Author: Chatinian Lara

Armenian defence minister discusses military ties with German envoy
Public Television of Armenia, Yerevan
22 Sep 04
Armenian Defence Minister Serzh Sarkisyan received today the
newly-appointed Polish ambassador to Armenia, Tomasz Knothe. They
discussed the implementation of the agreements reached during
Sarkisyan’s recent visit to Warsaw.
Defence Minister Serzh Sarkisyan and the German ambassador to Armenia,
Heike-Renate Peitsch, discussed today the establishment of the legal
foundations for military cooperation between Armenia and Germany.
We regard ourselves as part of the European fold and view cooperation
with NATO as part of Armenia’s security, Serzh Sarkisyan announced.
The German ambassador also spoke about the possibility of training
Armenian officers at Hamburg’s military school. The ambassador
expressed the hope that beneficial cooperation between Armenia and
Germany will be possible not only in the military sphere but in other
spheres as well.
[Video showed both meetings]
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Marco Island Eagle, FL
Sept 22 2004
MICMS students compete in Olympic Day
By MARCI ELLIOTT, Staff Writer
September 22, 2004
It was a day for champions.
The academic kind.
Seventh-graders at Marco Island Charter Middle School left their
regular classes Sept. 15 to take part in Olympic Day, an annual event
organized by teachers to help students develop an affinity for
learning through fun.
The event’s awards were styled after the Olympic Games, with gold,
silver and bronze medals presented to the top three teams. In the
MICMS version, the “medals” were made of spray-painted compact discs
that dangled from yellow ribbons around the winners’ necks.
The seventh-grade class, mostly 12-year-olds, was divided into 26
teams of five students each, with each team naming itself after a
country. Team members got to design their own flags, and many sported
their country’s name on their arms and legs or face.
The students performed dances, held relays, worked problems on the
metric system and took part in other activities in the morning. At 11
a.m., they had lunch and munched on popcorn as they watched Miracle,
the 2004 movie about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team.
The best part of the day, students said, was when they gathered on
the pavilion that afternoon and the winning teams were announced by
science teacher Shane Totten.
The gold medal went to Armenia, silver to Greece and bronze to
Norway. The champions roared with glee as their classmates cheered
and applauded.
“We really worked hard,” said Tabitha “Taby” Crotts, a member of Team
Armenia.
“We couldn’t have won if we didn’t all help each other.”
Conor Watt said being on Team Armenia meant a lot to him.
“It’s good to represent your own (ancestral) country,” he said. “My
great-grandmother knew what it was like to live there. She fled with
her family when the Turks invaded.”
Some students said their favorite parts of Olympic Day were the
“cotton ball” relay with math teacher Debbie Waldinger and wearing
dress- up costumes with social studies teacher Lori Galiana.
Beata Logan of Team Norway said the event was a lot of fun,
especially the social studies activities.
“It takes a lot of teamwork,” she said.
MICMS Seventh Grade Olympic Day
Gold – Armenia: Conor Watt, Danny Fleming, Chad Severn, Taby Crotts,
Anthony Funk
Silver – Greece: Danin Greusel, Ashley Wierback, Jake Pappas, Dan
Lopez, Nikki Popoff
Bronze – Norway: Nick Thorstenson, Kailey Knudson, Kevin Blaiweiss,
Nick Kalmanek, Beata Logan

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
September 21, 2004 Tuesday
Azeri pres believes Karabakh conflict hampers peace in region
By Sevindzh Abdullayeva and Viktor Shulman
BAKU
Azerbaijani President Ilkham Aliyev believes that the Karabakh
conflict “is creating huge obstacles to peace and stability in the
region.”
Aliyev made this statement in Baku on Tuesday receiving Filip
Dimitrov, the special envoy of the OSCE chairman in office for
Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The president stressed the permanency of his country’s stance on the
issue of the problem settlement.
“It should be settled based on the principles of inviolability of
borders and territorial integrity of states,” said the Azerbaijani
president pointing out, “It will be impossible to settle the Karabakh
conflict with any other approach.”
Ilkham Aliyev is positive that the problem settling will result in
the establishment of calm, security and acceleration of economic
development in the region.
The Azerbaijani president expressed regret that the activity of the
OSCE Minsk Group on Nagorno Karabakh that is performing mediator
functions in the conflict settlement has so far yielded no positive
results.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

MGM sale conjures old ghosts, history repeats
By Bob Tourtellotte
LOS ANGELES, Sept 13 (Reuters) – Even in fast-paced Hollywood,
the more things change, the more they stay the same. Case in point:
80 year-old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. <_MGM.N_ (aol://4785:MGM/) >.
The venerable film studio controlled by billionaire Kirk Kerkorian
on Monday agreed in principle to be acquired by investors led by Sony
Corp., according to sources close to the deal.
The nearly $5 billion deal recalls MGM’s origins in 1924, another
time when deep pockets were needed to compete against larger rivals.
The birthplace of musicals like “The Wizard of Oz,” epic “Gone with
the Wind” and home to the James Bond spy flicks, MGM has remained
a fixture in Hollywood through years of shifting owners, changed
locations and threatened bankruptcy.
In fact, the acquisition by Sony returns MGM to its old filmmaking
lot that was spun off in 1986 at a time when the studio was controlled
by Ted Turner. Since then, MGM has been a studio without a lot. Now,
like E.T., it has gone home.
MGM was formed in 1924 when financially struggling Metro Pictures
and owner Marcus Loew, who ran the New York-based Loews theaters,
approached Goldwyn Pictures about a merger.
Neither company was performing well at box offices, so they brought in
Louis B. Mayer, who along with his production chief, Irving Thalberg,
took charge of a merged Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn had been ousted from Goldwyn Pictures
two years earlier, and never worked at the company.
In the 1930s and 1940s, MGM became famous for producing spectacle
films and musicals like “Wizard of Oz” in 1939. That same year,
MGM and producer David O. Selznick released multiple-Oscar winner
“Gone With the Wind.”
MGM earned other best picture Oscars for 1951 musical “An American in
Paris,” starring Gene Kelly, and 1959 epic “Ben Hur,” with Charlton
Heston. In 1962, sister United Artists released the first of 20 James
Bond movies, “Dr. No.”
DEALS AND NEAR DISASTER
Kerkorian acquired 37 percent of MGM in 1969, then won control from
rival investor Edgar Bronfman Sr. He would own the studio three times
before this latest sale.
The 86-year-old billionaire is the son of Armenian immigrants and
made his early fortune in the airline industry. He also controls MGM
Mirage <_MGG.N_ (aol://4785:MGG/) >, operator of the Bellagio and
MGM Grand casino hotels, among others.
On Wall Street, Kerkorian is considered a wily dealmaker. In
complicated maneuvering in 1986, he sold MGM to Ted Turner’s Turner
Broadcasting System for $1.45 billion, then reacquired it from
Turner. But by then, Turner had stripped MGM of its pre-1948 film
library and sold MGM’s studio lot.
The deal formed the basis of modern MGM, which makes low-risk,
low-cost movies and cable and syndicated TV shows. It generates much
of its revenue from selling DVDs in its 4,100 title film catalog that
excludes classics like “Wizard of Oz.”
In 1990, Kerkorian sold MGM for $1.3 billion to Pathe Communications
and financier Giancarlo Paretti, but after losing money, French bank
Credit Lyonnais seized control then sold MGM back to Kerkorian in
1996 for the same $1.3 billion.
In 1999, the billionaire installed top lieutenant Alex Yemenidjian as
chief executive and Hollywood veteran Chris McGurk as chief operating
officer.
Helped by booming DVD sales, the pair have turned MGM into a steady
cash producer. Even so, in modern times MGM has been what old Metro
Pictures was, a small company looking for a big partner. On Monday,
it appeared to find one, again.
09/13/04 18:54 ET

Armenian constitutional reforms to amend relations between branches of power
Mediamax news agency
10 Sep 04
Yerevan, 10 September: The new packet of Armenian constitutional
reforms envisages amendments to relations between the president,
the government and the parliament, Armen Arutyunyan, the Armenian
president’s representative on constitutional reforms, said today,
Mediamax reports.
He pointed out that the changes to the constitution will not have a
revolutionary nature.
“We just want to make the constitution more effective,” Armen
Arutyunyan said.

Los Angeles Times
September 8, 2004 Wednesday
Home Edition
‘Komitas’ reawakened;
Anna Djanbazian brings back to life her ballet about the revered
Armenian, inspired by ‘the idea of survival … and not giving up.’
by Victoria Looseleaf, Special to The Times
Do a Google search for Komitas and more than 9,000 entries pop up.
The revered Armenian historical figure, who was born in Asia Minor in
1869 as Soghomon Soghomonian, assumed the name Komitas a quarter of a
century later, when he was ordained as a monk in the Armenian church.
But his work as a composer — more than 4,000 songs in Armenian,
Kurdish, Arabic and Persian, as well as numerous instrumental works
— is what made his reputation.
Add to this the facts that Komitas went insane after Turkey began
carrying out the Armenian genocide in 1915 and that he spent two
decades in mental hospitals before dying in Paris, and it’s easy to
see why a performing artist would be drawn to his story. Indeed,
Iranian-born dancer-choreographer Anna Djanbazian has been fascinated
with him for many years. In 1982, she created a two-act ballet,
“Komitas, Kroong Bnaver (Komitas, Banished but Not Forgotten),” in
Iran. The production featured 45 dancers, with Djanbazian as the
female lead opposite her husband in the title role.
Now, her locally based Djanbazian Dance Company is about to breathe
new life into this contemporary dance drama when it receives its U.S.
premiere this weekend at the Glendale Community College Theatre. But
its creator, 52, no longer performs, and she says her original vision
has been affected by time and by her own life struggles.
The new production was inspired by “the idea of survival and being
here and working, and not giving up,” explains Djanbazian, who
received a master’s in choreography from UCLA in 1990 and founded her
troupe in 1992. She also says that the more than 20 years she had to
think about the ballet nurtured its evolution. “The world has
changed, and the way people look at things. Also, my life and tastes
changed. The steps are not exactly the same, but Komitas’ story is,
which I wanted to introduce through his spiritual fragility and
struggle, through my eyes.”
Djanbazian’s eyes have taken in a lot. Her father, Sarkis Djanbazian,
was a renowned dancer-choreographer who in 1942 founded the first
classical ballet school in Iran. Born in Russia, he had studied dance
in St. Petersburg, but after the government arbitrarily expelled him
in 1937, he resettled his family in Tehran. Anna began dancing at 3;
her father died of a heart attack eight years later, in 1963. Her
mother, however, maintained the Djanbazian Dance Academy while
sending the teenage Anna to Russia for five years to continue her
training.
Djanbazian mounted “Komitas” in Tehran in 1982 in part to celebrate
the academy’s 40th anniversary.
“I loved Komitas’ ideology and his approach toward life. His music
was mesmerizing,” she says. But in her experience, that music “was
usually presented by scholars through lecture demonstrations and
recitals. Very rarely was dance set to it.”
She says Armenians have long considered Komitas’ music “a song of the
people,” and so she chose various tunes and instrumental works —
from religious and children’s songs to lively peasant and wedding
airs — as much for their emotional content as for their melodies.
There was one problem: Iran was in chaos under the reign of Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini. “We were in the disaster of revolution,” she
recalls, “and I was working underground, with the fear of the
government interrupting. We had several incidents when they barged in
and were looking for things — going over my costumes, pictures,
books. It was terrible.”
The show did go on, but within two years Djanbazian had closed the
school and moved to Los Angeles with her mother. In 1988, she honored
her heritage by opening a Djanbazian Dance Academy in Glendale. Now
located in La Crescenta, the school has 100 students, 22 of whom are
in Djanbazian’s company and will perform in “Komitas.” She hopes
eventually to take the evening-length work to Armenia, where her
troupe toured for three weeks last year.
Her father’s dances continue to figure prominently in her life. Two
years ago, she earned a local Lester Horton Dance Award for restaging
his “Memento (An Uzbek Dance),” and last year she received a Horton
for costume design for “What Is Inside Every Woman.”
“God gave me a good memory,” says Djanbazian, whose own dance
creations, she says, number about 80. “Since I was watching his class
when I was very little, all the students came to me to know their
next steps. That became a habit — to learn everything.”
Unfortunately, routine of a sadder stripe has also followed
Djanbazian. In 1996, her husband died, and four years later she fell
ill with cancer, which was what forced her to stop dancing.
“It gave me a chance to look at life differently,” she says. “And if
I can get back my energy, I’m going to perform. Not like before, but
differently.” Until then, Djanbazian’s creativity infuses “Komitas,”
featuring 25-year-old Arsen Serobian in the title role. A guest
artist with Djanbazian’s troupe, he was born in Armenia and has
danced with companies including the Moscow Ballet Theatre and the
Moiseyev Dance Company.
“I knew about Komitas from school,” Serobian says. “I love his
music.” Portraying first a monk, then a musician and finally an exile
in the throes of a breakdown (in a haunting solo) is “like going back
to that time and experiencing his pain and his love.”
Iranian-born Ani Grigorian, 21, a student of Djanbazian’s since she
was 7, will dance the role the choreographer made for herself. “We go
through a lot of emotions when we dance our people’s history,”
Grigorian says. “We lived through hard times and tragedy, but we
survive with a sense of pride.”
“Komitas” depicts Turkish forces’ 1915 slaughter of Armenians from
eastern Turkey as a tableau of chest-pounding angst, with
backward-bending dancers ending as crumpled heaps. Like Djanbazian’s
own saga, though, the drama concludes on a hopeful note.
“I show how people get stronger because of Komitas,” says Djanbazian.
“The libretto ends with this resurrection, with all of the people on
their feet.”
*
Djanbazian Dance Company
Where: Glendale Community College Theatre, 1500 N. Verdugo Road,
Glendale
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday (pre-show lecture by Arto
Tchakmakchian at 7:15 p.m.); 5 p.m. Sunday (pre-show lecture at 4:15
p.m.)
Price: $20 to $40
Contact: (818) 580-2170
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: PREPARATION: A reflection of Ani Grigorian, left,
Narinea Ghazarians, Arsineh Ananian and Arsen Serobian rehearsing.
PHOTO: IN SYNC: “Komitas,” at the Glendale Community College Theatre,
says Arsen Serobian, right, with Narinea Ghazarians, is “like going
back to that time and experiencing his pain and his love.”
PHOTOGRAPHER: Photographs by Genaro Molina Los Angeles Times

World Bank Warms to Business Climate
By Maria Levitov
The Moscow Times
Friday, September 10, 2004. Page 5.
Staff Writer Russia ranks in the top third of countries in terms of doing
business, according to a report published by the World Bank this week.
Despite acknowledging the country’s need to improve corporate governance and
transparency, the World Bank put Russia in 42nd place in its survey of legal
parameters for businesses in 145 countries. The World Bank made no
comparison to last year because its set of criteria has since changed.
“Russia’s business climate is one of the best in the region,” the World Bank
said in a statement.
The rosy assessment left some Russian entrepreneurs puzzled.
“Our own data and a growing amount of complaints about abuses of
entrepreneurs’ rights in the regions leads us to the opposite conclusion,”
said Sergei Borisov, president of Opora, which supports small business
development.
“It’s possible that compared to Morocco or Haiti, it really is very easy to
do business in Russia,” he said. “But comparing something bad with something
very bad, does not make the bad good.”
The report analyzes governments’ regulations on such things as starting a
business, hiring and firing workers, registering property, enforcing a
contract and filing for bankruptcy.
The World Bank positively appraised Russia’s business climate because of the
country’s flexible employment regulations and improvements in business
administration procedures.
“[The assessment] is based on an analysis of regulations — not the feedback
of entrepreneurs,” Irina Likhachova, the World Bank’s spokeswoman for
Central and Eastern Europe, said by phone from Washington.
It takes 36 days to register a new business in Russia, compared to 123 days
in Azerbaijan. Registering a property takes 37 days in Russia, while in
Croatia it takes more than 2 1/2 years.
Despite such positive factors for entrepreneurs, the country still needs to
improve transparency and corporate governance, the report said.
“If Russia increases its information transparency to the level that exists
in Slovakia or the Czech Republic, [Russia’s] market capitalization could
grow by more than half,” the World Bank said.
Slovakia topped the list of ten best reformers, which Russia did not make.
The country’s ranking was hurt by such considerations as the fact that it is
the only economy among the countries with 40 largest stock markets without
credit bureaus.
Overall, Russia was placed in the second best of five categories, along with
Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia and Estonia. Belarus, Hungary and Jamaica ranked
in the second to last category.
The top 20 countries included the usual suspects like New Zealand, the
United States and Switzerland, but also transitional economies like Slovakia
and Lithuania, and developing countries like Botswana and Thailand.

Armenia praises Iran for balanced policy
By Tigran Liloyan
ITAR-TASS News Agency
September 8, 2004 Wednesday
YEREVAN, September 8 — Armenian Prime Minister Andranik Margaryan
praised Iran’s balanced policy and constructive role in the resolution
of regional conflicts.
“Today Iran is considered an important factor of stability and peace
in the region,” the prime minister said in a meeting with visiting
Iranian President Sayed Mohammad Khatami on Wednesday.
In his words, trade and economic ties between the two countries include
elements of regional cooperation and were open for the participation
of other countries in the region.
The two sides welcomed the agreement on the construction of a gas
pipeline from Iran to Armenia and discussed projects to build the
Kajaran-Meghri tunnel in southern Armenia and design a hydropower
plant on the border river Araks.

Mind the Gap
Turkey is everyone’s idea of a “successful” modern Muslim state
A new novel will make you think twice
The Atlantic Monthly
October 2004
Books
“A Bit On The Side,” by William Trevor (Viking)
“Snow,” by Orhan Pamuk (Knopf)
By Christopher Hitchens
Well before the fall of 2001 a search was in progress, on the part
of Western readers and critics, for a novelist in the Muslim world
who could act the part of dragoman, an interpretive guide to the
East. In part this was and remains a quest for reassurance. The hope
was (and is) that an apparently “answering” voice, attuned to irony
and rationality and to the quotidian rather than the supernatural,
would pick up the signals sent by self-critical Americans and Europeans
and remit them in an intelligible form. Hence the popularity of the
Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, who seemed in his Cairo café-society mode to
be potentially “one of us”-even more so when he had the misfortune
to be stabbed in the neck by a demented fundamentalist. There was
a much lesser vogue for spikier secular writers, such as the late
Abdelrahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet, and the late
Israeli Arab Emil Habibi, whose novel Saeed the Pessoptimist is the
favorite narrative of many Palestinians (and who also had the grace
to win Israel’s national prize for the best writing in Hebrew). In
some ways those two were not quite “Muslim” enough for the purposes
of authenticity.
Orhan Pamuk, a thoughtful native of Istanbul who lived for three
years in New York, has for some time been in contention for the post
of mutual or reciprocal fictional interpreter. Turkey is, physically
and historically, the “bridge” between East and West, and I have
yet to read a Western newspaper report from the country that fails
to employ that cheering metaphor. (I cannot be certain how many
“Eastern” articles and broadcasts are similarly affirmative.) With
his previous novel, My Name Is Red, Pamuk himself became a kind of
register of this position, dwelling on the interpenetration of Islamic
and Western styles and doing so in a “postmodern” fashion that laid
due emphasis on texts, figures, and representations. After 9/11 he
was the natural choice for The New York Review of Books, to which
he contributed a decent if unoriginal essay that expressed horror
at the atrocities while admonishing Westerners not to overlook the
wretched of the earth. In Turkey he spoke up for Kurdish rights and
once refused a state literary award. Some of his fellow secularists,
however, felt that he was too ready to “balance” his views with
criticism of the Kemalist and military forces that act as guarantors
of Turkey’s secularism.
In a Bush speech to the new membership of NATO, delivered in Istanbul
last June, one of the President’s handlers was astute enough to insert
a quotation from Pamuk, to the effect that the finest view of the
city was not from its European or its Asian shores but from-yes-the
“bridge that unites them.” The important thing, as the President went
on to intone from Pamuk, “is not the clash of parties, civilizations,
cultures, East and West.” No; what is important is to recognize
“that other peoples in other continents and civilizations” are
“exactly like you.” De te fabula narratur.
Human beings are of course essentially the same, if not exactly
identical. But somehow this evolutionary fact does not prevent
clashes of varying intensity from being the norm rather than the
exception. “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest,” Albert
Einstein is supposed to have said. This already questionable call
to amnesia translates badly in cultures that regard Einstein himself
as a Satanic imp spawned from the hideous loins of Jewish degeneration.
In his new novel Pamuk gives us every reason to suppose that he is far
more ambivalent about this facile “bridge-building” stuff than he has
so far let on. The plot is complex yet susceptible of summary. Narrated
by Pamuk, with the advantages of both foresight and hindsight, it
shows an anomic young Turk named Kerim Alakusoglu, a poet with a bad
case of literary sterility and sexual drought, as he negotiates a
moment of personal and political crisis in the city of Kars, on the
Turkish-Armenian frontier. Disliking his given name, the man prefers
to go under the acronym formed by his initials: “Ka.” Having taken
part in the violent and futile Marxist-Leninist student movement that
was eventually obliterated by the military coup of 1980, and having
followed so many of his ex-comrades into exile in Germany, Ka is a
burned-out case. Pretending to seek a journalistic assignment in this
remote town, which has recently witnessed an epidemic of suicide
by young girls thwarted in their desire to take the Muslim veil,
he is in fact magnetized by the possibility of seeing Ipek, the lost
flame of his youth. As he arrives, a blizzard isolates the city and
almost buries it in snow-for which the Turkish word is kar. One might
therefore deploy a cliché and say that the action is frozen in time.
When frozen in the present, the mise-en-scène discloses a community
of miserably underemployed people, caught among a ramshackle state
machine, a nascent Islamism, and the claims of competing nationalist
minorities. A troupe of quasi-Brechtian traveling players is in town,
and it enacts a “play within a play,” in which the bitter violence
of the region is translated with shocking effect directly onto the
stage. Drawn into the social and religious conflict, Ka seems to
alternate between visions of “snow” in its macrocosmic form-the chilly
and hostile masses-and its microcosmic: the individual beauty and
uniqueness of each flake. Along the scrutinized axes that every flake
manifests he rediscovers his vocation and inspiration as a poet and
arranges a cycle of verses. This collection is lost when, on his return
to Frankfurt, he is shot down in a street of the red-light district.
In terms of characterization the novel is disappointing,
precisely because its figures lack the crystalline integrity of
individuals. Ipek, for example, appears on almost every page yet
is barely allowed any quality other than her allegedly wondrous
beauty. The protagonists speak their lines as Islamists, secularists,
conformists, and opportunists. And the author leaves no room for doubt
that he finds the Islamists the most persuasive and courageous. This is
true in spite of the utter nonsense that he makes them spout. A couple
of Muslim boys corner Ka and demand that he answer this question,
about a dead girl he never met:
Now we’d like to know if you could do us both a favor. The thing is,
we can both accept that Teslime might have been driven to the sin of
suicide by the pressures from her parents and the state. It’s very
painful; Fazil can’t stop thinking that the girl he loved committed
the sin of suicide. But if Teslime was a secret atheist like the one
in the story, if she was one of those unlucky souls who don’t even
know that they are atheists, or if she committed suicide because she
was an atheist, for Fazil this is a catastrophe: It means he was in
love with an atheist.
I should caution the potential reader that a great deal of the
dialogue is as lengthy and stilted as that, even if in this
instance the self-imposed predicaments of the pious, along with
their awful self-pitying solipsism, are captured fairly well. So is
the superiority/inferiority complex of many provincial Turks-almost
masochistic when it comes to detailing their own woes, yet intensely
resentful of any “outside” sympathy. Most faithfully rendered, however,
is the pervading sense that secularism has been, or is being, rapidly
nullified by diminishing returns. The acting troupe is run by a vain
old Kemalist mountebank named Sunay Zaim, who once fancied himself
an Atatürk look-alike, and his equally decrepit and posturing lady
friend. The army and the police use torture as a matter of course to
hang on to power.
Their few civilian supporters are represented as diseased old
ex-Stalinists whose leader-one Z. Demirkol, not further named-could
have leapt from the pages of Soviet agitprop. These forces take
advantage of the snowstorm to mount a coup in Kars and impose
their own arbitrary will, though it is never explained why they do
this or how they can hope to get away with it. In contrast, the
Muslim fanatics are generally presented in a favorable or lenient
light. A shadowy “insurgent” leader, incongruously named “Blue,”
is a man of bravery and charm, who may or may not have played a
heroic role in the fighting in Chechnya and Bosnia. (Among these
and many other contemporary references, the Taliban and al-Qaeda
are never mentioned.) The girls who immolate themselves for the
right to wear head-covering are shown as if they had been pushed
by the pitiless state, or by their gruesome menfolk, to the limits
of endurance. They are, in other words, veiled quasi-feminists. The
militant boys of their age are tormented souls seeking the good life
in the spiritual sense. The Islamist ranks have their share of fools
and knaves, but these tend to be ex-leftists who have switched sides
in an ingratiating manner. Ka himself is boiling with guilt, about
the “European” character that he has acquired in exile in Frankfurt,
and about the realization that the Istanbul bourgeoisie, from which
he originates, generally welcomes military coups without asking too
many questions. The posturing Sunay at least phrases this well.
No one who’s even slightly westernized can breathe free in this
country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one
needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they’re better
than everyone else and look down on other people. If it weren’t for
the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the
lot of them and their painted women and chopping them all into little
pieces. But what do these upstarts do in return? They cling to their
little European ways and turn up their affected little noses at the
very soldiers who guarantee their freedom.
A continuous theme of the novel, indeed, is the rancor felt by the
local inhabitants against anyone who has bettered himself-let alone
herself-by emigrating to an undifferentiated “Europe” or by aping
European manners and attitudes. A secondary version of this bitterness,
familiar to those who study small-town versus big-city attitudes the
world over, is the suspicion of those left behind that they are somehow
not good enough. But this mutates into the more consoling belief
that they are despised by the urbane. Only one character-unnamed-has
the nerve to point out that if free visas were distributed, every
hypocrite in town would leave right away and Kars would be deserted.
As for the past tense in which Kars is also frozen, I have to rely on
a certain amount of guesswork. Although Ka’s acronym could ostensibly
have been drawn from any pair of consonant/vowel first and last names,
I presume from Pamuk’s demonstrated interest in codes and texts that
K and A were chosen deliberately. There seem to be two possibilities
here: one is “Kemal Atatürk,” the military founder of modern secular
Turkey; the other is “Kurdistan and Armenia,” standing in for the
national subtexts of the tale.
Pamuk supplies no reason for his selection, but the setting of Kars
means that he might intend elements of both of the above. The city
was lost by Ottoman Turkey to Russia in 1878, regained in 1918, and
then briefly lost again to an alliance of Bolsheviks and Armenians
until, in late 1920, it became the scene of a Turkish nationalist
victory that fixed the boundary between Turkey and then-Soviet
Armenia that endures to the present day. (This event was among the
many negations of Woodrow Wilson’s postwar diplomacy, which had
“awarded” the region to the Armenians.) From Kars, also in 1920,
the legendary Turkish Communist leader Mustafa Suphi set out along
the frontier region, dotted with magically evocative place-names like
Erzurum and Trebizond, and was murdered with twelve of his comrades
by right-wing “Young Turks.” This killing was immortalized by Nazim
Hikmet in a poem that is still canonical in Turkey. (Hikmet himself,
the nation’s unofficial laureate, was to spend decades in jail and in
exile because of his Communist loyalties.) The outright victor in all
those discrepant struggles was Mustafa Kemal, who had helped defeat two
“Christian” invasions of Turkish soil in his capacity as a soldier,
and who went on to assume absolute political power and to supervise
and direct the only lasting secular revolution that a Muslim society
has ever undergone. His later change of name to Kemal Atatürk was only
part of his driving will to “Westernize” Turkey, Latinize its script,
abolish male and female religious headgear, adopt surnames, and in
general erase the Islamic caliphate that today’s fundamentalists hope
to restore.
Pamuk is at his best in depicting the layers of the past that are
still on view in Kars-in particular the Armenian houses and churches
and schools whose ghostly reminder of a scattered and desecrated
civilization is enhanced in its eeriness by the veil of snow. Nor
does he omit the sullen and disaffected Kurdish population. The price
of Kemalism was the imposition of a uniform national identity on
Turkey, where ethnic and religious variety was heavily repressed,
and where the standard-issue unsmiling bust of Atatürk-pervasive
in Pamuk’s account of the scenery and most often described as the
target of terrorism or vandalism-became the symbol of military rule.
(Atatürk was a lifelong admirer of the French Revolution, but Turkey,
as was once said of Prussia, is not so much a country that has an
army as an army that has a country.) In these circumstances it takes
a certain amount of courage for any Turkish citizen to challenge the
authorized version of modern statehood.
However, courage is an element that this novel lacks. Some important
Turkish scholarship has recently attempted an honest admission of the
Armenian genocide and a critique of the official rationalizations for
it. The principal author in this respect is Taner Akcam, who, as Pamuk
is certainly aware, was initially forced to publish his findings as
one of those despised leftist exiles in Germany-whereas from reading
Snow one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia
had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse, leaving
their ancestral properties for tourists to gawk at. As for the Kurds,
Pamuk tends to represent them as rather primitive objects of sympathy.
Ka’s poetic rebirth involves him, and us, in a comparable fatalism and
passivity. Early in the story he is quite baldly described as feeling
a predetermined poem coming on, and is prevented from completion of
the closing lines only by a sudden knock at the door. I managed to
assimilate the implied allusion to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. But about
fifty pages later, when another poem was successfully delivered from
Ka’s subconscious, I was confronted with a full-out deadpan account of
the person from Porlock who had interrupted Coleridge at the critical
moment. Pamuk’s literalism and pedantry are probably his greatest
enemies as a writer of fiction; he doesn’t trust the reader until he
has hit him over the head with dialogue and explanation of the most
didactic kind. Throughout the remainder of the novel, though, we are
invited to believe in the miraculous rather than the mundane: Ka quite
simply sits himself down at odd moments and sets out near faultless
poems (never quoted) on whatever paper is handy. The necessary cliché
about “automatic writing” is eventually employed, somewhat heavily,
to account for this. But I was inevitably put in mind of the Koran,
or “recitation,” by which the Prophet Muhammad came to be the supposed
medium of the divine.
Ka is presented to us as a man who has assumed or affected his atheism
as a kind of protective epidermis. His unbelief is of a piece with his
attempt to deaden his emotions and decrease his vulnerability. His
psyche is on a knife edge, and he is always ready to be overwhelmed
by the last person he has spoken to. Yet he can watch an educator
being shot in cold blood by a Muslim zealot and feel nothing. Only
when in the company of beaming Dervishes and Sufis-those Islamic
sects that survived Atatürk’s dissolution of clerical power-does he
become moist and trusting and openhearted. Yet “rising up inside him
was that feeling he had always known as a child and as a young man at
moments of extraordinary happiness: a prospect of future misery and
hopelessness.” Like the Danish prince who had a version of the same
difficulty, Ka finds a form of cathartic relief in helping to produce
the violent stage play that expresses his own fears and dreads. Pamuk
drops in many loud references to Chekhov, and the gun that is on
the mantelpiece from the beginning of the action is at last duly and
lethally discharged. (It is described as a “Canakkale” rifle, Canakkale
being the Turkish name for the Dardanelle Straits and the site of
Gallipoli-the battle that was Atatürk’s baptism as a leader.) The
handgun that goes off later, and extinguishes Ka’s life, is heard
only offstage. But it is clear that Islamist revenge has followed
him to the heart of Europe and punished him for his ambivalence.
Prolix and often clumsy as it is, Pamuk’s new novel should be taken
as a cultural warning. So weighty was the impression of Atatürk that
ever since his death, in 1938, Western statecraft has been searching
for an emulator or successor. Nasser was thought for a while to be
the needful charismatic, secularizing strongman. So was Sadat. So,
for a while, was the Shah of Iran. And so was Saddam Hussein . Eager
above all to have a modern yet “Muslim” state within the tent, the
United States and the European Union have lately been taking Turkey’s
claims to modernity more and more at face value. The attentive reader
of Snow will not be so swift to embrace this consoling conclusion.
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Kerkorian is offered £2.5bn cash for MGM
By Aaron Patrick (Filed: 03/09/2004)
The Daily Telegraph, UK
Sept 2 2004
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Hollywood studio that filmed The Wizard of
Oz, The Graduate and Lord of the Rings, has received a cash offer of
$4.5 billion (£2.5 billion) it emerged yesterday.
US media group Time Warner offered the sum to MGM controlling
shareholder Kirk Kerkorian, according to the Wall Street Journal and
the New York Times. It replaces a previous offer of shares that would
have left the 87-year-old with a large stake in Time Warner.
Analysts said the cash offer made Time Warner more competitive with
the other bidder, Sony, which owns Columbia Pictures and is reported
to have offered $4.8 billion cash. However, Sony’s bid is complicated
by the fact it relies on two junior backers, both private equity
firms.
Time Warner is said to have offered cash in part because it would be
uncomfortable with Mr Kerkorian as a major shareholder, having
watched the billionaire sue another of his major investments,
DaimlerChrysler, for $2 billion.
Issuing new shares could also be problematical for Time Warner while
it is the object of an investigation by US regulators into alleged
accounting irregularities at its America Online division.
Speculation over the deal has been intense, and MGM took the unusual
step on Wednesday of issuing a statement denying a Reuters report the
bidding was nearing $5 billion.
MGM shares fell sharply after the announcement and were yesterday
trading slightly above the estimated value of Time Warner’s offer.
MGM is attractive to Sony and Time Warner for its 4,000 movies – the
largest post-1948 film library – which generate income through
television reruns, video rentals and DVD sales.