Author: Chakhmakhchian Vatche

ARMENIAN RESEARCHERS DEVELOP NEW TEST TO DIAGNOSE PEOPLE WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA
Armenpress
Sept 25 2006
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 25, ARMENPRESS: A team of researchers from the
Armenian Molecular Biology Institute, an affiliation of the National
Academy of Sciences, said they have developed a test that can help
doctors and psychiatrists to diagnose people with schizophrenia.
The new test can be applied by doctors in clinics, mental houses and
psychiatrists in research centers.
Until now schizophrenics are often initially diagnosed based on display
of what doctors call ‘prodromal’ signs, which are signs preceding a
psychotic episode.
Schizophrenic prodromal signs may include social isolation, odd
behavior, lack of personal hygiene, and blunted emotions and sometimes
schizophrenia is diagnosed through the patient’s response to different
therapeutic regimens.
Armenian researchers have developed their new test after examining
200 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, tens of people suffering
from other illnesses and also 225 physically healthy people.
Schizophrenia is estimated to afflict 1% of the world’s population,
whereas schizotypal personality disorder afflicts 2-3%. The incidence
of schizophrenia among parents, children, and siblings of patients
with the disease is 15%. It occurs equally in males and females.
The disease may be seen at any age, but the average age for the
initiation of treatment is from 28-34 years. Schizophrenia is
associated with low economic status, probably due to a lack of proper
health care during fetal development.

ROOF ABLAZE
A1+
[02:30 pm] 22 September, 2006
On September 21 at 03:10 p.m. a fire broke out in village Karbi,
Aragatsotn region. The fire was put out at 04:30 p.m. The roof of
the house of M. Haroutyunyan with an area of about 120 square meters
burnt to ashes.
At 07.38 another fire broke out in village Berdik, Ararat region. It
was put out at 08:40 p.m.
The information was given by the RA rescue service.

THE POPE, JIHAD, AND “DIALOGUE”
American Thinker, AZ
September 17th, 2006
The most important address commemorating 9/11/01 was delivered on
9/12/06, a day after the fifth anniversary of this cataclysmic act
of jihad terrorism. It was not delivered by President Bush, and was
not even pronounced in the United States. On September 12, 2006 at
the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture
(“adding some allusions of the moment”) entitled, “Faith, Reason and
the University”.
Despite his critique of modern reason, Benedict argued that he did
not intend to promote a retrogression,
…back to the time before the Enlightenment and reject[ing] the
insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to
be acknowledged unreservedly: We are all grateful for the marvelous
possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in
humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover,
is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies
an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity.
Christianity, the Pope maintained, was indelibly linked to reason
and he contrasted this view with those who believe in spreading their
faith by the sword. Benedict developed this argument by recounting the
late 14th century “Dialogue Held With A Certain Persian, the Worthy
Mouterizes, in Anakara of Galatia” between the Byzantine ruler Manuel
II Paleologus, and a well-educated Muslim interlocutor. The crux of
this part of his presentation, was the following:
Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the
soul. ‘God’, he [the Byzantine ruler] says, ‘is not pleased by blood –
and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born
of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs
the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence
and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a
strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening
a person with death’….
However, it is Benedict’s discussion of the Byzantine ruler’s allusions
to “…the theme of the jihad (holy war)”-Koran 2:256, “There is no
compulsion in religion”, notwithstanding-that has unleashed a firestorm
of condemnation and violence from Muslims across the world. Here are
the words deemed so incendiary by both Muslim leaders, and the masses:
Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment
accorded to those who have the ‘Book’ and the ‘infidels’, he [Manuel
II Paleologus] turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the
central question on the relationship between religion and violence
in general, in these words: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that
was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such
as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’
The historical context for these words-which were likely written by
Manuel II Paleologus between 1391 and 1394-turns out be much more
banal, albeit unknown to fulminating Muslims (here; here),and Islamic
apologists of all ilks, especially the disingenuous Muslim (here;
here) and hand-wringing non-Muslim promoters of empty “civilizational
dialogue”.
When Manuel II composed the Dialogue (which Pope Benedict excerpted),
the Byzantine ruler was little more than a glorified dhimmi vassal
of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, forced to accompany the latter on
a campaign through Anatolia. Earlier, Bayezid had compelled the
Byzantines under Manuel II to submit to additional humiliations and
impositions-heavier tribute, which was already onerous-as well as
the establishment of a special quarter in Constantinople devoted to
Turkish merchants, and the admission of an Ottoman kadi to arbitrate
the affairs of these Muslims.
During the campaign he was conscripted to join, Manuel II witnessed
with understandable melancholy the great metamorphosis-ethnic and
toponymic-of formerly Byzantine Asia Minor. The devastation, and
depopulation of these once flourishing regions was so extensive that
often, Manuel could no longer tell where he was. The still recognizable
Greek cities whose very names had been changed into something foreign
became a source of particular grief. It was during this unhappy sojourn
that Manuel II’s putative encounter with a Muslim theologian occurred,
ostensibly in Ankara.
Manuel II’s Dialogue was one of the later outpourings of a vigorous
Muslim-Christian polemic regarding Islam’s success, at (especially
Byzantine) Christianity’s expense, which persisted during the
11th through 15th centuries, and even beyond. The Muslim advocates’
(particularly the Turks) most prominent argument was the indisputable
evidence of Islam’s military triumphs over the Christians of Asia
Minor (especially Anatolia, in modern Turkey). These jihad conquests
were repeatedly advanced in the polemics of the Turks. The Christian
rebuttal, in contrast, hinged upon the ethical precepts of Muhammad and
the Koran. Christian interlocutors charged the Muslims with abiding
a religion which both condoned the life of a “lascivious murderer”,
and claimed to give such a life divine sanction.
Manuel, and generations of Christian interlocutors, argued that the
“Christ-hating” barbarians could never overcome the “fortress of
belief,” despite seizing lands and cities, extorting tribute and even
conscripting rulers to perform humiliating services.
Manuel II’s discussions with his Muslim counterpart simply conformed
to this pattern of polemical exchanges, repeated often, over at least
four centuries.
Returning to Pope Benedict’s now controversial lecture, even if one
accepts an apologetic interpretation of Koran 2:256 as prohibiting
forced conversion to Islam (see below), this verse was abrogated by
the verses of jihad, for example 9:5, and many others in sura 9, as
well as sura 8. Indeed Koran 9:5 alone is held to have abrogated (here,
pp. 67-75 ) as many as 100 pacific (or seemingly pacific verses).
Koranic sources, in particular the timeless war proclamation (the
Koran being the “uncreated word of Allah” for Muslims) on generic
pagans (not simply Arabian pagans), Koran 9:5, offers pagans the stark
“choice” of conversion or death:
Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever
ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare
for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and
pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving,
Merciful.
The idolatrous Hindus (and the same applies to enormous populations
of pagans/animists wherever Muslim jihadist armies encountered them
in history, including, sadly, contemporary Sudan), for example,
were enslaved in vast numbers during the waves of jihad conquests
that ravaged the Indian subcontinent for well over a half millennium
(beginning at the outset of the 8th century C.E.). And the guiding
principles of Islamic law regarding their fate -derived from Koran
9:5-were unequivocally coercive.
Jihad slavery also contributed substantively to the growth of the
Muslim population in India. K.S. Lal elucidates both of these points:
The Hindus who naturally resisted Muslim occupation were considered
to be rebels. Besides they were idolaters (mushrik) and could not be
accorded the status of Kafirs, of the People of the Book – Christians
and Jews… Muslim scriptures and treatises advocated jihad against
idolaters for whom the law advocated only Islam or death… The fact
was that the Muslim regime was giving [them] a choice between Islam
and death only. Those who were killed in battle were dead and gone;
but their dependents were made slaves.
They ceased to be Hindus; they were made Musalmans in course of time
if not immediately after captivity…slave taking in India was the most
flourishing and successful [Muslim] missionary activity…Every Sultan,
as [a] champion of Islam, considered it a political necessity to plant
or raise [the] Muslim population all over India for the Islamization
of the country and countering native resistance.
The late Rudi Paret was a seminal 20th century scholar of the Koran,
and its exegesis. Paret’s considered analysis of Koran 2:256, puts
this verse in the overall context of Koranic injunctions regarding
pagans, specifically, and further concludes that 2:256 is a statement
of resignation, not a prohibition on forced conversion.
After the community which the Prophet had established had extended
its power over the whole of Arabia, the pagan Arabs were forcefully
compelled to accept Islam stated more accurately, they had to choose
either to accept Islam or death in battle against the superior power
of the Muslims (cf. surahs 8:12; 47:4). This regulation was later
sanctioned in Islamic law. All this stands in open contradiction to
the alleged meaning of the Quranic statement, noted above: la ikraha
fi d-dini. The idolaters (mushrikun) were clearly compelled to accept
Islam – unless they preferred to let themselves be killed. [Note-Koran
9:5];
In view of these circumstances it makes sense to consider another
meaning. Perhaps originally the statement la ikraha fi d-dini did
not mean that in matters of religion one ought not to use compulsion
against another but that one could not use compulsion against another
(through the simple proclamation of religious truth).
Such coercion applies not only to “pagans”. Princeton scholar Patricia
Crone makes the cogent argument that those of any faith may be forcibly
converted during acts of jihad resulting in captivity (including,
for example, the jihad kidnapping of the two Fox reporters, Centanni
and Wiig). In her recent analysis of the origins and development
of Islamic political thought, Dr. Crone makes an important nexus
between the mass captivity and enslavement of non-Muslims during
jihad campaigns, and the prominent role of coercion in these major
modalities of Islamization.
Following a successful jihad, she notes:
Male captives might be killed or enslaved, whatever their religious
affiliation. People of the Book were not protected by Islamic law
until they had accepted dhimma (Koran 9:29). Captives might also be
given the choice between Islam and death, or they might pronounce
the confession of faith of their own accord to avoid execution:
jurists ruled that their change of status was to be accepted even
though they had only converted out of fear.
An unapologetic view of Islamic history reveals that forced conversions
to Islam are not exceptional-they have been the norm, across three
continents-Asia, Africa, and Europe-for over 13 centuries.
Moreover, during jihad-even the jihad campaigns of the 20th century
[i.e., the jihad genocide of the Armenians during World War I,
the Moplah jihad in Southern India [1921], the jihad against the
Assyrians of Iraq [early 1930s], the jihads against the Chinese of
Indonesia and the Christian Ibo of southern Nigeria in the 1960s,
and the jihad against the Christians and Animists of the southern
Sudan from 1983 to 2001], the dubious concept (see Paret, above) of
“no compulsion” (Koran 2:256; which was cited with tragic irony during
the Fox reporters “confessional”! ) , has always been meaningless.
A consistent practice was to enslave populations taken from outside
the boundaries of the “Dar al Islam”, where Islamic rule (and Law)
prevailed. Inevitably fresh non-Muslim slaves, including children (for
example, the infamous devshirme system in Ottoman Turkey, which spanned
three centuries and enslaved 500,000 to one million Balkan Christian
adolescent males, forcibly converting them to Islam), were Islamized
within a generation, their ethnic and linguistic origins erased.
Two enduring and important mechanisms for this conversion were
concubinage and the slave militias-practices still evident in the
contemporary jihad waged by the Arab Muslim Khartoum government
against the southern Sudanese Christians and Animists . And Julia Duin
reported in early 2002 that murderous jihad terror campaigns-including,
prominently, forced conversions to Islam -continued to be waged
against the Christians of Indonesia’s Moluccan Islands.
Recently, at the close of a compelling, thoroughly documented address
(delivered April 2, 2006, at The Legatus Summit, Naples, Florida)
entitled, “Islam and Western Democracies,” Cardinal George Pell,
the Archbishop of Sydney, posed four salient questions for his
erstwhile Muslim interlocutors wishing to engage in meaningful
interfaith dialogue:
1) Do they believe that the peaceful suras of the Koran are abrogated
by the verses of the sword? (see here, pp. 67-75 )
2) Is the program of military expansion (100 years after Muhammad’s
death Muslim armies reached Spain and India ) to be resumed when
possible?
3) Do they believe that democratic majorities of Muslims in Europe
would impose Shari’a (Islamic religious) law? (see here)
4) Can we discuss Islamic history (here and here)-even the
hermeneutical problems around the origins of the Koran (see here,
here, here, and here)-without threats of violence?
Dr. Habib Malik, in an eloquent address delivered February 3,
2003 at the at the 27th annual Council for Christian Colleges and
Universities Presidents Conference decried the platitudinous “least
common denominators” paradigm which dominates what he aptly termed
the contemporary “dialogue industry”:
We’re all three Abrahamic religions, we’re the three Middle Eastern
monotheisms, the Isa of the Koran is really the same as the Jesus of
the New Testament….
This is politicized dialogue. This is dialogue for the sake
of dialogue. Philosophically speaking, this is what Kierkegaard
called idle talk, snakke in Danish; what Heidegger called Gerede;
what Sartre called bavardage. In other words, if this is dialogue,
it’s pathetic… it needs to be transcended, and specifically
to concentrate, to focus on the common ethical foundation for
most religions can also be very misleading. Because when you get
into the nitty-gritty, you find that even in what you supposed
were common ethical foundations, there are vast differences,
incompatibilities. Suicide bombers is one recent example. Condoned
by major authoritative Muslim voices; completely unacceptable by
Christianity.
Cardinal Pell’s unanswered questions highlight the predictable
failure of the feckless “We’re all three Abrahamic religions”,
“dialogue for the sake of dialogue” approach to both Muslim-Christian,
and Muslim-Jewish dialogue.
Eschewing the comforting banalities of his predecessor, Benedict
XVI has acknowledged that real dialogue, as opposed to bavardage,
begins not by kissing the Koran, but reading it. Most importantly,
he is impatient with an interfaith dialogue between Muslims and
Christians limited to platitudes about “Abrahamic faiths”, which
scrupulously avoids serious discussions of the living, sacralized
Islamic institution of jihad war.
Until Muslims evidence a willingness to engage in such forthright
discussions, Benedict appears to share Dr.
Malik’s sobering conclusions from his February 2003 speech: “One
certainly needs to be open at all times to learn from the Other,
including to learn at times that the Other right now has nothing to
teach me on a particular issue.”
Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad.

BERLIN: TRANSCENDING A CITY’S DIVIDES
By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune
International Herald Tribune, France
Published: September 17, 2006
BERLIN For Hakan Sever, history comes with onions and garlic
sauce. From his family’s kebab cafe, not far from where the Berlin
Wall once stood, he has watched this city reinvent itself in one of
the most remarkable transformations of our modern world.
“Everything changes in this city all the time,” says Sever, 34, as
his knife zigzags down a cone of lamb that weighs 30 kilograms, or
66 pounds, and is roasting on a vertical skewer. “The only thing that
doesn’t change,” he adds, his blade resting for a moment in mid-air,
“is people’s appetite for doner kebab.”
It is 5:05 p.m. and an Oriental breeze is blowing through Kreuzberg,
an eastern slice of what used to be West Berlin. The area is home to
about 26,000 of Berlin’s 142,000 residents of Turkish origin, among
them Sever, a wiry man with an animated smile. He arrived in 1977,
aged 6, when he stepped off a plane from eastern Turkey to join his
parents. Twelve years later, he looked on as the Wall fell and East
and West melded into one.
Now he spends his evenings crafting doner kebab, Turkish bread stuffed
with roasted lamb and a choice of vegetables and sauces. His cafe
bears the resolutely un-Turkish name of Bistro Bagdad. A colorful,
hungry crowd gathers outside his window, a microcosm of the city’s
3.4 million inhabitants.
“Look, today I sell doner to everyone,” Sever beams, making a sweeping
hand movement. “Turkish people, German people, tourists – everyone
comes to eat doner.
If you want to meet this city, you don’t have to go anywhere. You
can just sit right here and wait. The city will come to you.”
Doner kebab long ago replaced bratwurst as Germany’s favorite fast
food, and kebab vendors have become an immutable feature of Berlin’s
restless cityscape.
There are now an estimated 1,300 of them, more than in Istanbul,
according to the German Doner Federation.
They feed the city and transcend its many divides.
Five minutes into his shift, Sever has already stuffed, wrapped
and sold three kebabs: one with chili sauce to an American tourist,
one with no sauce to a Turkish woman in a Muslim head scarf and one
with an extra-generous helping of onions to a Western woman with more
tattoos than clothes.
“Next!” Sever cries. “With or without sauce?
Garlic-yogurt-chili-herbs?”
Doner kebab arrived in Berlin in the late 1970s after the first oil
shock, when tens of thousands of Turkish workers lost their jobs. Some,
like his uncle in 1977, found new work by opening kebab booths.
Sever served his first kebab in Kreuzberg as a teenager in 1983. Then
the area was the farthest edge of the Western capitalist world; now
it is an increasingly gentrified part of central Berlin. The subway
station across the road from the family cafe, Schlesisches Tor,
was the last stop before the Wall.
The street opposite leading to the River Spree was a lifeless
cul-de-sac.
It took Sever an hour to get to work in those days because buses and
cars had to follow the winding contours of the Wall. Today it takes him
10 minutes to arrive from Wedding, a neighborhood north of Kreuzberg.
“There were hardly any cars here and now it’s like the motorway,”
he recalls, his eyes wandering over the busy crossroad to the river
and into the past.
The Turkish grocery shop at the corner has been there as long as
Sever can remember. But the trendy cafes, the fusion restaurants,
the tourists and the students idly sipping their lattes are new. The
streets of Little Istanbul, as the area is still known, have changed
as history unfolded. So have Sever’s customers.
In the early years, he sold kebabs to an unlikely mix of Turkish
families and squatters from the leftist punk scene who had little more
in common than a life literally on the margins of West German society.
In 1989, he sold kebabs and Coca-Cola to some of the first East
Berliners to stream across the border. He watched their hopeful faces
appear on the Oberbaum Bridge, a majestic red-brick structure that
served as one of eight checkpoints during Berlin’s years as a divided
city. Crossing the bridge that had been the end of the world for them,
the East Berliners would empty the shelves in the nearby supermarket
and patiently line up outside the bank on the corner for their welcome
money – 100 Deutsche marks, or about $50.
Scores of them, whole families, slept on the pavement outside Bistro
Bagdad in the first few days of that memorable October, anxious not to
lose their place in line. One mother and her daughter ordered a Coke
with their kebab. When the girl tried to open the can, Sever recalled,
the mother grabbed her hand to stop her. “She told her it was for
Christmas, can you imagine?” he said. “I will never forget that.”
Sever then headed east in a kebab van, eager to learn more about
the other half of his adoptive home country, a place that felt as
foreign to him as to any West Berliner at the time. But when angry
youths with shaved heads shouted racist insults at him during a wave
of xenophobia in eastern Germany in the early 1990s, he decided to
leave and never go back.
“They told me to go home and to stop stealing their jobs,” he said. “I
offered one of them work in my van, by the oven. He lasted all of five
minutes. I told him, ‘See, you don’t want my job, it’s not a fun job.'”
Fun it is not, to cut meat beside an oven that radiates heat of more
than 80 degrees Celsius (175 degrees Fahrenheit). But Sever said he
loves his work because of the constant contact with people.
“In here,” Sever tapped his chest bone, “I carry the life stories of
my customers.” He likened kebab vendors to 24-hour psychiatrists who
provide succor for everyone from the lovelorn to those having trouble
digesting the tectonic shifts of the last two decades.
Backpacking tourists find their way to Sever’s booth after visiting
the so-called East Side Gallery on the other side of the river, which
is in fact not a gallery but the longest remaining stretch of the
Berlin Wall, adorned with paintings and graffiti. Taxi drivers stop in
before the evening shift. Techno aficionados come to eat when other
people sleep. There is Berlin’s legendary army of eternal students,
its growing unemployed population, its gangs of young Turkish men
and its many eccentric artists.
Many of them are poor and many would not want to live anywhere else.
Kebabs here are cheaper than in any other West European capital,
Sever says; indeed, the basic doner costs [email protected] in Berlin, ~@4 in
Paris. Lattes and rents are cheaper, too. International investors
are still buying property and half the world’s cranes are divided
between Shanghai and Berlin, tour guides will proudly tell you.
“All that building work,” Sever said. “What will the city look like
when they are done?”
Sever does not have a German passport and Germany, he says, is not
home. Neither is Igdir, the Turkish village near the Armenian border
where he spent the first seven years of his life.
His home is Berlin.
“Ich bin ein Berliner,” he joked, and he meant it.
He described his bond with his adopted home city as a happy arranged
marriage, like the one with his cousin Meleg. His father brought her
over from Anatolia 11 years ago and she is now the mother of his two
children, 9-year-old twins.
“There is no passion in an arranged marriage, but you face life
together, you share life, you build respect and your roots intertwine,”
he explained. “Then one day maybe you wake up and you love.”
His roots go deep in Berlin. He was taught by the same primary school
teacher who is now teaching his children. He supported Germany in
the recent soccer World Cup; a small German flag still adorns his
Volkswagen. He wears socks in his sandals as only Germans seem to do.
But he is all too aware that many Germans still think of Turks like
him as guests, not permanent residents.
“When my father arrived in Germany in 1963 as a guest worker, he was
greeted with flowers at the airport – and now they want to get rid
of us,” he said and broke into a self-confident chuckle. “But when
we Turks set up shop somewhere we don’t leave.”
When Sever finishes his shift at 11 p.m., he counts his tips: a
disappointing [email protected], or $1.40. But then he becomes protective of
the city and his customers.
“People in Berlin have no money. It’s O.K.,” he said, his smile back
in full force. “If they were rich, maybe they would stop coming to
eat my doner.”

MOSCOW’S NEW SCHOOL LOOKS WEST
by Della Bradshaw
Financial Times
17 September 2006 Sunday 7:36:59 PM GMT
It is not often that a brand new business school sets up shop, let
alone one that has the vocal support of national government and the
financial support of local and international businessmen. But then,
not everywhere is Moscow and not every business school founder commands
the respect of Ruben Vardanian, chairman and chief executive of Troika
Dialog, the investment bank.
At just 38, Mr Vardanian, born in Armenia, is already head of Russia’s
biggest investment company, has been named Russia’s Entrepreneur of
the Year (2005) by Ernst & Young, and has even been the subject of
a business school case study on leadership, written by Manfred Kets
de Vries, the veteran Insead professor. Now he has decided that what
Russia needs is a world-class business school and he is going to make
sure it happens.
On Thursday, it is hoped that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin
will lay the foundation stone for the new school, to be called the
Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, in Skolkovo on Moscow’s western
fringes. Mr Putin is so pleased with the plan that he has declared
the school a “national project”.
Mr Vardanian has not only wooed the Russian president. He has persuaded
12 like-minded Russian business oligarchs and two non-Russian investors
each to stump up $5m (GBP2.66m) to finance the school. These include
Shiv Vikram Khemka, vice-chairman of the Sun Group in India and an
MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; and
Roman Abramovich, probably most famous outside Russia as the owner
of the English premiership soccer club Chelsea.
Mr Vardanian says his first reason for establishing the school was
personal. “My son is 11 years old. My kids should at least have the
choice of studying in Barcelona, London, the US or Moscow.”
Second he says the main resource that Russia is missing is people:
“Russia’s future lies in its people, not its oil and gas.” He believes
that emerging markets such as China, India and Russia are becoming
more interesting, not only for natives of those countries who want
to return home but for companies too. “More foreign companies want
to set up in Moscow,” he says.
While Russian universities have a powerful academic reputation in the
sciences, they have no history in teaching western-style management.
About 110 MBA programmes are already taught in Russia, says Mr
Vardanian. “It’s name is an MBA, but…” he shrugs.
Mr Vardanian, a great bear of a man, visited 18 business schools
worldwide before deciding how he wanted the Moscow school to be run.
What he didn’t want, he says, is a school where professors taught
students in order to fund their own research. Instead, he decided on
a business school along the lines of IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland?
“very business-orientated, practical. We’re doing a lot to link the
business education to the reality.”
Three of the founding donors have already been persuaded to give
annual master classes at the school, which will be run like a business,
not a university.
Mr Vardanian plans for the school to have executive short programmes in
2007 with a pilot 25 or 50 students enrolled on the 18-month full-time
MBA programme in 2008. The campus, which has been designed by David
Adjaye, the London-based architect who also designed the Nobel Peace
Centre in Oslo, Norway, will open in September 2009.
“The concept is to have everything in place by 2012,” says Mr
Vardanian. The plan is to break even in 2015.
Professors will be paid as if they were working on Wall Street or
in the City a salary with bonuses. The tenure system, beloved of US
academic institutions, is out.
Coming from a family where his father and grandfather were professors
of architecture and history respectively, Mr Vardanian understands
the appeal of an academic life, but he believes researching and
teaching history is very different from researching and teaching
management. “For business education [the tenure system] is the wrong
concept. The main problem is trying to build a new school on a new
concept.”
One of the biggest differences between the Moscow School of Management
and more traditional business schools will be the school’s emphasis on
developing leaders who are risk-takers. While other schools may judge
the success of their programme by the corporate clout that their alumni
hold, the Moscow school believes a sign of success will be if 20-25 per
cent of graduates own their own businesses five years after graduation.
“We want to encourage more people in Russia to take risks,” says Mr
Vardanian. Some $40m of the initial funding will go into a venture
fund to finance new ventures.
Another difference is that the school will teach initially in English
but eventually in four languages English, Russian, Spanish and Chinese.
Finding the right faculty will be the tough part, says Danica Purg,
founder and dean of the IEDC-Bled School of Management in Slovenia
and a member of the advisory board for the Moscow school. “The biggest
challenge for them [the Moscow school] is to match their big ambitions
with reality. They need to develop their own professors.
They will need a lot of academic support,” she says.
Schools in other developing countries, notably China and India,
have secured their reputation by attracting home Chinese or Indian
professors who were trained in the US or Europe every top business
school employs Indian and Chinese nationals. The same does not apply
to Russian nationals.
For example, the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, with which Mr
Vardanian says the Moscow school already has close links, was set up
with help from two US schools, the Wharton School of the University
of Pennsylvania and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern
University. Dipak Jain, now dean of Kellogg, was previously dean
at ISB.
Without similar emotional ties or very large sums of money the new
Moscow venture is unlikely to find support from the US.
For this reason, Mr Vardanian is seeking partnerships in other emerging
markets, notably South America.
That said, the remuneration for faculty will be competitive with
top international business schools, but Professor Purg believes it
will not be the money that persuades faculty to teach there. “In my
experience professors don’t go where there is money but where there
is a challenge.”
Mr Vardanian will hope she is right. He is planning to appoint 10
Russian professors and 20 non-Russian professors along with 70-100
visiting faculty, largely from business schools in other emerging
economies.
Most significant in the hiring process is the dean’s job or, to
be more precise, the appointment of two deans, one Russian, one
non-Russian. The Russian will be Andrei Volkov, deputy minister for
science and education and head of the education expert group for
Russia’s presidency of the Group of Eight industrial nations.
Headhunters Heidrick & Struggles have been appointed to find the
second co-dean and an announcement is expected next spring. Mr
Vardanian will remain as president of the school.
Widely regarded as the one of the most respectable of Russia’s
self-made men, Mr Vardanian has continually expounded the need for
stronger corporate governance in Russia. The school will practise what
it preaches, he says. “The school needs to show success, transparency
and corporate governance. It needs to be well-managed.”
This will be corporate governance Russian-style, however. Mr Vardanian
has no intention of handing over the reins altogether, but he and the
two co-deans will form the triumvirate that manages the school. “The
triangle needs to work together well,” he says.
Compromise will be the order of the day.
Whether the school will be able to attract a high-calibre international
dean under these strictures is debatable, particularly as the co-deans
will also report to the board. “The manager is there to execute the
plan and he has to report to the board. We have to show that we are
like any other company.”
“The problem,” he concedes, “will be getting someone who wants to
play by these new rules.”

Public Radio of Armenia
Sept 15 2006
Jacques Chirac to arrive in Armenia on an official visit
16.09.2006 12:34
September 29 The President of France Jacques Chirac will arrive in
Armenia on an official visit.
RA President’s Press Secretary Viktor Soghomonyan informed that
during the visit Presidents of Armenia and France Robert Kocharyan
and Jacques Chirac will have a meeting, following which the leaders
of the two countries will give a joint press conference. The
Presidents will participate the festive ceremony of opening the
Square of the French Republic in Yerevan and will attend Charles
Aznavour’s concert at the Republic Square.
In the framework of the visit Jacques Chirac will attend the Mother
See of Holy Echmiadzin and will have a meeting with the Catholicos of
All Armenians Garegin II. The French President will lay a wreath of
flowers at the memorial to the Armenian Genocide victims. The visit
will be completed on October 1.

Agence France Presse
16 septembre 2006 samedi 9:48 AM GMT
Chirac en Arménie (29 septembre-1er octobre): Aznavour et Karabakh au menu
Le président français Jacques Chirac se rendra en visite en Arménie
du 29 septembre au 1er octobre, où il assistera à un concert du
chanteur Charles Aznavour et évoquera le problème du conflit du
Nagorny-Karabakh, a annoncé samedi la présidence arménienne.
Il s’agit de la première visite officielle du président français dans
cette ex-république soviétique du Caucase du Sud. Il sera accompagné
de son épouse Bernadette, de ministres et d’hommes d’affaires, a
déclaré à l’AFP le porte-parole du président Robert Kotcharian,
Viktor Sogomonian.
Il assistera le 30 septembre à un concert du chanteur et compositeur
français d’origine arménienne Charles Aznavour, adulé en Arménie, sur
la place de la République, dans le centre d’Erevan, en ouverture de
l’Année de la France en Arménie.
Soulignant les “liens traditionnels d’amitié” entre l’Arménie et la
France, où vit une importante diaspora arménienne, M. Sogomonian a
précisé que la question du Nagorny-Karabakh serait au menu des
discussions, la France faisant partie du groupe de médiateurs de
l’OSCE.
L’Azerbaïdjan et l’Arménie campent depuis des années sur leurs
positions concernant le conflit qui les oppose au Nagorny Karabakh,
une enclave habitée en majorité par des Arméniens et qui a fait
sécession de l’Azerbaïdjan après un conflit débuté à la fin des
années 1980.
Un cessez-le-feu est intervenu en 1994, mais la situation reste
tendue.
La France avait accueilli en février des pourparlers entre le
président azerbaïdjanais Ilham Aliev et Robert Kotcharian, qui
s’étaient soldées par une absence totale de progrès.
Le président Chirac se rendra également au mémorial des victimes du
génocide arménien de 1915 sous l’empire ottoman, non reconnu par la
Turquie.

Panorama.am
15:05 16/09/06
COCHAIRS TRY TO REVIVE THE PROPOSED PEACE DEAL
The move of Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement to
U.N. is a new challenge for Armenia, Vartan Oskanyan,
foreign minister of Armenia, said pointing out to some
qualitative and quantitative changes. `We will have to
deal with four different countries and not only with
Azerbaijan. Each of these countries has its circle of
friends. So, the scope of interests enlarges,’ he
said. However, Oskanyan expressed his readiness to
`enter into concrete discussions when there is a
resolution.’ Anyway, he said it changes the focus of
attention from the main process.
The minister said OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs want to
revive the peace deal which was approved by the
Armenian side and to record positive move by the end
of this year. He also said if the conflict gets into
U.N., Nagorno Karabakh should become part of the
negotiations. `U.N. is comprised of 159 countries
which have no idea about the process and have no
interests. They can vote based on political sympathies
for this or that side. We cannot leave the fate of
Karabakh to the vote of some countries in Latin
America and the Caribbean islands. This means that
Karabakh must be a part of the process. It does not
mean that Armenia will not be involved. It will but
only with Karabakh,’ the minister said. /Panorama.am/

TURKEY HAS NO CHANCES TO BECOME FULLY EUROPEAN COUNTRY
PanARMENIAN.Net
14.09.2006 17:37 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Turkey will hardly leave EU talks, but it cannot meet
all European criteria, political scientist Levon Melik-Shahnazaryan
told a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter. In his words, the logic of development
of the talks suggests that Turkey, even having the direct and rather
aggressive support of Washington, does not have chances to become a
European country in the foreseeable future. “The process of sobering up
will be painless: Ankara understands that Turks never were a European
people. At that Levon Melik-Shahnazaryan underscored that by declaring
“secularity”, Turkey is held by military bayonets.
“However, this state of affairs cannot be sustained perpetually,
at least as army is a creation of the people. Turkey will finally
return to pan-Turkism ideology, as it is their true religion,” the
political scientist said.

NO PROGRESS IN SEARCH FOR SCHOOL FIREBOMBER
By Janice Arnold
Staff Reporter
The Canadan Jewish News
September 14, 2006
MONTREAL – The perpetrator of a Molotov-cocktail attack on a chassidic
boys’ school in Montreal over Labour Day weekend remains at large
despite the act having been videotaped by the school’s surveillance
camera and despite a $5,000 reward offered by an anonymous donor for
information leading to his arrest.
The images released by police show, from an angle, a masked
black-haired man, seemingly in his 20s and apparently alone, wearing
a beige top and beige pants reaching to below the knees. He is seen
lighting an accelerant and throwing it through a glass panel of the
main entrance of the Skver community’s Toldos Yakov Yosef school in
the city’s Outremont neighbourhood shortly after midnight on Saturday,
Sept. 2.
In the last frame, he removes his hood-like mask as he flees.
School and Jewish community officials told a press conference last
week that they’re confident and grateful police are putting the
necessary resources into their investigation.
The community and police, however, differ on the motivation for
the crime.
Police have so far not labelled the incident a hate crime, because
of the absence of evidence such as graffiti or phone calls, and are
treating it as arson.
But Canadian Jewish Congress, B’nai Brith Canada and Toldos
leaders are convinced the perpetrator deliberately targeted a
Jewish institution. No one was in the school at the time. About a
dozen teenaged students had left the building only about 20 minutes
beforehand.
Damage was limited to the school’s vestibule because sprinklers put out
the fire and the fire department responded quickly, school director
Binyomin Mayer said. He thanked the school’s non-Jewish neighbours
for immediately alerting police and coming to see if anyone was on
the premises.
The school reopened the next day, but it estimates it will cost
$150,000 to repair damage and add new security features.
Asked if he thought there was a connection between the incident and the
recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Rabbi Reuben Poupko, co-chair of the
Montreal Jewish Security Advisory Committee, told reporters that it’s
“a fair question to wonder whether the gathering of 15,000 Quebecers
under the flag of Hezbollah – unfortunately further legitimized by
the presence of politicians – creates an atmosphere where fanatics
draw the conclusion that violence against Jews is somehow acceptable.”
He said many in the community have been asking themselves that
question. Rabbi Poupko was referring to the Aug. 6 demonstration
against the recent war in which three politicians – Bloc Quebecois
leader Gilles Duceppe, Parti Quebecois leader Andre Boisclair and
federal Liberal MP Denis Coderre – participated prominently.
At the press conference, held three days after the firebombing,
community officials asked that political leaders forcefully denounce
the Toldos attack. But reaction was slow and scattered, unlike the
firebombing of United Talmud Torahs’ library in April 2004, when
politicians at all levels, including then-prime minister Paul Martin,
immediately condemned the act. (Prime Minister Stephen Harper has
yet to issue a statement.)
Duceppe was one of the first politicians to condemn the incident and
affirm that Quebecers do not tolerate any such “hateful act whoever
it is directed at, or for whatever reason.” Boisclair soon after
denounced the incident as well.
Quebec Premier Jean Charest said: “No one can determine at this point
if it was motivated by hate.
But nonetheless I think it is important that all Quebec see very
clearly on this issue that we are a society of tolerance, that we
are a society that encourages free speech and that we should not and
cannot tolerate these kinds of acts.”
Federal Liberal leadership candidate and Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison
visited the school to express his revulsion against what he called
an act of “terrorism” against children and education.
NDP leader Jack Layton likewise stated: “How could someone be so
callous as to attempt to strike terror into the hearts of young
children?”
Alex Werzberger, president of the Coalition of Chassidic Organizations
of Outremont, pointed out there is an Armenian church and school two
blocks away from Toldos, as well as a French school on a nearby block,
which suggests to him that the perpetrator had “his pick of schools”
but went for the Jewish one.
“You can’t put any other spin on it than anti-Semitism.”
Werzberger said there hasn’t been a serious anti-Semitic incident in
Outremont for a long time, nor has there been any recent contentious
issue, such as disputes over shul locations, parking problems or an
eruv, which were all prominent several years ago.
“Other than someone yelling ‘damned Jews,’ which is almost a daily
occurrence, there has been nothing,” he said.
FEDERATION CJA, which co-ordinates community security, is re-evaluating
security at Jewish schools and other institutions in the wake of
the incident, but it did not raise its threat-assessment level as a
result of the incident. It continues to call for “heightened vigilance”
and implementation of existing procedures.
Since the UTT firebombing, the federation has had a full-time community
security director, Michel Bujold, formerly in charge of security at
Concordia University. He was on the Toldos crime scene about three
hours later.
After UTT, Combined Jewish Appeal raised $2.3 million specifically
for security, and all 40 school and day-care sites were assessed by
a U.S security professional. Toldos was found to be at risk and CJA
heavily subsidized the installation of a surveillance camera. The
school, located a former industrial area that is now mainly home to
condominiums, has been defaced with swastikas in the past. Its girls’
school is down the street, as is a Belzer chassidic school.
CJC Quebec region chair Jeffrey Boro said it will be determined if
additional security at the schools is needed. Rabbi Poupko said the
incident proved that the security structure in place worked well and
the community’s investment paid off.
The psychological damage from the attack may last a while, Mayer
said. Some Toldos students, especially those between six and 12, are
showing signs of anxiety and counsellors have been hired to help them.
Toldos has about 250 boys from age three to 16, Mayer said. There
are about 200 Skver families in Montreal.
Originally from Ukraine, the community is headquartered near Spring
Valley, N. Y., where its Grand Rebbe, David Twersky, lives.
Boro, a criminal lawyer by profession, admitted that no matter how
many layers of security are in place, there’s no way to totally
prevent acts such as the firebombing.
“What we have to do is educate people. Civil discourse is the rule
of the day. We have to continue outreach programs and show people we
are not so different.”
The UTT firebombing was immediately called a hate crime by police
because of a note left at the school, but the perpetrator was not
charged with a hate crime.
Sleiman El-Merhebi, 20, was released from a federal prison in May
after serving two-thirds of a 40-month sentence.
A date for his mother’s trial is to be set Sept. 25.
Rouba El-Merhebi Fahd is charged with being an accessory after the
fact of her son’s crime.