Author: Chatinian Lara

ARMENIAN RESIDENT WOUNDED BY AZERI SNIPER – TV SAYS
Public Television, Armenia
Nov 4 2006
A 28-year-old resident of the village of Aygepar [northeastern
Armenia], Maksim Pogosyan, was wounded by an Azerbaijani sniper on
3 November.
The incident happened on the Aygepar-Movses road at 1350 [0950 gmt]
yesterday, the press secretary of the Armenian Defence Ministry,
Col Seyran Shakhsuvaryan, told “Aylur” news programme.
Pogosyan was taken to hospital of the town of Berd.

NAGORNO-KARABAKH TO HOLD REFERENDUM ON NEW CONSTITUTION
Agence France Presse — English
November 6, 2006 Monday 4:32 PM GMT
The disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh will hold a referendum next
month on its first ever constitution, the region’s ‘presidency’
said Monday.
The territory, whose self-declared independence is recognized by
no-one, has nonetheless organized three presidential elections and
four legislative votes since breaking away from Azerbaijan in 1991.
Now, the region’s largely Armenian population will cast their vote
December 10 on a proposed constitution already approved by Karabakh’s
national assembly.
The referendum coincides with the 15-year anniversary of the enclave’s
announced secession from Azerbaijan, which sparked a six-year war
between Baku and neighboring Armenia that caused tens of thousands
of casualties on both sides.
Despite a 1994 ceasefire, the status of the region — located 270
kilometers (170 miles) west of Baku — is unresolved, and the situation
remains tense.
Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers failed to make a
breakthrough during October talks in Paris. They are scheduled to
meet again in Brussels this month.

ARMENIA DOESN’T EVEN GET A SATISFACTORY MARK
A1+
[05:41 pm] 06 November, 2006
“Corruption traps millions in poverty,” said Transparency International
Chair Huguette Labelle during the launching of the 2006 Corruption
Perceptions Index (CPI) by Transparency International (TI). It
points to a strong correlation between corruption and poverty, with
a concentration of impoverished states at the bottom of the ranking.
The 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index is a composite index that draws
on multiple expert opinion surveys that poll perceptions of public
sector corruption in 163 countries around the world, the greatest
scope of any CPI to date. It scores countries on a scale from zero
to ten, with zero indicating high levels of perceived corruption and
ten indicating low levels of perceived corruption.
“Despite a decade of progress in establishing anti-corruption laws and
regulations, today’s results indicate that much remains to be done
before we see meaningful improvements in the lives of the world’s
poorest citizens”, Mr. Labelle said.
A strong correlation between corruption and poverty is evident in
the results of the CPI 2006. Countries with a significant worsening
in perceived levels of corruption include: Brazil, Cuba, Israel,
Jordan, Laos, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia and the
United States. Countries with a significant improvement in perceived
levels of corruption include: Algeria, Czech Republic, India, Japan,
Latvia, Lebanon, Mauritius, Paraguay, Slovenia, Turkey, Turkmenistan
and Uruguay.
The weak performance of many countries indicates that the facilitators
of corruption continue to assist political elites to launder, store and
otherwise profit from unjustly acquired wealth, which often includes
looted state assets.
According to the report, the CPI of Armenia is 2.9 which has remained
unchanged in comparison with that of last year. If the CPI is less than
“3”, is means that corruption is wide-spread in the country.

United Armenian Fund donates $4.5 million to all 28 Armenian schools in
Lebanon
ArmRadio.am
04.11.2006 15:40
The United Armenian Fund, through a generous grant from the Lincy
Foundation, is donating a total of $4.5 million to all 28 Armenian
schools throughout Lebanon.
This contribution is prompted by the economic crisis of the
past few years, which was aggravated by the devastating attack on
Lebanon last summer. Thousands of needy Armenian families could no
longer afford the tuition for the Armenian schools their children
attended. Consequently, most of these schools were in no position to
pay the salaries of their teachers and staff.
The UAF funds contributed to these schools are designated for three
specific purposes: $3.2 million to pay full or partial tuition for
5,092 needy Armenian students, which constitutes close to 75% of the
7,029 students enrolled in all 28 schools during the 2006-07 academic
year; $757,000 to cover the salaries owed by most of the schools to
536 teachers and staff for the past academic year; a total of $513,000
for the general operating expenses of these schools.
Harut Sassounian, the President of the United Armenian Fund, is
currently in Lebanon to visit all 28 Armenian schools, meet with their
principals and educational councils, and deliver the earmarked sums
to each school.
“The UAF’s contribution will be allocated to all Armenian schools in
Lebanon, without exception,” Sassounian said.

Armenian National Committee of Canada
130 Albert St., Suite 1007
Ottawa, ON
KIP 5G4
Tel. (613) 235-2622 Fax (613) 238-2622
E-mail:[email protected]
Fo r Immediate Release
November 1, 2006
Contact: Kevork Mangeulian
Tel. (613) 235-2622
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Ministry Withdraws its Sponsorship of
Turkish Conference
Ottawa-The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT)
has withdrawn its sponsorship of “Turkey in the World: Implications
for Canada” one-day conference organized by the Turkish Canadian
Advocacy Group and sponsored by DFAIT and the Turkish Embassy. The
conference will take place on November 3 in Ottawa.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the conference is a “special
lecture” titled “History as a Present Day Problem: the Ottoman Armenian
Question” to be delivered by Prof. Guenter Lewy, a well-known Armenian
Genocide denier engaged in Turkish propaganda rather than in scholarly
research.
Prof. Lewy’s participation in a DFAIT sponsored conference is in
conflict with the policies of the Canadian government and public
pronouncements of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign
Affairs.
Moreover, the conference included discussions on Middle Eastern,
Mediterranean and Caucuses issues without representation from those
regions.
Rather than make the conference an open and pluralistic forum conducted
by academic, diplomatic and expert participation, organizers had
hand-picked panelists who are guaranteed to deliver the message the
organizers wanted to hear.
The withdrawal of DFAIT from the conference followed an October
23 letter by the Armenian National Committee of Canada (ANCC) to
Minister MacKay and a presentation to DFAIT of the concerns of the
Canadian-Armenian community.
The ANCC considers such a sponsorship morally and ethically
unacceptable and at odds with Canadian values and what Canada stands
for. “The conference and Prof. Lewy’s “headline” participation is
an insult to the Canadian government, to the House of Commons and to
Senate Members, to Quebec, Ontario and to British Columbia–the three
provinces which recognize the Armenian Genocide as a historic fact,”
said Aris Babikian, executive director of ANCC.
“The ANCC would like to take this opportunity to thank DFAIT and other
political authorities for their understanding and valuable input in
upholding the government’s principled stand on such important human
rights issues as the Armenian Genocide,” said Babikian.
#
The ANCC is the largest and the most influential Canadian-Armenian
grassroots political organization. Working in coordination with a
network of offices, chapters, and supporters throughout Canada and
affiliated organizations around the world, the ANCC actively advances
the concerns of the Canadian-Armenian community on a broad range
of issues.
Regional Chapters
Montreal – Laval – Ottawa – Toronto – Hamilton – Cambridge – St.
Catharines – Windsor – Vancouver

DIVERSITY MANIA
By Walter E Williams
WorldNetDaily, OR
Nov 1 2006
There are some ideas so ludicrous and mischievous that only an
academic would take them seriously. One of them is diversity. Think
about it. Are you for or against diversity? When’s the last time
you said to yourself, “I’d better have a little more diversity in my
life”? What would you think if you heard a Microsoft director tell
his fellow board members that the company should have more diversity
and manufacture kitchenware, children’s clothing and shoes? You’d
probably think the director was smoking something illegal.
Our institutions of higher learning take diversity seriously and
make it a multimillion-dollar operation. The Juilliard School has
a director of diversity and inclusion; Massachusetts Institute of
Technology has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University,
an associate dean for diversity; the universities of Harvard, Texas
A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of
officers, deans, vice-presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity.
(Column continues below)
George Leef, director of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education
Policy in Raleigh, N.C., writes about this in an article titled “Some
Questions about Diversity” in the Oct. 5 issue of Clarion Call. Mr.
Leef suggests that only in academia is diversity pursued for its
own sake, but there’s a problem: Everyone, even if they are the
same ethnicity, nationality or religion, is different. Suppose two
people are from the same town in Italy. They might differ in many
important respects: views on morality, religious and political beliefs,
recreation preferences and other characteristics.
Mr. Leef says that some academics see diversity as a requirement
for social justice – to right historical wrongs. The problem here is
that if you go back far enough, all groups have suffered some kind
of historical wrong. The Irish can point to injustices at the hands
of the British, Jews at the hands of Nazis, Chinese at the hands of
Indonesians, and Armenians at the hands of the Turks.
Of course, black Americans were enslaved, but slavery is a condition
that has been with mankind throughout most of history. In fact,
long before blacks were enslaved, Europeans were enslaved. The word
slavery comes from Slavs, referring to the Slavic people, who were
early slaves. White Americans, captured by the Barbary pirates, were
enslaved at one time or another. Whites were indentured servants
in colonial America. So what should the diversity managers do about
these injustices?
When academics call for diversity, they’re really talking about racial
preferences for particular groups of people, mainly blacks.
The last thing they’re talking about is intellectual diversity.
According to a recent national survey, reported by the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni in “Intellectual Diversity,” 72 percent
of college professors describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent
conservative. Liberal professors think their classrooms should be used
to promote a political agenda. The University of California recently
abandoned a provision on academic freedom that cautioned against using
the classroom for propaganda. The president said the regulation was
“outdated.”
Americans, as taxpayers and benefactors, have been exceedingly
generous to our institutions of higher learning. That generosity has
been betrayed. Rich Americans, who acquired their wealth through our
capitalist system, give billions to universities. Unbeknownst to them,
much of that money often goes to faculty members and programs that
are openly hostile to donor values. Universities have also failed
in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having
dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just
barely literate and computationally incompetent.
What’s part of Williams’ solution? Benefactors should stop giving
money to universities that engage in racist diversity policy. Simply
go to the university’s website, and if you find offices of diversity,
close your pocketbook. There’s nothing like the sound of pocketbooks
snapping shut to open the closed minds of administrators.
icle.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52707

MEETING OF AZERBAIJANI AND GEORGIAN FOREIGN MINISTERS HELD IN BAKU
Regnum, Russia
Nov 1 2006
On October 31, Georgian Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuashvili arrived
in Baku on short-term visit. He met with his Azerbaijani colleague
Elmar Mamedyarov and planned to go to Moscow on the same day; a REGNUM
correspondent informs.
After the meeting was over, Minister Elmar Mamedyarov stressed at
briefing that the parties had discussed interstate bilateral ties.
According to him, regional projects in economic sphere were considered
at the meeting. Elmar Mamedyarov and Gela Bezhuashvili agreed to
hold joint sitting of state commission on border delimitation and
demarcation next month in Baku.
Responding to question of journalists, Gela Bezhuashvili stressed
that issue of gas transportation to Georgia via Azerbaijani
territory was not discussed at the meeting. “However, the issue was
discussed at power engineering ministries’ level. Georgia is going
to transport Iranian gas via Azerbaijani territory.” Speaking about
role of Azerbaijan in Russian-Georgian relations’ normalization,
Bezhuashvili stated that they do not need intermediary services of
other countries. “We will lead these relations up to necessary level
ourselves. Azerbaijan is natural mediator in the process.
Responding to journalists’ questions at the briefing, Elmar
Mamedyarov expressed his attitude to Nagorno Karabakh settlement on
the basis of Kosovo’s model. “Every conflict has its own history and
peculiarities. It is impossible to settle conflicts on the basis of
the same formula.”

A PLOT OF ONE’S OWN
By Vasily Uzun
Russia Profile, Russia
Oct 31 2006
Land Reform Shows that Small Farms Can Produce Big Results
The transition from a socialist-style planned economy to a market
economy in Russia involved radical changes in land relations. In
the Soviet era, all land was exclusively the property of the state,
given for free to those who used it in perpetuity. Changes in the
way communal farms used land were permitted only with the approval
of federal and regional authorities.
The 1990s land reforms sought to improve resource use efficiency
through privatization of collective-farm land and liberalizing
the market for land plots. These privatization mechanisms, and
the subsequent trading of land, did have a positive effect on the
efficiency of agricultural land usage.
In the post-Soviet space, the privatization of collective farm land
was done in a variety of ways, depending on the region. In the Baltic
States, the land was returned to its former owners; in Armenia,
the land was allotted to families living in the villages at the time
of the reforms. In Russia, farm land was allocated to farm members
in standard parcels. If farm laborers then chose to leave the farm,
they would receive the same amount of land elsewhere in Russia.
One of the reasons restitution was technically impossible to carry
out in Russia in the early 1990s was because citizens did not have
documents confirming property rights. The idea of giving each family
a land plot was also considered, but was rejected on the grounds that
most communal farmers were unprepared to work on their own.
As a result of the reforms, some 120 million hectares, or 60 percent
of farm holdings, were divided into shares, and 12 million people
became landowners. Owners of land shares had the right to use
their segments to create or expand a farm business or to use them
as private gardens. Shares could also be sold, rented, given away,
used as capital, or passed on to descendants.
Before the reforms, virtually all Russian farmland, some 221 million
hectares, was used by communal farms. Only about 4 million hectares
functioned as private gardens. Following the introduction of reforms,
5 percent of communal farmers, as well as some city dwellers,
pooled land plots, obtained land from the state redistribution fund
or rented land parcels from shareholders in a drive to create their
own agri-businesses. By the start of 2006, this group of people held
19.5 million hectares of farmland.
There were huge variations in the ways in which land reform was
carried out in different parts of the country: many regions were able
to put off introducing private property for as much as 49 years,
according to a 2002 law on land trading; most villagers rented out
their land shares to nascent agribusinesses joint-stock companies
or cooperatives created from reformed communal farms; agriculture is
generally loss-making in northern zones, where not all agricultural
organizations have rental contracts with land-share owners, and
roughly a quarter of all land parceled out is used by agricultural
organizations without a signed agreement.
The method of land privatization adopted in Russia made it possible
for people who live in rural areas to assume land ownership rights
on a voluntary basis while allowing major farms to continue working
by renting land shares. This setup avoided strip farming as well as
the division of all of Russia into 5-by-10-hectare chunks.
But Russia’s agricultural land privatization system had some obvious
drawbacks. For example, land shares are not accurately demarcated:
holders know roughly where their fields are but not the precise
location; agribusiness managers are able to use shared land without
signing agreements with the owners and, to this day, 15 years after
the reforms began, land share owners still do not clearly understand
their rights and responsibilities.
The authorities in many post-Soviet countries including Ukraine,
Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan have already divided
up their land into plots. But these countries now face the problem
of consolidating the divided parcels into optimal-sized units. This
process is also slowly getting underway in Russia, but lacks the
necessary political or legal infrastructure.
In recent years, Russia has seen relatively active trade in
agricultural land. It is being bought up, rented out long-term or
added to the charter capital of agribusinesses. As of Jan. 1, 2005,
legal entities in the Moscow Region mainly agribusinesses and other
investors held more than 300,000 hectares of land, or roughly 25
percent of farm holdings in the region. Agribusinesses have also taken
control of most of the agricultural land in the regions around Moscow,
including Belgorod and Oryol regions.
Land can be transferred from a share owner to an agribusiness or
other investor based on buy-sell agreements (as is the practice
of Inteko holding in Belgorod Region) by absorbing the shares into
charter capital (a procedure applied by Stoilenskaya Niva, also of
Belgorod), or by oligarchs buying up the land and property of bankrupt
agricultural firms. Agribusinesses have been created in Oryol and
Rostov using long-term agreements for land shares, as well as in
Stavropol and Krasnodar territories.
But investors in all regions are pumping money into agriculture and
creating larger business structures. In cases where sizeable farms
broke apart due to their inability to deal with competition from
domestic and foreign producers, rural residents left without jobs
were obliged to take care of their own gardens. Eventually land
share owners on such farms expanded their plots, a process that
has intensified over the last few years. In early 2006, roughly 10
million hectares of shared land had been added to market gardens,
and people were farming it themselves.
It was widely supposed that once land reforms took hold, large
Western-style organizations would replace collective farms. Although
such farms have appeared, they make up just 6 percent of gross
production. However large agribusinesses have developed rapidly,
and range from 10 to a 100 times the area of former collective farms.
On the other hand, most production over 50 percent is concentrated
in private market gardens, most of which comprise less than half a
hectare of land with one or two cows.
Although most Russians think farming has neither taken off in Russia
nor has a future, the dynamics of land redistribution suggest that
less and less land is being used by major agricultural organizations,
while the share of family farms in cultivated land is increasing. In
1990, these farms accounted for less than 2 percent of agricultural
holdings, but by 1995 this figure was 18 percent and by 2006, it had
risen to 28 percent.
In the socialist economy, the state set targets for agricultural
holdings and new area cultivation regardless of the suitability of
the plot. For example, land that eroded barely produced any crops,
yet was included in targets.
With the transition to a market economy, agricultural producers
stopped using 22 million hectares of available terrain. Between 1990
and 2006, the area used by agricultural businesses dropped by 72
million hectares, or 34 percent, while the proportion used by private
cultivators and farmers increased from 4 to 54 million hectares
(more than 13 times).
Much has been written about the drop in land use by agricultural
organizations, but few studies have analyzed which lands were abandoned
and in which regions. Published in 2003, Tatyana Nefyodova’s book,
Fragmentation of Rural Russia, showed that such areas were located
mostly in the “non-Black Earth periphery,” in other words, outside
Russia’s most fertile agricultural region.
One study examined Russia’s administrative districts by looking
at percentage change in land planted by agricultural organizations
between 1995 and 2003. Regions with a low bio-climactic potential
suffered reduced plowed and crop areas and low grain yield.
Similarly, the higher the yield and bio-climatic potential, the
smaller the reduction in cultivated land. It also became obvious that
agricultural organizations reduced the amount of land in use in an
attempt to produce higher return from their inputs.
The usage efficiency of agricultural holdings fell until 1998, but has
risen in recent years. However, this process has taken different forms
depending on the size of the producer. Agribusinesses have continued
to reduce the size of their plots while simultaneously boosting gross
production, leading to an increase in return of 35 percent in 2003
compared to 1998.
Despite different tendencies in return rates, family farms are using
land much more efficiently than agribusinesses. Each hectare used
by small landholders produces 4.5 times more gross product and 10
times more added value. Of course, such a difference in efficiency is
only partially explained by better land quality or by more intensive
cultivation and greater cattle density per area.
Besides these factors, another considerable influence is that people
make unlicensed use of land officially registered to agribusinesses, as
well as a significant amount of feedstock produced by agribusinesses
given to rural residents as part of the rental costs for their
land shares.

“MUASIR MUSAVAT” PARTY LAID BLACK WREATH IN FRONT OF FRENCH EMBASSY
Author: J.Shahverdiyev
TREND, Azerbaijan
Oct 31 2006
On October 31 at 15:00, “Muasir Musavat” Party laid a black wreath
in front of the French Embassy in Azerbaijan after holding a picket,
Trend reports.
The police did not allow the participants of the picket to approach
the Embassy. The picket was held to protest the French Parliament’s
adopting the law penalizing the denial of so-called “Armenian
genocide”. The resolution of the picket was presented to the Embassy,
and a black wreath was laid in front of the embassy.
Oppositional “Muasir Musavat” Party was created in 2002. The picket
finished without any incidents.

YEREVAN-BAKU DIALOGUE NOT EXHAUSTED
PanARMENIAN.Net
30.10.2006 16:41 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ “Any meetings and talks – are already boon even
if they bring no result. Much worse if the sides have no wish and
possibility to meet and hold talks, let us take Georgia and Russian,
for example,” Chief of the Department of CIS Countries of the Russian
Institute of Strategic Research, Candidate of Historical Sciences
Alexander Skakov said in an interview with PanARMENIAN.Net. In
his opinion the potential of the Armenian-Azeri dialogue has been
exhausted. “Meetings at the presidential and ministerial level are a
positive phenomenon but expecting the leaders to make halfway would be
impracticable now. In my opinion, the problem of the Armenian-Azeri
relations is the ill will of the peoples heated up by the history
and patterns of the politicians. At the same time we are neighbors
and will remain such,” he said.
“The task of the peaceful process is to establish dialogue between
the publics. In this case the terms of the Karabakh settlement, let it
be 3 or 30 years, becomes not so important. The security zone and the
actual front line can be maintained until they become unnecessary. May
be it seems fantastic but I do not see any other way of settlement
at present. I do not think that the leaders of the two states should
dedicate their meetings to the search of a universal compromise. They
have better improve the atmosphere of the Armenian-Azeri relations. For
example, establishment of transport communication should precede the
conflict settlement,” the Russian analyst said.