Author: Baghdasarian Karlen

CRISIS “SPECIALISTS” APPEAL TO EU TO COMPETE MORE ACTIVELY WITH RUSSIA AND USA IN SOUTH CAUCASUS

Regnum, Russia
March 21 2006

“Defending its own security, the European Union should be
closer involved in conflict settlement in South Caucasus, to
prevent the conflicts from breaking out as scaled wars immediately
neighboring Europe,” is said in report of International Crisis Group
non-governmental organization. In its “Settlement of Conflicts in
South Caucasus. EU Role” report, the ICG tries to analyze current
efforts of EU “in strained situations, arisen around Nagorno Karabakh,
Abkhazia, and South Ossetia”, and also denotes additional expectations
from EU to settle these conflicts. “Just recently, Brussels started
reacting to the challenges more profound,” stated, in particular,
Director of ISC Caucasus program Sabine Freizer.

According to her, “several very promising steps were made, but a long
way is still ahead to be gone through.”

As it is mentioned further, the UN is occupied with settlement in
Abkhazia, and the OSCE – in Nagorno Karabakh and South Ossetia.

However, decades later, talks are not crowned with peaceful
agreements. “Having authority of ‘honest mediator’, various soft and
hard instruments of influence, as well as ability to offer closer
European integration, EU can play more significant role, and add to
UN and OSCE efforts,” believe ICG authors.

“In order to avoid destabilization of its own borders, the EU
wishes to establish around itself a circle of states with effective
governing. It is interested in South Caucasus because of one more
reason; it wishes to guarantee access to oil and gas of Caspian
region, to develop communication corridors between Europe and Asia,
as well as to restrict such threats as trafficking, smuggling, and
environmental pollution. It is hard to imagine, that the EU will let
have its membership to Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan within the next
few years, and that is why it should find new approaches to ground its
assistance and use it as instrument of influence. Action program of
New European Neighborhood policy is now at stage of generalization. It
provides a good opportunity to strengthen EU role, especially if
peaceful conflict settlement will be fixed as a necessary one. New
special EU representative is to become observer at talks on settlement
of Abkhazian, South Ossetian, and Karabakh conflicts. The European
Union has considerably contributed to reconstruction of Abkhazia and
South Ossetia. It must evaluate, what it may do in Nagorno Karabakh
and neighboring areas,” pointes out the ICG.

“The EU tries to define its role in new neighborhood, where there
is neither peace nor war,” says Director of ICG European program
Nicolas Wait. “If the EU is not able to implement strategy of safe
neighborhood, then, trust in it will suffer comparing with Russia
and the USA. Most of all, the fact worries, that if the conflicts
in South Caucasus continue to escalate, then, the EU can turn out to
be not ready for looking for answers in wars between its neighbors,”
believes Wait.
From: Baghdasarian

AIR FRANCE OFFERS DISCOUNTS FOR NEW PARIS – YEREVAN FLIGHT

Noyan Tapan
Mar 20 2006

YEREVAN, MARCH 20, NOYAN TAPAN. The French company Air France, which
will operate three flights a week in Paris-Yerevan destination starting
March 28, intends to offer considerable discounts. NT correspondent was
informed at the company’s office in Yerevan that in case of purchasing
a ticket until April 9 for a Yerevan-Paris-Yerevan flight, the price
will be 332 dollars. The purchased tickets may be used until June
15. The price of a ticket outside this move makes 472 dollars. To
recap, the company Armavia that also operates Yerevan-Paris flights
is offering discounts as well – the price of a return ticket will
make 299 dollars until June 30, whereas the price of a ticket in this
destination is 474 dollars.
From: Baghdasarian

THEY CONTINUE TO VIOLATE THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH

A1+

02:49 pm 17 March, 2006

“The fact which faces the “A1+” staff today comes to prove that in
Armenia they still continue to oppress the activity of free Mass
Media”, leader of the party “National Renaissance” Albert Bazeyan
said. The latter had come to the editorial office in protection of
“A1+”.

“The Government could carry out direct sale and give priority to the
company which has been carrying out all the responsibilities according
to the contract for the last 15 years”, the ex mayor of Yerevan said.

Albert Bazeyan noted that whatever happens to “A1+” today is
connected with all the previous cases of violation of human rights,
“Unfortunately we do not succeed in the protection of the rights
of the citizens, and the authorities continue the policy they have
adopted. As people say, “the appetite comes with eating”; we know
many cases when state property was sold to this or that official for
very little money”.

And today “A1+” is deprived of the area it has been occupying for
more than ten years.

“Today the authorities of any country want to have more power, and
the society of any country, of course if it exists, does not allow the
authorities to have more power. Unfortunately, our society allows the
authorities to do anything”, advocate Avetiq Ishkhanyan spoke about
the indifference of the society. “The society must be strong and
protect its rights. In Armenia they behave like they are sentenced
and their words have no value. That’s too bad”, Ishkhanyan says.

Asked the question who had to be next to “A1+” that is not, he
answered, “Any person who considers himself a citizen, learning about
this had be here today. This refers firstly to social-political bodies,
and of course to journalists”.

By the way, the majority of the supporters of “A1+” today were
journalists.
From: Baghdasarian

Regnum, Russia
March 18 2006

Chances are high that the Nagorno Karabakh conflict will be settled
in 2006 (Semneby, EU Special Representative for South Caucasus)

Baku, 18 March 2006 (Regnum – website) – “To be sure in rightful
coordination of initiatives on settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict,
I will regularly keep in touch with co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk
Group,” EU Special Representative for South Caucasus Peter Semneby
has announced.

According to him, chances are high that the conflict will be settled
in 2006: “Taking into consideration that the latest meeting of the
Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents failed to justify hopes, it is
difficult to say how strongly these hopes are bound to the reality.

For closer examination of the situation I should visit Azerbaijan and
Armenia, exchange opinions with the co-chairs. But if I had not been
so sure in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement, I would not have
given my consent to the appointment,” Day.az quotes Semneby as saying.
From: Baghdasarian

‘TREASON OR PLOT?’
By Hakob Chakrian

AZG Armenian Daily
16/03/2006

Halil Berktay Allegedly Requested Financial Aid from Diasporan
Armenians.

This was the title of an article in Turkish Vatan newspaper on
March 13 that dealt with an email allegedly sent by professor of
Sabanci University, Halil Berktay, to history professor at Minnesota
University, Stephan Weinstein.

In March 10 and 11 issues of Vatan, columnist Ruhat Mengi without
checking authenticity of the email commented on it meanwhile demanding
that Berktay reveal other Turkish scientists who receive money form
the Armenians. By doing so he arose uproar and allowed to suspect
Berktay in treason.

Why? Because Berktay, according to Mengi, defined deportation
of Armenians in 1915 as genocide, called the Armenian Genocide an
undisputed fact, called a renowned scientists as Bernard Luis Justin
McCarty a hired scholar of Turkey, dubbed Turkish scholars backing
official thesis “fascists concealing the truth” as well as established
close ties with the Armenian Diaspora.

As to the email, Prof. Berktay urged Weinstein to ban the participation
of Yusuf Halacoglu, head of Turkish History Foundation, and Gyunduz
Aktan in the panel of PBS TV and added that “scientists backing our
views on Genocide should be invited. We should discover them and give
chance to voice their opinion. We need to secure necessary financial
means for that.”

Berktay refuted the allegations calling them clear slander and then
he said: “First of all Stephen Weinstein is an American Jew and
does not accept the fact of the Armenian genocide. He criticized in
an article those opposing the participation of Halacoglu and Aktan
in the TV show. I turned to Weinstein via the Internet to back his
approach. I do not know him personally and I have never been to the
University of Minnesota nor have I made a speech there. I believe
this issue goes deeper than just questioning ‘was the deportation
of 1915 a genocide or not?’ I opposed to those blocking discussions
on the matter. As to financial support, it is an incredible lie that
has hurt my self-esteem and I am going to sue.”

The American historian confirmed Berktay’s words. He said the email
is a fiction and that he knows neither Aktan nor Halacoglu and has
never met Berktay.

Stephen Weinstein’s words well answer the question posed in the title
of the article underscoring that Berktay is a victim of a plot.

Prof. Halil Berktay is one of those Turkish scholars who recognize
the Armenian Genocide. In the created situation when the freedom
of speech is gaining momentum in Turkey, some circles strive not to
limit the freedom of thought of scientists but rather to force them
give up their views by various means.

It’s over doubt that any scientist facing an accusation of treason
will prefer to keep his mouth shut on Genocide issues than playing
with fire.
From: Baghdasarian

RA OMBUDSMAN AGAINST GOVERNMENT AND PRESIDENT
By Marietta Khachatrian

AZG Armenian Daily
16/03/2006

Armen Harutyunian, RA ombudsman, is getting prepared to the March 21
sitting of RA Constitutional Court where, according to his appeal,
the August 1 2002, government decision #1151-N on alienation of the
lands for the state needs. RA Government and RA President will be
defendants at the court hearing.

“We will operate with laws, the international treaties and article
#31 of RA Constitution and struggle. The acts I pointed out are
anti-constitutional, thus the alienation of the property right in
the Northern Avenue was implemented according to these acts,” Armen
Harutyunian said. He didn’t want to go into details, adding that he
is quite determined to take victory on March 21.
From: Baghdasarian

IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Laurel Lambert, KCET
(323) 953-5246

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tomikka Anderson
Publicity Associate
KCET
323-953-5308 phone
323-953-5678 fax
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

KCET TO PREMIERE ‘LE GENOCIDE ARMENIEN’ (‘THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE’) AT
9 PM ON MONDAY, APRIL 17 – ‘MY SON SHALL BE ARMENIAN’ TO AIR MONDAY,
APRIL 24 AT 9 PM

KCET has scheduled its premiere of “Le Genocide Armenien” (“The
Armenian Genocide”) the 2005 documentary by French filmmaker Laurence
Jourdan, for 9 pm on Monday, April 17. (The film had originally
been slated to air at 10 pm). The English-narrated documentary will
be premiering for the first time on American television. Also in
April, KCET has scheduled an encore of “My Son Shall Be Armenian” by
Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Hagop Goudsouzian to air Monday, April 24
(9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.)

“We have received very positive feedback regarding our airing of
‘Le Genocide Armenien’ and we are choosing to air it earlier in the
evening to create the opportunity for a larger audience to view this
important production,” said Mary Mazur, KCET executive vice president
or programming and production. “We feel the comprehensive storytelling
of the documentary and its educational content will be appreciated
by a broad range of KCET viewers.”

“My Son Shall Be Armenian” follows the journey of filmmaker Hagop
Goudsouzian, who, accompanied by five Montreal men and women of
Armenian origin, returned to the land of his ancestors in search
of survivors of the genocide of 1915. Through the moving testimony
of those centenarians and the funny and touching accounts of his
fellow travelers from the New World, Hagop Goudsouzian has crafted a
dignified and poignant film on the need to make peace with the past
in order to turn toward the future.

Additional information about the films and filmmakers is available
on KCET.org.

# # #
From: Baghdasarian

GEORGIAN AUTHORITIES RESPONSIBLE FOR INCIDENTS AGAINST ARMENIANS IN JAVAKHETI

PanARMENIAN.Net
14.03.2006 23:17 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The Council of Javakhk NGO many times urged Armenian
authorities to pay proper attention to problems of Armenians in
Javakheti, to recognize the political element in those problems.

These calls were not answered, says a statement of the Council. The
message notes, “Encouraged by Armenian party’s indifference, the
Georgian party became more unruly. Three incidents against Armenians
happened within the past month, including the Georgian Orthodox Church
establishing a Diocese in the territory of Armenia and murder of an
Armenian in Tsalka.”

Statement authors keep the Georgian authorities and the Georgian
Orthodox Church responsible for all incidents. “Armenian authorities
also have their share of responsibility – they did nothing to solve
Javakheti problems. By their neutral stance they allow the Georgian
chauvinists acting that is fraught with dangerous consequences,”
the Council believes.

The statement calls to censure planned actions against Armenians,
discrimination and bind the Armenian authorities to demand
that Georgian authorities punish instigators of actions against
Armenians. “We demand that Armenian authorities along with those of
Georgia plan measures to solve all issues in Javakheti in a fair
manner. Javakhk Council will do its best to protect Armenians in
Javakheti and not to admit forcing out Armenians from Georgia. In
case it is necessary, it will counteract anti-Armenian provocation,”
the statement says.
From: Baghdasarian

AN ARTISTIC TREK ACROSS A SURREAL LAND OF SAND AND SELF-DISCOVERY
By Kathryn Shattuck

The New York Times
March 9, 2006 Thursday
Late Edition – Final

As snow fell lightly on Broome Street in SoHo one evening last month,
three women in their 40’s sipped tea inside an artist’s studio and
charted a journey through unfamiliar territory. The landscape, viewed
on an iMac monitor, was at once barren and lush, its undulating sands
and craggy outcroppings morphing into gently rhythmic waves. It could
have been anywhere.

But to the cellist Maya Beiser, the composer Eve Beglarian and the
visual artist Shirin Neshat — each laying claim to a different
piece of the broader Middle East — this curious terrain born of an
18-month odyssey of music, art and, not least, self-awareness was
specific and unique.

The fruit of their travels, “I Am Writing to You From a Far-Off
Country,” will be presented by Ms. Beiser at Zankel Hall tonight
as part of “Almost Human,” a program in which she draws comparisons
between the sound of the cello and the human voice. After new works
by Brett Dean, Joby Talbot and Michael Gordon, the second half will
be devoted to “Far-Off Country,” Ms. Beglarian’s 40-minute setting
of a poem of the same name by the Belgian Surrealist Henri Michaux,
with video by Ms. Neshat.

Though “Far-Off Country” was written by a man, the voice is
a woman’s. In 12 letters to an unspecified listener — a lover,
perhaps, or a god — she describes a place of wind and water and
“inexorable weather,” where leaves are separated from their trees and
“dwarfs are born constantly.”

“I am writing to you from the end of the world,” she says. “You must
realize this.”

Ms. Beiser first came to “Far-Off Country” as a teenager in her own
distant land, on a kibbutz in northern Israel between Nazareth and
the Sea of Galilee.

The poem haunted her, she said, after her move to the United States,
where she studied at Yale, and later, as she traveled the world
performing.

More recently, she found an English translation of the poem and
decided to produce a setting of the work for “Almost Human,” to make
the words her own.

“I had wanted to work with Eve for a long time, and this gave me
an excuse,” she said of Ms. Beglarian, an experimentalist whose
work often interweaves electronics, spoken word and even dance and
theater. “I think she has a phenomenal way of working with text and
incorporating that with music.”

Ms. Beglarian said: “That was really meaningful to me. I know what
it’s like to love a text and not yet know what form it should take.”

That form slowly revealed itself as the women dissected the poem line
by line to find a common starting point.

“It’s a really bizarre country that this woman finds herself in,”
Ms. Beglarian said, “and yet as you travel through the poem you realize
that the far-off country she is describing is the country we’re
in. I was looking for a combination of strangeness and otherness,
and I found this in Armenian music because of how Armenian culture
lies at the intersection of the East and the West.”

Drawing from Christian liturgical music and chants, Ms. Beglarian
created a deeply layered composition that requires Ms. Beiser to recite
the poem while playing, accompanied by a recorded instrumental track. A
mezzo-soprano, Alexandra Montano, adds recorded and live vocalises.

The connection to Ms. Beglarian’s heritage, so obvious in retrospect,
did not come to her immediately. Though her father was Armenian and
lived in Tehran for part of his childhood, he did not immerse his
children in the culture of his youth. “Only toward end of his life did
it become clear to me how important his Armenian-ness was to him,”
she said. “This is the first time I’ve incorporated what was his
music into my work.”

But how to convey the poem’s otherworldliness visually? The women
turned to the Iranian-born Ms. Neshat. Ms. Beglarian felt she had the
fierceness and sensitivity to respond in a powerful way to the text,
and Ms. Beiser proposed that she join their collaboration.

“For me, it was a chance to expand my own vocabulary and my own
themes,” Ms. Neshat said. “I felt that this collaboration from three
women from three different cultures could be very poignant in a way.”

Still, “I have to be very honest that I had not been to Israel, I had
never collaborated with anyone from Israel, and when Maya approached
me, I was wary,” she said. “We have in Iran in many ways been
brainwashed since childhood about certain cultures and religions. But
I thought, if I don’t do something about the way I’m programmed and I
don’t take that responsibility to negotiate and collaborate and open
up about those people I feel are strangers to me, it’s never going
to happen. These days more than ever, I feel that culture can be a
tool of peace and mediation and negotiation and understanding.”

Ms. Neshat began to imagine the place the poem’s narrator was
describing.

“It was clear to me this was a world unlike any other world,”
she said. “I was really after this sort of landscape not common to
the eye.”

She considered the Moroccan desert, but when one of her
cinematographers announced he was traveling to Israel, she asked him
to film the landscape of Ms. Beiser’s home.

“Of course, I come from the desert too,” Ms. Neshat said. “But I was so
shocked when he came back. I thought, ‘My God, is this what all these
people are fighting for, this barren land? This is so ironic.’ The
space was so abandoned, and yet there was this energy about it,
in emotional and political ways, that charged me.”

How “Far-Off Country” is interpreted — as a specific destination or
a spiritual excursion or even as a woman’s secret and often painful
existence inside herself — is ultimately in the eye of the beholder,
Ms. Beiser said. But to these three artists, the lessons are far
larger than that.

“That’s the message for me in all of this, that yes, we are connected
to where we come from and that’s important, but in the end we all
transcend that if we let ourselves go into a deeper kind of place,”
Ms. Beiser said. “I think women need to say much more in this
way. Because if we make our voices heard, maybe then there will be
less of that horrible stuff in the world.”
From: Baghdasarian

LEVON ARONIAN FOR THE FIRST TIME TO TAKE PART IN “AMBER” TOURNAMENT

YEREVAN, MARCH 9, NOYAN TAPAN. The traditional chess tournament
“Amber” will be held in Monte Carlo on March 18-30. The peculiarity of
it is that 12 strongest grand masters hold small competitions among
one another. One of the games will be held by “blind”, the second one
by fast chess rules. Levon Aronian, the strongest chess-player of
Armenia for the first time received an invitation of taking part in
the competitions. The competitors of the World cup holder in the Monte
Carlo will be world champion Veselin Topalov (Bulgary), Vishvanatan
Anand (India), Peter Leko (Hungary), Vasili Ivanchuk (Ukraine), Pyotr
Svidler, Alexander Grishchuk, Alexander Morozevich (three from
Russia), Boris Gelfand (Israel), Luk Van Velin (Holland), Fransisko
Valejo (Spain) and Peter-Hans Nilsen (Denmark).
From: Baghdasarian