
blocking access to information — something that the court said the
University of Minnesota never did.

“There is no allegation that the defendants impaired students’ access
to the TCA website on a university-provided Internet system,” the
appeals court’s decision says. “There is no hint in the complaint
that university students were not free to, for example, read the
TCA website, e-mail material from the TCA website to their friends,
regale passers-by on the sidewalk with quotes from the TCA website,
and so forth. In short, TCA’s website was not ‘removed’ from the
university in any sense.”

The Turkish coalition’s appeal argued that the Minnesota website
defamed the coalition by saying it engages in “denial” of the Armenian
genocide, by calling it “unreliable,” by saying that it features a
“strange mix of fact and opinion,” and that it is “an illegitimate
source of information.” The coalition argued that by labeling its
website a “denial” website, the Minnesota center was maligning it
because the term “denial,” in the context of the study of genocide,
“implies denial of well-documented underlying facts associated with
a genocidal event.”

The appeals court ruling, however, says that the issue here is whether
the coalition denies the Armenian genocide. “Because the TCA website
does, in fact, state that it is ‘highly unlikely that a genocide
charge could be sustained against the Ottoman government or its
successor’ based on the historical evidence, the center’s statement
under this interpretation is true and, thus, still not actionable,”
the appeals court decision says. “The remaining three statements can be
interpreted reasonably only as subjective opinions, rather than facts,”
the opinion adds, rejecting the defamation charges there as well.

A lawyer for the Turkish coalition did not respond to a request
for comment.

DOES SERZH SARGSYAN WANT ABSOLUTE POWER?
Naira Hayrumyan

Story from Lragir.am News:

Published: 15:59:01 – 03/05/2012

The political system in Armenia is changing in front of our eyes.

Such definition may seem exaggerated to someone but if we look
at the facts in dynamics, it will become clear that the previous
monopoly-authoritarian system exists almost no more. True, there is
also the issue on what will replace it, but the system is changing.

Serzh Sargsyan is trying to demonstrate that it is a policy worked
out in advance, everything is controlled and the government goes on
democratization deliberately. But obviously this is a forced step,
which will inevitably lead to loss of Serge Sargsyan’s absolute power.

Strictly speaking, he has never had such authority. He has been trying
to prove for the last four years that he has it, but he failed. The
oligarchs, oligarchic parties, as well as the lack of formulated civil
demand were supposed to become the rear to the absolute power. But they
“refused”.

The main “rival” of Serzh Sargsyan’s absolute power became, though
strange it may seem, the oligarchs, who, against Serzh Sargsyan’s
statements, decided to run for the parliament. Ruben Hayrapetyan put
the last point who stated one day before nomination that only Samvel
Alexanyan may convince him to run. He just wanted to say that Serzh
Sargsyan doesn’t decide anything.

Prosperous Armenia party is also against the absolute power, which has
already stated that its aim is to dismantle the party monopoly of the
RPA. This means that Serzh Sargsyan failed, despite the attempts to
force Gagik Tsarukyan provide support for a large party, which has
a fairly high rating.

Serzh Sargsyan succeeded to some extent to neutralize the political
opposition in the face of the Armenian National Congress having
involved it into the unfruitful dialogue and having eliminated the
consequences and the likelihood of revolution. But the Congress didn’t
stop being Serzh Sargsyan’s main enemy having declared his resignation
as its main task.

But the important is that the civil society has changed. The story
related to the Mashtots Park proved that Serzh Sargsyan understands
from where the main threat comes. He understood that the society speaks
about the rights and about the public interest that should be higher
of the oligarchic interest, the country, where the authorities are
the servants of the people, which are paid by the citizens’ money,
and in such a society it’s stupid to build an absolute vertical.

And he was forced to refuse absolutism presenting it as his most
democratic achievement. In this situation, Serzh Sargsyan will have
more chances in his office if he stops aspiring to the absolute power
and demands building a more extensive and balanced system.

True, the question what’s Serzh Sargsyan’s task remains. Does he really
want absolute power or he just pursues the noble goal of construction
of democracy in the country, or perhaps, the point is about the banal
desire to be the president in order to tell the grandchildren whom
he met in this life.

It is clear that it is difficult leave the desire to have absolute
power. Now large-scale technologies are applied – sometimes primitive,
sometimes effective to neutralize the opponents. For example, Serzh
Sargsyan calls to vote for Gagik Tsarukyan, thereby demonstrating that
they are “of the same flock”. And many TV channels with the help of
political technologists are busy of pressing the politicians against
the wall for their past. Vartan Oskanian gets the most of this.

Nevertheless, the process of collapse of the absolute system has been
launched and the fact we can hear reasonable and clearly formulated
charges by Nikol Pashinyan against Serzh Sargsyan on the TV means
they will have to forget about absolutism anyway.