Author: Chakhmakhchian Vatche

SILTING OF LAKE SEVAN FRAUGHT WITH DISAPPEARANCE OF FRESHWATER
MOLLUSKS
YEREVAN, JUNE 9. ARMINFO. Silting of Lake Sevan fraught with the
disappearance of some species of freshwater bivalves (Euglesa), Head
of Hydrobiology Department of the Institute of Hydroecology and
Ichthyology of Armenia’s National Academy of Sciences Evelina
Ghoukassyan says in an interview to ARMINFO.
She says that the recent investigations of the lake bottom shown that
the bivalves’ population deeply shortened. 8 species of bivalves have
been seen in the lake before, most of them are freshwater. However,
the species adapted to live in muddy water have been seen in small
quantities nowadays.
Changes of the lake’s structure follow to both the degradation of the
whole ecosystem and the modification of various processes taken place
in lake’s area (including biological dissociation, deposition of
sediment and diffusion), Ghoukassyan notes. In her words, various
species of lake’s habitants are on the verge of
disappearance. Ghoukassyan also informed that the Institute workers
will start the large-scale investigations of lake’s bottom with the
“Hydrologist” scientific-and-research vessel given by the Russian
Academy of Sciences. To note, the level of mirror of Lake Sevan has
been risen by 1 meter within the last two years.

Pan Armenian News
GUAM INTENDS TO ENGAGE IN REGIONAL CONFLICT SETTLEMENT
07.06.2005 03:19
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The organization of GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and
Moldova) has set a goal of settlement of regional conflicts, state
Azerbaijani Milli Mejlis Speaker Murtuz Aleskerov at a briefing June 6. In
his words, the decision over it was passed by the GUAM Parliamentary
Assembly session held in Yalta, Ukraine May 27-29. «There are conflicts in
GUAM member countries. Azerbaijan has Nagorno Karabakh, Georgia – Abkhazia,
Moldova – Transdniestria. The organization has set a goal of setting these
conflicts. The attention towards the GUAM is large. A number of countries
work for joining the organization. We suppose that by accepting new members
the organization activities will strengthen. Besides, the settlement of
conflicts in the region will become more successful,» the Milli Mejlis
Speaker underscored.

Azerbaijan News Service
June 6 2005
FOLLOWING ROUND OF QARABAQ TALKS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PARIS
2005-06-06 14:45
The following round of negotiations over Daqliq Qarabaq conflict will
take place in Paris June 17. President’s special representative on
Daqliq Qarabaq conflict Araz Azimov informs of foreign minister Elmar
Mammadyarov’s planned meeting with OSCE Minsk group co-chairs. This
meeting will be somehow the follow up of the meeting Prague. That’s
why the agenda of this meeting will be that of the Prague meeting. If
you remember I have informed that all the issues are being discussed
at Prague meeting. These are the issues concerning conflict. There is
no restriction on the agenda or discussion of any issue. At the same
time it is evident that certain issues of the agenda are more
important. We shall have meeting with Vardan Oscanian and separate
meeting. Elmar Mammadyarov’s meeting with his Armenian counterpart
may be organized separately too. We don’t put any restrictions on the
format

–Boundary_(ID_/bX+yctlErdmIzI9cdswCg)
Content-typ e: message/rfc822
From: “Katia M. Peltekian”
Subject: The Great Game gone
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT
New Yorker, NY
June 6 2005
THE GREAT GAME GONE
by JOHN UPDIKE
The post-Cold War spy novel.
Issue of 2005-06-13 and 20
Posted 2005-06-06
The spy thriller still pines for the Soviet Union. No post-Iron
Curtain intrigue, no replay of the British Empire’s Great Game in
Afghanistan or its intrusions into the Middle East, no elaborate
`security measures,’ no double-double cross in the murk of
C.I.A.-F.B.I. rivalry can match, for heart-stoppingly high
geopolitical stakes, the good old days when, in terms of John le
Carré’s fiction, M.I.6’s Smiley matched wits with the K.G.B.’s Karla
on the global chessboard. There was an intelligibility if not a
friendly intimacy in the old contest, one between two large,
idealistic, rough-mannered nations seeking to maintain their spheres
of influence short of tripping nuclear war. As one hardened
undercover functionary cozily tells another in Robert Littell’s new
book, `Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation’ (Overlook; $25.95), `We all
came of age in the cold war. We all fought the good fight. I’m sure
we can work something out.’ The so-called war on terror has no such
surety; `working out’ is just what the other side, or sides, doesn’t
want. Littell conscientiously covers the new ground – the post-Soviet
Russia of the oligarchs; the potential for financial shenanigans
opened up by worldwide computerization; the stagnant antipathy
between Israel and its neighbors; Bosnia; Chechnya; and (news to me)
an international smugglers’ cove where the borders of Paraguay,
Brazil, and Argentina meet and whores dance sleepily in one another’s
arms – but he remains most excited by, and most at home with, occupants
of the old U.S.S.R. as they strike up fresh relations with capitalism
and the C.I.A.
Littell, a former Newsweek reporter now resident in France, began his
career as a fictional spymaster with `The Defection of A. J.
Lewinter: A Novel of Duplicity’ (1973), a deft and lighthearted
performance on the edge of parody, and capped it, a dozen books
later, with the best-selling magnum opus `The Company: A Novel of the
C.I.A.’ (2002), a nostalgic recapitulation, in nearly nine hundred
pages, of the Cold War intelligence marathon from 1950 to 1995.
Littell is not the only author to scent an epic here; Norman Mailer’s
giant, possibly ongoing saga `Harlot’s Ghost’ deals also with this
secretive struggle and evokes the striking historical figure of
gaunt, erudite James Jesus Angleton, for some twenty years the head
of C.I.A. counterintelligence. `Legends,’ though falling short of
Tolstoyan, or Maileresque, amplitude, does not scant, expertly
roaming the continents and offering a psychological puzzle to go with
all the deception and violence.
Martin Odum, to give the novel’s confusing hero his most often used
name, is an ex-C.I.A. operative who has, he feels, lost his real
identity in the shuffle of `legends’ – false identities, with carefully
worked-out histories and trade skills, assumed for particular
episodes of espionage. Odum has paid a personal price for doing his
devious patriotic duty: he suffers from migraine headaches; his
occasional lover finds her side of their relationship `like
sleepwalking through a string of one-night stands that were
physically satisfying but emotionally frustrating’; he plans to spend
the rest of his life, he confesses to her, `boring himself to death.’
The C.I.A. retired him after his psychoanalysis at the taxpayers’
expense was abruptly terminated. His diagnosis was MPD,
multiplepersonality disorder. Along with his well-remembered roles of
Dante Pippen, an I.R.A. dynamiter training Hezbollah jihadists in
Lebanon, and Lincoln Dittman, a Civil War buff doubling as an arms
dealer in Brazil, there are hints of a legend, an alter ego, beyond
his memory’s reach. These impersonations having served their
dangerous purpose, and Odum having outlived his usefulness to the
C.I.A., he makes ends meet as a private detective in the Crown
Heights section of Brooklyn, using two pool tables as his office
furniture. Well, one day in walks this dame called Stella, wearing a
long raincoat and `a ghost of a smile’ on her lips . . .
It’s a long story, and Littell should be allowed to tell it, twist
after twist after twist. This reviewer put up some initial resistance
against the plot’s ruthless manipulations of chronological sequence,
the arch chapter titles (`1997: Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner Discovers
the Weight of a Cigarette’), the excessively vivid verbs (`The
jetliner elbowed through the towering clouds’; `He heard Stella’s
voice breasting the static’), the occasional fusillade of clichés
(`He must have been off his rocker to think he could trace a husband
who had jumped ship. Finding a needle in a haystack would be child’s
play by comparison’), the clammy, overcooked atmospherics (`eyes
burning with excitement’; `the muscles on her face contorting with
heartache’), and the heavy-breathing ruminations about identity, that
critical modern problem. Almost all the characters, including stray
taxi-drivers and hookers (maybe especially hookers, adept at
dissimulation and undercover work), are pretending to be somebody
else, under another name. In a `nightmarish world,’ we are left to
conclude, `people who are broken have several selves.’ Why does this
theme feel tired? Is it just the Jason Bourne movies, starring Matt
Damon?
But, as I rounded page 300 and headed into the book’s last quarter,
the pieces of the puzzle began to click together and I felt myself
sinking into an earlier assumed identity: I became a
fourteen-year-old boy lying on a red cane-back sofa in Pennsylvania
eating peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwiches (a site-specific ethnic
treat) and reading one mystery novel after another. Not just
mysteries – Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ngaio
Marsh, Erle Stanley Gardner – but an occasional international thriller,
like Eric Ambler’s `A Coffin for Dimitrios’ and Graham Greene’s `The
Third Man.’ The idea of reading a non-genre novel, with its stodgy
domestic realism and sissy fuss over female heartbreak, repelled me,
but I could lose myself all morning and afternoon in narratives of
skulduggery, detection, and eventual triumphant justice. And so, to
judge from the best-seller lists, can millions still. Thrillers, as
we shall call them, offer the reader a firm contract: there will be
violent events, we will go places our parents didn’t take us, the
protagonist will conquer and survive, and social order will, however
temporarily, be restored. The reader’s essential safety, as he
reclines on his red sofa, will not be breached. The world around him
and the world he reads about remain distinct; the partition between
them is not undermined by any connection to depths within himself. At
this same age, I remember, I looked into Joyce’s `Ulysses’ and
Orwell’s `1984′ and was badly shaken by the unmistakable impression
that these suffocating, inescapable worlds were the same one I lived
in.
To complain of thrillers, or romances, that they are less than real
is to invite several counter-charges. It could be said that a book
like `Legends’ consummately achieves a novel’s basic purpose,
implicit in its name, of bearing news. Littell, a former reporter, is
generous in the amount of data he provides about not just guns,
explosives, and the procedures of terrorism (how to plant a bomb in a
dead dog), the battle of Fredericksburg, the Civil War nursing career
of Walt (known to his soldier friends as Walter) Whitman, chess,
Lithuanian history, Russian as spoken with a Polish accent, and so
on; he persuasively conjures up a desolate ruined island in the sadly
depleted Aral Sea, top-secret conference rooms in Washington and Tel
Aviv, and a medically vivid simulacrum of Osama bin Laden. Facts,
fascinating facts, are the bones of his fable, and who doubts that
the C.I.A. really exists and that describing how nations and
corporate entities relate to one another brings more important news
than describing the relations of mere individuals? On the other hand,
it could be argued that all fiction is escapist: by its means we
escape our own heads and lives and enter into other heads and lives.
Whether the head belongs to a Hobbit in Tolkien or to one of Virginia
Woolf’s sensitive, externally unadventurous women does not change the
nature of the escape: what gives relief and pleasure in fiction is
its otherness. It can hardly help being other, no two sets of
experience being identical: an American finds in English fiction a
different slant and social atmosphere, and a realistic Victorian
novel like `Middlemarch’ develops, as electricity and automobiles
overtake reality, a refreshing strangeness.
The slippery difference between a thriller and a non-thriller would
hardly be worth groping for did not the thriller-writers themselves
seem to be restive – chafing to escape, yearning for a less restrictive
contract with the reader. They write longer than they used to, with
more flourishes. Nothing in Agatha Christie’s brilliantly compact,
stylized, and efficient mysteries suggests that larger ambitions
would have served her; the genre in its lean classic English form fit
her like a cat burglar’s thin black glove. But Littell and le Carré
and the estimable P. D. James give signs of wanting to be `real’
novelists, free to follow character where it takes them and to
display their knowledge of the world without the obligation to
provide a thrill in every chapter. The hero of `Legends’ at times
shows sympathetic depths but in the end turns into a killing machine
as remorseless as the novel’s savage opening vignette. The heroine
never comes clearer than that ghost of a smile and the three shirt
buttons she tends to leave undone. The villainess, Bondishly named
Crystal Quest, chews ice, literally – cold-blooded, eh? The amorous
dialogue, the little there is of it, feels painfully awkward, if not
at bottom hostile, and the rest creaks like an oxcart under its
burden of conveying data. A random sample:
`In the early nineteen-eighties,’ Kastner explained, `Ugor-Zhilov was
a small-time hoodlum in a small pond – he ran a used-car dealership in
Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He had a KGB record: He’d been
arrested in the early seventies for bribery and black market
activities and sent to a gulag in the Kolyma Mountains for eight
years’ [and so on, for sixteen more lines of type].
`You seem to know an awful lot about Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov,’ Martin
observed.
`I was the conducting officer in charge of the investigation into the
Oligarkh’s affairs.’
Martin saw where the story was going. `I’ll take a wild guess – he paid
off the Sixth Directorate.’
`Legends’ patiently details the labor of espionage; in turn, the
reading of it can be laborious. Various checkpoints of the intricate
plot are repeated almost in toto, lest the reader carefreely lose
track and, like a scholar in springtime, gaze out the window at the
birds and trees of the non-espionage world. Espionage, this novel
implies, borders on the tragic, hollowing out a man so that he no
longer feels real to himself. The games the C.I.A. would play with
the world take on, in the plot’s developments, a megalomaniacal
hubris. Littell, and history with him, has come a long way since
1973, when `The Defection of A. J. Lewinter’ marked his début. That
novel is airy and comic, speedy and understated; it shares many grim
ingredients with `Legends,’ including a C.I.A. whose presumptuous
meddling destroys lives, but it has a warmth in its portraits of
Russia and individual Russians that extends to the American heroine
and her romantic involvement in the machinations of the state. The
passage of time, too, as with `Middlemarch,’ has added a nostalgic
patina. More than thirty years later, the mirvs and missile defense
at the heart of the intrigues around Lewinter have faded from the
foreground of our anxieties. The Cold War, surprisingly, had an end,
and the U.S.-U.S.S.R. rivalry did not produce a nuclear holocaust.
Now we fear not missiles sent forth by a government playing at
brinkmanship but loosely sponsored suicide missions that turn
passenger jets into missiles. An opaque seethe of religious animus
and insatiable grievance has replaced the hidden counsels of the
Kremlin, whose inhabitants, in softening retrospect, became over time
fellow-conspirators of a sort, enemies whose fears and aspirations
mirrored our own.

PACE INTERESTED IN PROGRESS IN CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM IN ARMENIA
YEREVAN, JUNE 4. ARMINFO. An expert of CE Venice Commission Gianni
Buquicchio expressed doubts regarding inclusion of the issue of
Constitutional reforms in the agenda of summer session of PACE June
20-24. Talking to ARMINFO, he stated that PACE is interested in a
progress in the constitutional reform in the country. We have agreed
that another round of discussions on the draft constitutional reform
will be held on June 24 after PACE summer session in Strasbourg and
before the second reading of the draft. If our proposals are adopted,
the referendum will be held in October, Buquicchio says. It should
be noted that Venice Commission Plenary session is fixed for 10-11
June, Venice (Italy) – On the agenda: freedom of _expression and media
pluralism in Italy; constitutional reform in Armenia, electoral reform
in Armenia and Azerbaijan, the decertification of police officers
in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Law on the Prosecutor’s Office of
the Russian Federation and the amendments to the Constitution of
Ukraine adopted during the “Orange revolution”. A briefing for the
press will be held during the session at the Scuola Grande di San
Giovanni Evangelista (Venice).

Soccer falls victim to tension in Turkish-Armenian relations
RIA Novosti, Russia
June 4 2005
BELGRADE, June 4 (RIA Novosti, Nikolai Paskhin) – Turkish authorities
refused to grant an air corridor on Thursday night for a plane
carrying Macedonian national soccer team to Yerevan for a 2006 World
Cup qualifying match against Armenia scheduled for June 4.
The plane spent about an hour and a half in Turkish air space but
when it had less than a hundred kilometers left to reach the Armenian
border, the aircraft was suddenly ordered to return to Macedonia’s
capital Skopje.
Utrenski Vestnik, a Macedonian daily, wrote on Friday that, to justify
its actions, Ankara claimed that “the aircraft crew did not have the
documents required for flying over Turkey”.
Other Macedonian media assumed that the real cause of the incident
lied in strained Turkish-Armenian relations (Yerevan demands that
Ankara apologize for the large-scale massacre, branded by Yerevan
as genocide against the Armenian population of eastern territories
of the Ottoman Turkey in 1915-1917, when up to 1.5 million Armenians
were exterminated).
Currently, the Macedonian Soccer Federation is looking for alternative
routes (bypassing Turkey) to send its national team to Armenia.

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:
THE SECOND SEMESTER OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES IS COMPLETED
Antelias, Lebanon – The last session of religious studies was held
in the Catholicosate of Cilicia on June 2, under the patronage and
direction of Aram I.
Rev.Fr. Vaghinag Meloian, the director of the courses, praised the
Lord for the successful ending of the two semesters of religious
studies. He also thanked His Holiness Aram I and members of the
Cilician Brotherhood, who delivered lectures on the topics assigned
to them during the two semesters.
The Reverend Father also talked about the importance of the courses
and highlighted their theological and ethnographical aspects. He
affirmed that the courses not only deepened the knowledge of students,
but also prepared them to convey that knowledge to others.
His Holiness blessed and praised the attendants of the session. He
thanked God that the last two semesters have successfully come to an
end. “God made this happen,” His Holiness said.
Aram I also spoke about the aim of the courses: to bring Armenian’s
close to their church’s rites and theology based on the Holy Gospel
and the history of the Armenian Church.
His Holiness also praised the director of the course, its lecturers,
and the students, who attended to the courses with serious and
hard work.
The religious studies courses started last year on the initiative
of the Catholicosate’s Christian Education Department. The director
of the courses is Rev.Fr. Vaghinag Meloian. Its aim is to acquaint
people with the Holy Gospel and the rites of the Armenian Church,
its history and its theology.
##
The Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia is one of the two Catholicosates
of the Armenian Orthodox Church. For detailed information about
the jurisdiction and the Christian Education activities in both the
Catholicosate and the dioceses, you may refer to the web page of the
Catholicosate, The Cilician Catholicosate, the
administrative center of the church is located in Antelias, Lebanon.

Harold Doan and Associates (press release), CA
June 3 2005
Van Ardenne and Zalm to visit Georgia and Armenia
Press Release – Ministry of Foreign Affairs
>>From 10 to 12 June, Minister for Development Cooperation Agnes van
Ardenne and Minister of Finance Gerrit Zalm will visit Georgia and
Armenia, two of the Netherlands’ development partners. They will be
meeting representatives of government, NGOs, financial institutions
and UN organisations. In Armenia, Zalm and Van Ardenne will sign
agreements facilitating Dutch investment there. The trip will end
with informal talks between the members of the Netherlands’
constituency at the World Bank and IMF.
In 2005, Georgia and Armenia will receive ~@4 and [email protected] million
respectively in general budget support from the Netherlands. These
funds will be spent on the priorities discussed in a strategic plan
drawn up by the governments of the countries themselves, civil
society and donor countries. These priorities include combating
corruption and promoting good governance (in the case of Georgia) and
improving tax collection and strengthening small and medium-sized
businesses (in the case of Armenia). The Dutch private sector can
also help through grant programmes like the Programme for Cooperation
with Emerging Markets (PSOM) and joint ventures with local firms. The
Dutch embassy in Armenia and Georgia is also funding a number of
projects relating to government financial management. One such
project aims to make government expenditure more transparent.
The Netherlands represents eleven countries at the World Bank and
IMF, including Georgia and Armenia. On their own, these countries
would be too small to have a seat on the Executive Board, and hence
they are grouped together in constituencies. As the largest
shareholder, the Netherlands heads the constituency and provides the
executive directors (World Bank: Ad Melkert, IMF: Jeroen Kremers).
Each year, the finance and development ministers of the countries in
the Netherlands’ constituency take part in informal talks. This year,
they will be held in Georgia.

THE FRENCH “PUT FIRE” INTO THE SUNDUKYAN THEATRE
A1plus
| 12:32:17 | 03-06-2005 | Social |
Yesterday at about 09:00 – 09:15 p.m. the Theater after Sundukyan
sent a fire alarm. 3 fire fighting cars arrived at the place of
incident. One of the workers of the theater told that there was a
terrible smoke inside the building. “We checked every room, there
was no fire, but we decided to call the fire brigade”, he said.
One of the fire fighters climbed up the 4th floor. Some 15 minutes
later he told his co-workers from the 4th floor window that the alarm
was false. What had happened? One of the workers of the French Embassy
had entered the building and informed that perhaps the smoke was from
the fire burnt near the Embassy building. And really it was that.

This all they do to hegemonize the oil resources, writes Rafeeq A.Naqash
GreaterKashmir.com (press release), India
June 1 2005
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the vast oil deposits
beneath the Caspian Sea have made the regions of Georgia and Azerbaijan
the focus of heated interest. The United States sees the region as an
alternative source of energy, Russia regards it as its own strategic
reserve, other countries – Iran, Turkey, even China – have a stake
in control of the oil, where it goes, and how. They call it “The
Great Game” – a reference to the rivalry between Imperial Russia and
the British Empire over influence in Central Asia at the end of the
19th century. This time the stakes are just as high – control over
the vast deposits of crude oil beneath the Caspian Sea but there are
more players.
The United States (and the West) is taking a keen interest in the
region as an alternative source of energy supply for the next century.
Russia has long regarded the Caspian as its strategic reserve and
Moscow does not take kindly to the prospect of the once-Soviet states
which actually sit on the oil drilling their way to real economic
independence.
Iran is keenly interested both in becoming a player itself and in
keeping the United States from dominating its back yard to the North.
Turkey desperately seeks a sphere of influence of its own after being
effectively locked out of the European Union.
Even China, the new giant Tiger to the East, has indicated interest.
At the center of it all is Caspian Sea, and Azerbaijan is booming. A
London-based think-tank recently estimated there are 68 billion
barrels of crude beneath the Caspian in ‘proven’ reserves. The latest
US. government estimate puts reserves at over 100 billion barrels,
worth approximately $2 trillion at current prices.
Whatever the true value of Caspian oil, the rumor of riches has
attracted an a large number of entrepreneurs including international
oil giants, as well as a host of subcontractors interested in getting
their own piece of the oily action. Azerbaijan is the centre of the
entire effort. The various oil companies have pledged to invest over
$25 billion in Azerbaijan by completion in 2004. There is no question
that Azerbaijan is going to be the wealthiest country in the region
in ten years owing to its oil reservoirs.
But paradox is that the Oil won’t really come on line until 2005 if
everything proceeds according to plan. Nor is it possible to know the
true cost of the pipeline. Because clouds of uncertainty are hovering
over the construction of pipeline. Even the routing of the “early oil,”
a line that goes through Russia — but it also goes through Chechnya,
which is still struggling with Moscow. Another possibility is to go
through Georgia to a new terminal on the Black Sea. The most of all
options goes straight South over Iran to the Persian Gulf.
That is not only the shortest route, but also the most secure –
petroleum is so cheap in Iran there is no temptation to drill into the
line, as is currently the practice in Chechnya (and was in Georgia).
The problem is that US companies could not participate without
violating the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA). And there are questions
about continued stability in Azerbaijan itself. Most worrisome is
the ongoing stalemate with Armenia to the west over the disputed
territory of Nagorno Karabakh, where ethnic Armenians have declared
their independence from Azerbaijan.
(The Author is Research Scholar Deptt. CCAS, University of Kashmir)