Author: Baghdasarian Karlen

EUROPEAN ARMENIAN FEDERATION
For Justice and Democracy
Avenue de la Renaissance 10
B-1000 Bruxelles
Tel: +32 (0)2 732 70 26
Tel/Fax : +32 (0)2 732 70 27
PRESS RELEASE
29 septembre 2006
Contact: Varténie ECHO
Tel/Fax : +32 (0)2 732 70 27
EP/TURKEY: RECOGNITION OF GENOCIDE ESSENTIAL TO ACCESSION – ARMENIAN
BLOCKADE VIOLATING NEGOTIATIONS
— Eurlings: `there is no accession without an acknowledgement of the
Armenian genocide’ —
The European parliament adopted on Wednesday 27 September a
resolution on `Turkey’s progress towards accession’ by 429 votes in
favour, 71
against and 125 abstentions. The report in a highly critical tone
demonstrates the sharp degradation of relations between Turkey and
the
European Union and the unfavourable situation of the negotiation
process.
As for the Armenian genocide, the European Parliament maintained the
position by recalling that “although the recognition of the Armenian
genocide as such does not formally constitute one of the Copenhagen
criteria, it is essential that a country towards accession faces and
recognizes its past”. In fact, this was the only point underlined by
the rapporteur, Mr. Eurlings who, at the end of the vote, emphasised
by “Let’s be clear: even if the recognition of the Armenian genocide
is not formally a condition of membership, Turkey cannot join the
Union without recognizing its past’.
However, on this question, the European Parliament rejected by 320
votes against 283 and 40 abstentions paragraph 49 that had already
been
adopted by the Committee of Foreign Affairs and which places the
recognition of the Armenian genocide as a precondition to accession.
`We deeply thank those who – among all groups – have done everything
in order to maintain the formulation which constituted only a recall
of the European parliament former positions’ declared the chairperson
of the European Armenian Federation, Hilda Tchoboian. `The rejection
of this paragraph is purely linked to the current situation and was
imposed by Turkey with the expedience of the chancelleries of the
European Countries. We note however that the impact of this
suppression
was restrained by the declarations of the rapporteur on this very
subject’ continued Hilda Tchoboian.
In addition, the Federation regrets the lack of awareness which led
the European Parliament – in line with the socialist group proposal –
`to take note of Turkey’s proposal to establish a bilateral committee
of experts which should be held under the auspices of the United
Nations’ in order to pronounce judgment on the Armenian genocide. The
Federation reminds that the experts of the UN Sub-Committee on Human
Rights have in 1985 already acknowledged without any ambiguity the
Armenian genocide.
`The European parliament resolution is a real disavowal of the
Turkey’s aggressive policy since it considers that the blockade of
Armenia
explicitly violates the conditions of membership of this country’,
continued Hilda Tchoboian. `Now, we are waiting for the European
executive to consider this issue with the same determination as the
Cypriot
issue, concluded Hilda Tchoboian.
The Federation notes with satisfaction that the Armenian genocide and
the blockade forced by Turkey – as is the question of the Cyprus
occupation and the capacity of the Union to absorb members constitute
the
core of the European preoccupations regarding Turkey’s controversial
application.
From: Baghdasarian

POLICE REFERS TO THE VISIT OF “YAPONCHIK”
A1+
[03:00 pm] 29 September, 2006
The RA Police has made a statement which says:
“A number of Armenian newspapers have published materials about
the supposed visit of Russian criminal authority Vyacheslav Ivankov
a.k.a. Yaponchik to Armenia. Some of them have even informed about
the date of his arrival in Yerevan (September 9 or 14).
It is not difficult to notice that the above mentioned representatives
of the Mass Media violate the corresponding provisions of the RA Law
on Mass Media trying to cause a sensation with misinforming articles.
In order to stop the process the Informational Administration of the
RA Police officially informs that Yaponchik a.k.a. Vyacheslav Ivankov
has not entered the territory of Armenia”.
From: Baghdasarian

AZERBAIJANI PRESIDENT GIVES INTERVIEW FOR QATARI TV CHANNEL
Author: A.Ismayilova
TREND Information, Azerbaijan
Sept 27 2006
On 27 September Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev gave an interview
for correspondents of Qatari television channel Al-Jazeera, Abdulmun
Salim Adil and Khuda Khalil Rakhmay, Trend reports.
The President spoke about ex-President Heydar Aliyev’s services in
the establishment of modern Azerbaijan, Armenian aggression, ways
for resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The Azerbaijani President also touched upon the economic development
of the country, foreign policy and Azerbaijan’s position in the
international community.
From: Baghdasarian

PEOPLE OF ART PRAISE SOVIET DAYS
Panorama.am
16:46 26/09/06
Translator Armen Hovhannnisyan praised the Soviet rule in a debate
today saying, “Everything was clean then unlike now when everybody is
going down to the level of consumer.” Hovhannisyan believes that the
state must regulate culture. Ruben Hakhverdyan, a renowned Armenian
singer, also criticized the present day culture, particularly pointing
out to the songs of Grisha Aghakhanyan. He believes that everything
was organized during the Soviet era, though he also admits “some
censorship was used against his songs.”
From: Baghdasarian

TURKEY PLEDGES TO KEEP UP REFORM AFTER EU CRITICISM
Agence France Presse — English
September 26, 2006 Tuesday
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged Tuesday that Turkey
would stick to the path of democratic reform following European
Union criticism that EU-hopeful Ankara was failing to ensure freedom
of speech.
“We are keeping up the reform process, without slowing down and without
losing our enthusiasm,” Erdogan said in a speech to lawmakers from
his Justice and Development Party.
Last week, the EU slammed Ankara for failing to promote free speech
after best-selling novelist Elif Shafak went on trial for insulting
the Turkish nation in a book about the massacres of Armenians under
the Ottoman Empire.
Even though the writer was swiftly acquitted, the European Commission
said “a significant threat to freedom of expression” remains in
Turkish law and urged amendements in the penal code, including the
infamous Article 301, which landed Shafak as well as a string of
other intellectuals in court.
Erdogan reiterated the government was open to proposals to amend
Article 301 in order to “to thicken the line between offence and
criticism.”
He said, however, that freedoms cannot be “limitless” and underlined
that enacting higher democracy norms in the country also required
“a change in mentality” among the judiciary, “which does not happen
overnight.”
Article 301 sets out up to three years in jail “for denigrating
Turkish national identity” and insulting state institutions.
No one has yet been imprisoned under the provision, but the appeals
court in July confirmed the suspended six-month sentence of a
Turkish-Armenian journalist, setting a precedent for dozens of other
pending cases.
Parliament last week began debating a package of reforms aimed at
further boosting Turkey’s accession bid before a crucial European
Commission report on November 8 detailing the country’s progress
towards membership.
Erdogan said the government was determined to press ahead with a draft
law expanding the property rights of non-Muslim religious foundations,
brushing aside criticism from the opposition that the planned reform
would grant too broad rights to minorities.
Turkey’s EU bid is already complicated by its rejection to open its
sea and air ports to Greek Cypriots on the grounds that international
restrictions on the breakaway Turkish Cypriots statelet should be
simultanously lifted.
From: Baghdasarian

NAGORNO-KARABAKH RELEASES BAPTIST SOLDIER AFTER ONE YEAR JAIL
BosNewsLife , Hungary
Sept 25 2006
NAGORNO-KARABACH/BUDAPEST (BosNewsLife)– A Christian soldier who was
imprisoned in the troubled unrecognized republic of Nagorno-Karabakh
for refusing to swear the military oath and carry weapons on
Biblical grounds, has been released, after spending one year in jail,
BosNewsLife learned Monday, September 25.
From: Baghdasarian

70% OF MEMORY CIRCUITS FOR CELLULAR TELEPHONES DESIGNED IN ARMENIA
Arka News Agency, Armenia
Sept 25 2006
YEREVAN, September 25. /ARKA/. 70% of memory circuits for cellular
telephones are designed in Armenia, Director General of Synopsys
Armenia Hovik Musaelyan told a press conference.
According to him, chips for satellites and space equipment are designed
in Armenia as well.
Musaelyan expressed regret over the fact that local profitable
production of these chips is yet impossible in Armenia.
Armenia’s IT sector comprises 100 companies, 30% of them shared in by
foreign capital. A total of 5,000 people are employed in this sphere.
From: Baghdasarian

Spiegel Online, Germany
Sept 22 2006
Positive Signs from Turkey?
Turkish author Elif Shafak was acquitted on Thursday by an Istanbul
court on charges of “insulting Turkishness.” A good move given that a
progress report on Turkey’s readiness to join the EU is due out soon.
AP
Turkish author Elif Shafak was acquitted on charges of “insulting
Turkishness” on Thursday.
The charge is not one you’d see in most European Union countries:
“Insulting Turkishness,” it is called. But that’s what Turkish
novelist Elif Shafak, one of the EU aspirant’s most popular writers,
had been charged with. On Thursday, though, an Istanbul court
acquitted Shafak following a one-and-a-half hour session, concluding
that she had committed no crime.
The case had drawn a lot of attention from the EU and has highlighted
Turkey’s difficult road to membership. The 25-member club, which
appears set to accept Romania and Bulgaria in January, has repeatedly
criticized elements of Turkish law such as the one that provided the
basis for the charges against Shafek. A report on Turkey’s progress
toward joining the EU will be presented in mid-October.
While Turkish nationalists protesting outside the court building had
to be contained by riot police after the verdict was announced, many
in Turkey have expressed relief over the verdict. “We want a country
where people are not interrogated because of their novels,” said Muge
Sokmen, Shafak’s publisher, according to the Associated Press. The AP
also quotes Shafak’s husband Eyup Can as saying that the trial is “a
shame not just for her but for Turkey.”
Even if the trial did not receive much coverage in the German press,
the verdict had a few of Friday’s commentators heading for their
keyboards. An editorial in the center-left daily Berliner Zeitung
notes with satisfaction that “the court in Istanbul needed only a few
minutes to acquit the Turkish writer Elif Shafak,” stressing that the
trial was “absurd” in so far as the accusations were not based on
statements made by Shafak “in essays or on discussion panels,” but
rather on words uttered by the protagonist in her new novel. “It’s a
good sign that the court reached a decision so quickly,” the
commentator notes. She immediately adds, however, that Turkey
shouldn’t get too smug: What is ultimately needed is for the Turkish
government to eliminate the law that made the trial possible in the
first place. The law in question, paragraph 301 of the Turkish penal
code, has a history of being used to silence debate over “Turkey’s
attempted extermination of the Armenians” during the years before the
First World War, the commentator points out. Such legally sanctioned
censorship is incompatible with EU membership. “The European Union
has rightly demanded changes to the Turkish penal code,” the piece
concludes.
The trial against Shafak comes at a time when many Westerners are
convinced that predominantly Muslim countries are bastions of
religious fanaticism and intolerance. Notwithstanding the recurring
calls for a “dialogue with Islam,” many seem already to have made up
their minds that such a dialogue cannot be conducted in a fruitful
way. This, in any case, is the position of a commentary in Friday’s
center-right daily Die Welt– one that takes a look back at the
Muslim outrage over the comments on Islam made by Pope Benedict XVI
last weekend. The much-invoked “dialogue with Islam,” the paper
writes, is nothing but a “farce.” The paper claims that the words “We
need to show more respect for Islam” have become a catchphrase in the
West and that this formula is always used when “criticism of Islam
triggers Islam’s violent reflexes.” The “feelings” of Muslims — the
commentator himself places the word in quotation marks — are
“nothing but a modern form of religious dictatorship,” the piece
argues. Islam is compared by the commentator to medieval
Christianity. “Just as, during the Christian Middle Ages, only church
members were considered human, orthodox Islam considers no one human
but those who are Muslim,” the paper says. The commentator then
claims that “strongly religious Muslims” are in fact nothing but
“mental clones” and victims of “indoctrination.” After waxing
eloquent on Islam’s “problematic history” and accusing Muslims of
“refusing to confront it,” he concludes that “we can expect a
renaissance of religious dictatorship in which every so-called
prejudice and every putative lack of respect is responded to with
threats and attacks.”
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Left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung warns against precisely this kind of
rhetoric and makes a plea against painting all Muslims with the same
broad brush. After all, even if there has been a resurgence of faith
in the Muslim world since September 11, 2001, they’re not all
fundamentalist, the paper writes. “The majority of … Muslims have
not discovered a blueprint for bombs in the Koran,” the commentator
writes, “but rather a manual on how to lead a better life.” Many
young Muslims have found ways of reconciling their religion with
Western popular culture. Instead of treating “reborn Muslims” as if
they were all bigots and potential terrorists, Europeans need to
understand that “the struggle is not one between religious faith and
the tradition of the Western Enlightenment, but one between
terrorists and their enemies.”
— Max Henninger, 12:30 p.m., CET
——————————————- ————————————-
Hungarian Unrest Raises Questions About The EU’s Future
An estimated 10,000 people gathered outside the Hungarian parliament
on Thursday in what became the fifth consecutive night of protests
prompted by Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany’s admission that he had
lied to voters about the catastrophic state of the Hungarian economy.
The protests followed the example of those on Wednesday night by
being largely peaceful. The chaos and street battles witnessed in
Budapest earlier in the week appear to have died down for good.
But aside from the civil unrest it has prompted in Hungary,
Gyurcsany’s admission that he “lied morning, evening and night” also
raises questions about the pressures that European Union membership
entails for new member states from Eastern Europe. Hungary was one of
10 states to join the EU on May 1, 2004 — two more Eastern European
countries, Bulgaria and Romania, look set to join the club in a
little over three months. A number of commentators are scratching
their heads about Europe’s future as a result.
“Budapest is burning,” the center-left daily Suddeutsche Zeitung
observes, adding that “these flames are not just a symbol of public
outrage — the unrest also shows that the road ahead for the EU’s
prospective member states is more painful than expected.” In other
words, similar scenes are to be expected in Bulgaria and Romania:
“The expansion of the EU will lead to further crises. That’s why it
would be a good idea not to force the entry of Bulgaria and Romania
into the EU,” the paper says. In the 1990s, the paper recalls, the
idea was that new members would reform themselves under EU
supervision — “a risky game,” the commentator insists. A tough love
approach might be better. Indeed, the paper calls for “applying
especially strict standards to Bulgaria and Romania,” forcing them to
battle their problems of “corruption and organized crime” by
“tightening the thumbscrews.” Such a policy may seem harsh, and
“Bulgarians and Rumanians may find it unfair,” but the EU has “no
other choice,” the paper concludes.
— Max Henninger, 14:10 p.m., CET
From: Baghdasarian

Canadian Press
Sept 23 2006
Suspected Kurdish guerrillas set off a truck bomb in eastern Turkey,
17 hurt
Canadian Press
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) – Suspected Kurdish guerrillas set off an
explosive-laden minibus across from a police guest house in eastern
Turkey, injuring 17 people Saturday, the governor’s office said.
The Ford minibus parked across from the police guest house, went off
in eastern city Igdir on the Armenian border, the governor’s office
announced. Two of the injured were in serious condition, he said.
The injured included five police officers and some officials of a
small soccer club who travelled from Ankara to Igdir for a match,
private Dogan news agency said. The blast shattered the windows of
the police guest house and other buildings in the area.
“Thank God, we don’t have any loss,” Dogan quoted deputy governor
Mehmet Yilmaz saying.
The explosion coincided with complaints by imprisoned guerrilla chief
Abdullah Ocalan about his prison conditions, which were relayed by
his lawyers, the pro-Kurdish news agency Firat reported on its
website Saturday.
The attack also comes after recent declaration of co-operation
between Turkey, the United States and Iraq in fighting the
guerrillas, who are based in northern Iraq.
The guerrillas have recently intensified their attacks across the
country and have so far ignored a recent call by the pro-Kurdish
Democratic Society party to declare a unilateral ceasefire in the
hopes of establishing dialogue with the state.
Earlier Saturday, autonomy-seeking Kurdish guerrillas detonated a
remote-controlled bomb, derailing a freight train in southeastern
Turkey, officials said. No injuries were reported in that attack
which occurred in Elazig province. Seven train carriages derailed and
a total of eight were damaged.
The guerrillas have also carried out bomb attack in Mediterranean
resorts, killing at least three people and wounding dozens, including
10 Britons in a minibus bombing in the popular resort town Marmaris
in late August.
Ocalan’s guerrilla group has long demanded Ocalan be moved out of
solitary confinement. Ocalan has been in prison on the prison island
Imrali, off Istanbul, since his capture Feb. 15, 1999 in Kenya.
His guerrilla group and supporters have long expressed concern about
Ocalan’s health. But a delegation from the Council of Europe’s
committee for the prevention of torture, which visited Ocalan on the
island in 1999, said the leader’s cell was well lit and suitably
equipped.
Turkey also maintains doctors closely monitor Ocalan’s health.
The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 37,000 people since
the guerrillas took up arms for autonomy in 1984.
The United States and the European Union have called on Turkey to
improve the economy of the war-ravaged southeastern Turkey to end the
22-year-old conflict, which has killed 37,000 people. Turkey insists
it will not negotiate with terrorists, threatening to fight until all
guerrillas are killed or surrender.
Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish military, recently ruled
out any compromise and said negotiations with “terrorists” are out of
question. Buyukanit said the new co-operation with the United States
was aimed at finishing off the guerillas.
A special U.S. envoy, retired air force general Joseph Ralston,
visited Ankara earlier this month and assured Turks of Washington’s
commitment to helping Turkey and Iraq confront the Kurdistan Workers
party, or PKK, which the United States lists as a terrorist
organization. The PKK is also labelled as a terrorist group by the
EU.
Ralston, the former NATO supreme allied commander, stressed however
the use of force against the autonomy-seeking group should be a last
resort.
The bulk of the PKK’s estimated 5,000 guerrillas are thought to be in
Turkey but many operate in Iraq and Iran.
The guerrillas have benefitted from the years of a power vacuum in
northern Iraq to stage cross-border offensives in Turkey’s
Kurdish-dominated southeast, as Turkey complained of lack of U.S.
support in fighting the guerrillas while Turkish soldiers served in
Afghanistan to support the U.S.-led war against global terrorism.
The appointment of Ralston came after Turkey issued thinly veiled
threats to stage a unilateral cross-border offensive into northern
Iraq to hunt down Kurdish guerrillas.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other U.S. officials have
repeatedly warned Turkey against entering northern Iraq, one of the
few stable areas in that country, fearing an incursion would alienate
Iraqi Kurds, the most pro-U.S. group in the region.
From: Baghdasarian

AZERI FM RECEIVES DEPUTY CHIEF OF U.S. EUROPEAN COMMAND
Author: V.Sharifov
Trend
Today 22.09.2006
On 21 September the Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov
received the Deputy Chief of the U.S. European Command, General
William Ward.
The Foreign Minister praised the co-operation between Azerbaijan
and the U.S. in the defense sector. The Minister also applauded the
bilateral bonds under the Azerbaijan’s Euro-Atlantic integration.
Mammadyarov noted the importance of the repeal of Section 907 of the
Freedom Support Act for more expansion of relationships.
General Ward voiced his satisfaction regarding the relationship
between the United State and Azerbaijan and the level of Azerbaijan’s
Euro-Atlantic policy. He estimated the current growth rate and
Azerbaijan’s future plans as ideal.
Speaking about Armenia’s belligerent policy, Mammadyarov noted its
negative aspects for the entire region. The Armenian aggression will
be discussed at the 61st session of the UN General Assembly. During
the meeting they discussed issues of mutual interests.
From: Baghdasarian