Author: Basmajian Ani

PRESS RELEASE
Eastern Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America
138 East 39th Street
New York, NY 10016
Tel: 212-689-7810
Fax: 212-689-7168
e-mail: [email protected]
Website:
Contact: Iris Papazian

March 13, 2007

CLERGY CONFERENCE OF THREE NORTH AMERICA
PRELACIES TAKES PLACE IN CALIFORNIA

NEW YORK, NY-The annual Sts. Ghevontiantz commemoration, which precedes the
Feast of Vartanantz, has become a time of renewal, edification, and
reflection for the Armenian Clergy. Each year they gather together to learn
and to pray in an atmosphere marked with brotherhood and fellowship.
Continuing a tradition that was inaugurated several years ago, the 2007
clergy conference was a joint gathering of the Eastern and Western Prelacies
of the United States, and the Prelacy of Canada. The three-day conference
was hosted by the Western Prelacy from February 12 to 14, under the auspices
of Archbishop Moushegh Mardirossian, Prelate of the Western Prelacy;
Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan, Prelate of the Eastern Prelacy; and Archbishop
Khajag Hagopian, Prelate of Canada.
The main topic of discussion was the many challenges facing the Armenian
Church and Clergy in the Western world in the 21st century and the general
theme of "The Zeal of Clergy." The conference convened in Ghazarian Hall,
adjacent to Forty Martyrs Church in Orange County, with the reading of the
letter of blessing from His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House
of Cilicia. Following the welcoming remarks by the host parish priest and
board of trustees’ representative, the three Prelates offered their remarks
and encouragement to the participants.
The meeting began with V. Rev. Fr. Muron Aznikian being elected as Chair
and Rev. Fr. Nareg Terterian as Secretary. Over the three-day period,
pastoral and spiritual concerns were discussed, as well as issues relating
to Christian education. Among the items on the agenda were discussions of
topics raised at the Youth Gathering with Catholicos Aram which took place
in December. Morning and evening church services were an important part of
the gathering.
On Monday evening, the eve of the Feast of St. Ghevont, Holy Mass was
conducted at Forty Martyrs Church by Bishop Anoushavan Tanielian, Vicar
General of the Eastern Prelacy. Requiem service was offered for the souls of
the departed clergy who served the three Prelacies. Among those in
attendance were guest clergy members, including Father Johanna Ibrahim of
the Coptic Orthodox Church, and Father John Monestera of the Catholic
Church, and Mrs. Irma Contrera, secretary of the Catholic Church.
On Tuesday morning, students from the Ari Guiragos Minassian School
attended morning church services and later had the opportunity to be
photographed with the clergy members. In the evening, the eve of the
Presentation of the Lord to the Temple, services took place at St. Mary
Church in Glendale, with the three prelates presiding. Archbishop Khajag
Hagopian delivered the sermon. Homenetmen scouts also participated.
Following the service, the Board of Trustees and Ladies Guild hosted a
reception.
On Wednesday morning, the clergymen visited the new Prelacy building
where morning services took place at the Sts. Dertad and Ashkhen Chapel,
followed by a visit to the Vahan and Anoush Chamlian School where the
students presented a special assembly devoted to Vartanantz.
The conference, which offered the participants the chance to renew their
spiritual responsibilities and their will to serve our faithful, concluded
on Wednesday afternoon and the clergy prepared to return to their respective
communities.

NATO SEC. GEN. SP. REPRESENTATIVE FOR SOUTH CAUCASUS TO ARRIVE IN YEREVAN MARCH 26

PanARMENIAN.Net
12.03.2007 19:39 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Robert Simmons, NATO Secretary General’s Special
Representative for South Caucasus and Central Asia will visit Armenia
March 26-28, RA MFA Acting Press Officer Vladimir Karapetyan told the
PanARMENIAN.Net reporter. In the framework of his visit R. Simmons
will meet with Armenian leadership.

At the meetings he will discuss the realization process of Armenia-NATO
Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP).

WAVING ATATURK’S FLAG; TURKISH NATIONALISM

The Economist
U.S. Edition
March 10, 2007

istanbul and washington, dc Nationalism on the march

There has been a lethal upsurge in ultra-nationalist feeling in Turkey

SITTING in an office plastered with Ottoman pennants, portraits
of Ataturk and the Turkish flag, Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer, says
his mission in life is to protect the Turkish nation from "Western
imperialism and global forces that want to dismember and destroy us".

In the past two years Mr Kerincsiz and his Turkish Jurists’ Union
have launched a slew of cases against Turkish intellectuals under
article 301 of the penal code, which makes "insulting Turkishness"
a criminal offence.

Mr Kerincsiz has confined his nationalism to the courts. But
elsewhere new ultra-nationalist groups, some of them led by retired
army officers, have been vowing over guns and copies of the Koran
to make Turks "the masters of the world" and even "to die and
kill" in the process. In January one of Mr Kerincsiz’s targets,
a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor, Hrant Dink, was shot dead by a
17-year-old, Ogun Samast, because he had "insulted the Turks". The
murder, in broad daylight on one of Istanbul’s busiest streets, was
a chilling manifestation of a resurgence of xenophobic nationalism
aimed at Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities and the Kurds-plus their
defenders in the liberal elite.

The upsurge threatens to undo the good of four years of reforms by
the mildly Islamist government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Indeed,
it is partly in response to these reforms-more freedom for the
Kurds, a trimming of the army’s powers, concessions on Cyprus-that
nationalist passions have been roused. The knowledge that many members
of the European Union do not want Turkey to join has inflamed them
further (the EU partially suspended membership talks with Turkey
in December because of its refusal to open its ports and airspace
to Greek-Cypriots).

Another factor is America’s refusal to move against separatist PKK
guerrillas who are based in northern Iraq. If the United States
Congress delivers its pledge to adopt a resolution calling the
mass slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 genocide, Turkey’s
relationship with its ally would suffer "lasting damage", says the
foreign minister, Abdullah Gul.

Murat Belge, a leftist intellectual who is being hounded by Mr
Kerincsiz, sees disturbing similarities between the racist nationalism
espoused by the "Young Turks" in the dying days of the Ottoman empire
(who ordered the mass slaughter of its Armenian subjects), and the
siege mentality gripping Turkey today. The perception, now as then,
is that Western powers are pressing for changes to empower their local
collaborators (ie, Kurds and non-Muslims), with the aim of breaking up
the country. "This social Darwinist mindset that implies it’s OK to
kill your enemies in order to survive" has been perpetuated through
an education system that tells young Turks that "they have no other
friend than the Turks," says Mr Belge. And it has been cynically
exploited by politicians and generals alike.

Mr Erdogan and Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican
People’s Party, have proved no exception. When more than 100,000
Turks gathered at Mr Dink’s funeral chanting "We are all Armenians",
Mr Erdogan opined that they had gone "too far". Both he and Mr Baykal
have resisted calls to scrap article 301, though there have been
hints that it will be amended.

The politicians are keen to court nationalist votes in the run-up
to November’s parliamentary election. Mr Erdogan also hopes that
burnishing his nationalist credentials will help him to coax a blessing
from Turkey’s hawkish generals for his hopes of succeeding the fiercely
secular Ahmet Necdet Sezer as president in May.

Yet a recent outburst by the chief of the general staff, Yasar
Buyukanit, suggests otherwise. He declared that Turkey faced more
threats to its national security than at any time in its modern history
and added that only its "dynamic forces" [ie, the army] could prevent
efforts to "partition the country". These words, uttered during an
official trip to America, were widely seen as a direct warning to Mr
Erdogan to shelve his presidential ambitions.

Others do not rule out possible collusion between nationalist
elements within the army and retired officers who are organising
new ultra-nationalist groups (one is said to be training nationalist
youths in Trabzon, where Dink’s alleged murderers came from). "The real
purpose is to sow chaos, to polarise society so they can regain ground
[lost with the EU reforms]," argues Belma Akcura, an investigative
journalist whose recent book about rogue security forces known as the
"deep state" earned her a three-month jail sentence. It would not be
surprising if their next target were a nationalist, she adds.

Meanwhile prominent writers and academics, including Mr Belge,
continue to be bombarded with death threats. Some are under police
protection. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize-winning author whom Mr
Kerincsiz took to court over his comments about the persecution of
the Armenians and the Kurds, has fled to New York.

Where will matters go from here? This week one court banned access to
YouTube after clips calling Ataturk gay appeared on it; and another
sentenced a Kurdish politician to six months’ jail for giving the PKK
leader, Abdullah Ocalan, an honorific Mr. But a private television
station also withdrew a popular series, "The Valley of the Wolves",
that glorifies gun-toting nationalists who mow down their mainly
Kurdish enemies, after the channel was inundated with calls for the
show’s axing. The battle for Turkey’s soul is not over yet.

ITAR-TASS News Agency, Russia
March 9, 2007 Friday

Armenia expects positive results from Karabakh talks

Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanyan expects positive results
from the talks with his Azeri counterpart Elmar Mamediarov, which are
to be held in Geneva next week. “Of course, if there will be nothing
unexpected from the Azeri side,” he noted.

“As distinct from the Azeri side, the Armenian statements are always
in keeping with the actual contents of the negotiations, and
sometimes one may get the impression that Armenia is adhering to a
more compromising stand than Azerbaijan,” Oskanyan believes.

The minister said the mediators were now preparing most carefully the
ground for the upcoming meeting of the foreign ministers of the two
countries. This is especially borne out by the fact that French
Co-Chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group for Nagorny Karabakh Bernard
Facier had visited Yerevan this week and is now in Baku, whence he
will come back here again on Monday. The mediators are striving to
arrange a new meeting between the presidents of Armenia and
Azerbaijan after the parliamentary elections in Armenia, which are
scheduled for May 12, and are endeavouring, in view of that meeting,
“to settle as many outstanding problems as possible at the level of
foreign ministers,” Oskanyan believes.

During his recent meeting in Washington with U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, Oskanyan stated that Armenia was still adhering to
the document, which is being discussed at the negotiations. The draft
of the framework principles of settlement, tabled by the co-chairmen
of the Minsk Group (Russia, France and the United States) stipulates
the withdrawn of Armenian forces from the occupied territories of
Azerbajan, the stationing of peacemakers there, the rendering of
international economic aid to the Karabakh Region, and the eventual
holding of a referendum on the future status of Nagorny Karabakh.

“We deem it premature to discuss the problem of the return of
Azerbaijanians to Nagorny Karabakh prior to the determination of the
parameters and date of the referendum on Nagorny Karabakh, which is
to determine the status of that region,” the minister stated. He
recalled that Armenia and Azerbaijan had so far only agreed that the
status of Nagorny Karabakh should be determined by its population,
but the details of this process were still being discussed.

PRESS RELEASE
Catholicosate of Cilicia
Communication and Information Department
Contact: V.Rev.Fr.Krikor Chiftjian, Communications Officer
Tel: (04) 410001, 410003
Fax: (04) 419724
E- mail: [email protected]
Web:

PO Box 70 317
Antelias-Lebanon

Armenian version:

A GATHERING WITH HIS HOLINESS ARAM I AT THE SEMINARY IN BIKFAYA

The Dean of the Cilician Seminary organized a gathering at the Seminary in
Bikfaya, bringing together His Holiness Aram I and the Catholicosate’s large
family, including the Cilician Brotherhood members, the Seminary staff,
students and the Catholicosate staff.

A warm family atmosphere surrounded the event with consecutive speeches by
the eldest member of the Cilician Brotherhood, Archbishop Ardavazt
Terterian, Primate of the Diocese of Lebanon Bishop Kegham Khatcherian,
Archbishop Gomidas Ohanian, V. Rev. Fr. Norayr Ashekian, V. Rev. Far. Shahe
Panossian, Seminary professor and poet Sarkis Giragossian, the Catholicosate’s
chancellor Khatchig Dedeyan and others. The speakers praised the
achievements of the Catholicosate of Cilicia on national and international
levels thanks to the untiring efforts, deep dedication and ecumenical
leadership of the Pontiff Aram I.

By bringing together the most senior and junior members of the
Catholicosate’s family, it reinforced among them the notion of being the
servants of the same calling.

In his words of blessing, the Pontiff praised the work carried out by each
member of the Catholicosate of Cilicia’s large family, pointing out that
Brotherhood members, teachers, staff and students are all humble travelers
on the path of the Catholicosate’s mission.

"We must commit ourselves to that mission. We must always remind ourselves
that the church is not a structure, administration or authority. This is a
misconception of church. The church is essentially a mission of faith. As
members of church, as well as, as the servants of the church, our life must
be undergirded by this vision. What takes place in the Catholicosate of
Cilicia is noting but mission. A mission aimed at the preaching of the Word
of God, serving the needy, forming the young generation with Christian and
Armenian values, keeping the Armenian identity intact and strong in a
Diaspora situation, pursuing the human right of our people, etc… We will
continue the work of our predecessors. Each of you is a part of this
mission", said His Holiness.

The Seminary’s administration marked His Holiness’ 60th birthday with this
event, wishing him a long and fruitful tenure.

##
View the photo here:

PanARMENIAN.Net

Azerbaijan-Armenia matches will probably take place in neutral field
09.03.2007 12:57 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ UEFA President Michel Platini has completed his
two-day business visit to Georgia. At a press conference Platini took
a stance on the Azerbaijan-Armenia match in Group A of European
championship qualifying. `Azerbaijan-Armenia matches will probably
take place in a neutral field’, he said. UEFA president stated that
he had acquainted himself with the positions of Azerbaijan and
Armenia. `We have received proposals by Azerbaijani and Armenian
National Associations. The issue will be solved in near future in
Geneva’, he underscored.

Azerbaijani and Armenian national teams are to meet on Sep. 8 in Baku
and Sep. 12 in Yerevan, reports APA-Sport.

WE’RE ALL ARMENIANS
By Gwynne Dyer

Egypt Today
March 7 2007

The assassination of the editor of the only Turkish-Armenian newspaper
underscores Turkey’s battle between its past and future

When they buried Hrant Dink in Istanbul at the end of January, more
than 100,000 Turks came to his funeral, filling the streets and
chanting, "We are all Armenians!" There is a war going on for the
soul of Turkey, but at least a lot of Turks are on the right side.

Dink, who called himself "an Armenian from Turkey and a good Turkish
citizen," was murdered because he insisted on talking about the great
crime that happened in the country 92 years ago: the mass murder
of most of Turkey’s Armenian population in eastern Anatolia. The
newspaper he founded and edited, a bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly
called Agos, had only a small circulation, but his outspoken editorials
had made him one of Turkey’s most famous journalists – and a target
for assassination.

His killer, 17-year-old Ogun Samast, was a semi-educated thug from
Trabzon in the far northeast of Anatolia. He was allegedly given the
gun by a group of older ultra-nationalists including Yusuf Hayal, who
was convicted of bombing a McDonald’s restaurant in Trabzon in 2004.

But these marginal characters are just pawns in the larger war between
those who want a more democratic, more tolerant Turkey and those
who are desperately defending the power and privileges of the old
"republican" elite.

Samast shot Dink from behind in the street in front of his
newspaper office. "I feel no remorse," the killer reportedly told
investigators. "He said that Turkish blood was dirty blood." Of course,
Dink never said any such thing. What he actually said, in a newspaper
article addressed to his fellow Armenians, was that their obsession
with the massacres of 1915-17 was having "a poisonous effect on
your blood."

But it’s easy to see how a useful idiot like Samast could have believed
that Hrant Dink was an enemy of the Turks, because just over a year ago
a Turkish court took that same phrase out of context, found Dink guilty
of "insulting Turkishness" and gave him a six-month suspended sentence
under Article 301 of the criminal code. A number of other Turkish
citizens -including Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk -have been
prosecuted under the same law for daring to discuss what happened to
the Armenians, and most of them have received death threats, too.

It really is a kind of war, and the villains of the piece are precisely
the army officers, judges and senior civil servants who were once
seen as the guardians of the republican tradition, the people who
were going to modernize and democratize Turkey.

Unfortunately, "republican" doesn’t really mean the same as
"democratic."

When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk put the Ottoman Empire out of its misery
and declared a Turkish republic in 1923, his model was the democracies
of Western Europe, but his own countrymen were still largely sunk in
feudal obscurantism. Literacy was about 20 percent, and most rural
people still saw themselves as Muslim subjects of the Caliphate (which
Ataturk abolished in the following year), not as Turkish citizens.

The forms of the Turkish republic were democratic from the start,
but for a very long time the reality was a mass of illiterate
peasants under the harsh tutelage of a narrow educated elite who were
determined to Westernize the country. The republican elite rewrote
history (including the denial of the Armenian massacres) to mold a
new Turkish national consciousness and saw religion as a retrograde
force that must be banned from politics.

The decades passed, and much of the elite’s dream came to pass.

Turkey today has a per-capita income higher than Romania or Bulgaria,
the most recent countries to join the European Union. Democracy is
a reality, and the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
leads a party whose members openly refer to themselves as "Muslim
Democrats." Under Erdogan, there has been a wave of legal and
administrative reforms designed to qualify Turkey for EU membership.

But all this threatens both the rigidly secular ideology and the
autocratic privileges of the old republican elite.

>>From their powerful positions in the army, the judiciary and the
bureaucracy, the old republican elite work to undermine the reforms and
to wreck Turkey’s chances of joining the EU. In de facto alliance with
ultra-nationalist right-wing parties that also oppose EU membership,
they incite hatred of minorities, bring false prosecutions against
the advocates of a more open and democratic Turkish society and pursue
the long-term goal of destabilizing the democratic order.

It was they who smuggled the notorious Article 301 into the Criminal
Code when it was being reformed to align Turkish law with EU standards;
they who brought false prosecutions for "insulting Turkishness" against
Hrant Dink, Orhan Pamuk, and other well-known writers, journalists and
scholars; they who spread the lies about what Dink had actually said.

It is they, not some ignorant, angry teenager, who are really
responsible for his death.

But the war is not over yet, and the good guys have not lost. Foreign
Minister Abdullah Gul vowed last November to change or abolish Article
301, and recently 100,000 Turks thronged the streets of Istanbul to
mourn the country’s best-known Armenian and condemn his murderers. et

Gwynne Dyer, an award-winning journalist and documentary maker based
in London, is a regular Egypt Today columnist.>

3,294 TOURISTS VISIT NKR IN 2006

Arka News Agency, Armenia
March 6 2007

STEPANAKERT, March 5. /ARKA/. 3,294 tourists from 50 countries of
the world visited the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) in 2006.

As the NKR Statistical Service reported the number of tourists reduced
by 426 (11.5%) as compared to 2005.

2,971 tourists (90.2%) visited the country aiming to have rest and
leisure, 289 (8.8%) – on business and 34 people (1.0%) for other aims.

1,118 tourists (33.9%) who visited the NKR were from the USA, 463 or
14.1% from France and 267 or 8.1% from Canada.

BILL GATES NEVER DEMANDED TO DENY THE RECOGNITION OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Aghavni Haroutiunian

AZG Armenian Daily
06/03/2007

In connection with c the recent statements by Azerbaijani mass media
that over 100 biggest businessmen of the world, among which Bill Gates
and Warren Buffet, demanded the US President to deny the Recognition
of the Armenian Genocide, director of the "Micriosoft Area" company,
Grigor Barseghian stated that the Microsoft company has no idea what
letter it is, therefore has no information about its content, origin
or its goals.

GENOCIDE DENIAL TRIAL RAISES MANY QUESTIONS

Swissinfo, Switzerland
March 5 2007

The trial of Turkish politician Doðu Perincek, who made comments in
Switzerland denying the 1915 Armenian massacre was genocide, opens
in Lausanne on Tuesday.

The court case, which is centred on Swiss anti-racism legislation,
is set to test the already shaky relations between Bern and Ankara.

A meeting between Swiss Justice Minister Christoph Blocher – an
opponent of the law – and his Turkish counterpart Cemil Cicek in Bern
at the weekend has also raised eyebrows.

Perincek, the head of the Turkish Workers’ Party, stands accused of
racial discrimination after he called the genocide "an international
lie" during a public speech in the city of Lausanne in July 2005.

Under the Swiss penal code any act of denying, belittling or justifying
genocide is a violation of the country’s anti-racism legislation.

Armenians maintain the mass killings in 1915 were genocide, a charge
Turkey disputes.

Experts say the presiding judge at the district court in Lausanne
will have to negotiate some tricky waters concerning both the law
and Swiss-Turkish relations.

Tensions between Bern and Ankara were high in 2005 after Turkey
criticised the Swiss authorities’ decision to investigate Perincek.

It also later cancelled an official trip to Turkey by the then
economics minister, Joseph Deiss.

Law debate

The law itself has been the subject of debate after Blocher announced
during a visit to Turkey last October that the legislation was
incompatible with freedom of expression.

The comments were welcomed by Ankara but caused a storm of protest
in Switzerland.

Blocher has again come in for criticism by the media and some
politicians over the timing of the meeting with his Turkish counterpart
at the weekend. According to the justice ministry bilateral issues –
and not the trial – were discussed.

Legal experts have also raised questions about the law – albeit in
a different context.

"The lawmakers wanted to assimilate the negation of a historical
reality to a racist proclamation. This is controversial, because it
is about two different things," said Robert Roth, dean of the faculty
of law at Geneva University.

Roth believes, however, the central question of the trial will be
another one – who should make a judgement on historical events?

Perincek during his speech in Lausanne (Keystone)

Genocide or massacre?

The Armenians say Ottoman Turks slaughtered up to 1.8 million Armenians
in a planned genocide between 1915 and 1918. Turkey denies the mass
killings were genocide, saying the death toll is inflated.

So far most historians, the Council of Europe, the French parliament
and the Swiss House of Representatives – plus two cantonal parliaments
in Switzerland – have all recognised the events as genocide. The
Swiss government does not officially speak of genocide.

Francesco Bertossa, who was part of the defence team in another Turkish
genocide denial trial in 2001in Bern, believes the definition question
should not influence the verdict.

"The anti-racism law does not only punish genocide denial but also
any crime against humanity," he said.

Swiss-Armenians

For its part, the Swiss-Armenian Association, the private party
associated with the public prosecutor in the trial, welcomes the case.

"We will finally know if denigrating our people and tarnishing our
memory is a crime in Switzerland," said co-president Sarkis Shahinian.

Prosecutor-general Eric Cottier has been quoted as saying that
unless shown to be otherwise, the Armenian genocide was "sufficiently
recognised to be defined as such".

But Perincek remains defiant. Arriving in Switzerland at the weekend
he reiterated his call for the law to be abolished and said he could
prove that genocide did not take place.

A verdict in the trial is expected on Friday.

–Boundary_(ID_FBp2V0yBRecyLV8PJg9kJw)–