Author: Ekmekjian Janet

KHAZAR IBARHIM: ARMENIA’S CLAIMING THERE IS RELIGIOUS FACTOR IN THE ROOT OF NAGORNO KARABAKH CONFLICT IS NOTHING, BUT PRETEXT

Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Nov 12 2007

We are living in 21st century, but not in mid centuries when religious
factors regulated international relations and these factors were
used for occupying territories of the other countries, Azerbaijan
Foreign Ministry’s spokesman Khazar Ibrahim said while commenting
on Armenian Prime Minister Serj Sarkisian’s statement on "There is
religious motive in the root of Nagorno Karabakh conflict".

Diplomat regards absurd such statements when interreligious dialogue
is wide scope.

"Interreligious, intercultural and intercivilization dialogues are
carried out today and Armenia’s such statement show that it is far
from realities. This is inadmissible, and Armenia should realize it
and not make such statements, take such steps. On contrary this is
nothing, but pretext of masking aggressive policy of Armenia," he said.

PRESENTATION OF INTERNATIONAL LITERARY COLLECTION
By Hasmik Harutyunian, translated by L.H.

AZG Armenian Daily #207
10/11/2007

"Revealing each other"

Recently, the presentation of international literary collected works
titled "Revealing each other" took place in the Union of Writers.

The collection involves prose works of the authors from six different
countries: Austria, Germany, Russia, Bulgaria, Ghrghzstan and Armenia.

Similar works have been published also in Russia, Germany, USA and
England.

The project "Revealing each other" is carried out in the framework
of the international festival "Bibliobraz", on the initiative of the
first lady of Russian Federation Lyudmila Putina.

"The collection is of a peculiar and great importance.

Children’s writers of different countries gather round a table. It
is directed to the new generation, where the life and reality of
different peoples are presented. The work of the German writer Tsoran
Drvencar "The opposite side of the moon" is about the everyday life
of school-teenagers. And the story of the Kyrgyz prose-writer Barma
Abduhamidova "Mother’s aroma" is about the little children who live
without parental tenderness and love. And the love and melancholy
towards the parents change their emotional state.

The Minister of Culture Hasmik Poghosian speaks of this project with
pleasure, as it is devoted to children.

"The fact is praiseworthy and should be encouraged.

Besides, it is planned to create joint films and performances. The
project is of a great importance and it should be carried out
periodically", mentioned the Minister.

ARMENIAN-IRANIAN RELATIONS EXEMPLARY IN ALL SPHERES

PanARMENIAN.Net
08.11.2007 16:14 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ "Regional conflicts should be resolved peacefully
via talks and with participation of states of the region," Iranian
Defense Minister,Brigadier General Mostafa Mohammad Najjar told a news
conference in Yerevan. "Participation of other states will aggravate
the situation and multiply problems," he said.

"Iran is ready to do everything in its power for resolution of regional
problems. I should stress that cooperation is the only way to achieve
stability and development in the region. Struggle against creation
of weapons of mass destruction and war on terror are priorities for
Iran," he emphasized.

When commenting on the Armenian-Iranian relations, he said these are
exemplary in all spheres.

"Relationships between Yerevan and Tehran are developing. Signature
of the Memorandum on cooperation in defense sector will mark the
beginning of mutually beneficial cooperation. Joint programs will
contribute to stability and development in the region," he said.

For his part, Armenian Defense Minister Mikael Harutyunyan noted
that there is a necessity to develop programs for military technical
cooperation. "Iran is our neighbor and military logistics would
be invaluable assistance to the Armenian army," he said, IA Regnum
reports.

REPORT ON TURKEY FILED
Translated by L.H.

AZG Armenian Daily #205
08/11/2007

EU-Turkey

On November 6, European Committee published its 2007 Report on Turkey
and other country-candidates’ progress in the process of integration
into European Union. The report lays stress mainly on the issues of
freedom of religion and speech and mainly Article 301 of Turkey.

According to the report, Turkish legislative system doesn’t give a
complete guarantee of the freedom of speech.

It’s mentioned also that Turkey should put more effort into the issue
of protection of the rights of Kurds and non-Muslims.

ERDOGAN WANTS TO KNOW IF ARMENIANS MAY TURN THEIR BACK UPON HISTORY

Lragir.am
06-11-2007 14:16:15

After the meeting with the U.S. President Bush the Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan stated that Turkey will open its border
with Armenia as soon as Armenia stops the occupation of the Azerbaijani
territory. According to him, Armenia has a wish to open the border
with Turkey. "However, you are occupying Nagorno-Karabakh. The world
acknowledges that you are an aggressor. It is necessary to stop the
occupation which continues.

Therefore, we are not going to open the border with Armenia," the
Turkish prime minister stated.

He also made a statement about the recognition of the
genocide. "Armenia should open its archives. But it fails to. Turkey
is ready to turn its back upon history. But are the Armenians ready
to do it and face their history," the Turkish prime minister asked.

ARMENIAN MEN’S AND LADIES’ NATIONAL TEAMS GAIN VICTORIES IN 6th AND 7th TOURS OF EUROPE CHESS TEAM CHAMPIONSHIP

Noyan Tapan
Nov 5, 2007

HERAKLION, NOVEMBER 5, NOYAN TAPAN. Two tours remain until the end
of the Europe Chess Team Championship being held in the Greek city
of Heraklion. In the 6th tour held on November 3, the Armenian men’s
national team beat the chess players of Hungary with the score of
2.5 to 1.5 and in the 7th tour held on November 4, beat the Slovenian
chess players with the same score.

The leader is the Russian national team, which has 14 points. The
Armenian team is in the second place.

In the 6th and 7th tours, Armenian lady chess players defeated
representatives of Romania and Bulgaria with the scores of 2.5 to 1.5,
and 3 to 1, respectively. The Polish and Russian teams are at the
top of the tournament table with 12 points each. The Armenian lady
chess players share the 3-4th places with Dutch lady chess players
with 10 points each.

In the 8th tour, the Armenian men’s national team will compete with
the Azeri team and the ladies’ team with the Polish team.

DAVIT ISHKHANYAN WAS ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE OF ARF DASHNAKTSUTYUN CENTRAL COMMITTEE

KarabakhOpen
05-11-2007 14:50:12

On November 3 and 4 the 14th Biannual General Meeting of the ARF
Dashnaktsutyun Artsakh was held in Stepanakert. The report on the
work done in the past two years was discussed, which was presented
by the representative of the Central Committee Arthur Mosiyan, who
has been appointed NKR minister of justice recently.

The General Meeting elected Davit Ishkhanyan representative of the
ARF Dashnaktsutyun Central Committee of Artsakh. In 1992-1994 Davit
Ishkhanyan was the commander of the battalion of the village of Ashan,
Martuni, in 1995-2000 he was the director of the village of Ashan. In
2000-2005 he was the mayor of the village of Ashan. He is now the
director of the Center for Tourism.

Davit Ishkhanyan was elected member of the Central Committee of
Artsakh for several times.

The 14th General Meeting of the Karabakh organization of the ARF
Dashnaktsutyun kicked off November 5 in Stepanakert, which is held
once in two years. Hrant Margaryan, the representative of the ARF
Dashnaktsutyun Bureau has arrived in Stepanakert to participate in
the meeting. He said in an interview with the Public Television of
Artsakh the ARF Dashnaktsutyun survived hard times in Karabakh. Now
we are enjoying more stability when the party has representatives to
the government, Hrant Margaryan said.

According to the acting representative of the ARF Dashnaktsutyun
Central Committee Arthur Mosiyan, the party will define its plans
for the upcoming two years.

By the way, the ARF Dashnaktsutyun says to have the support of one
third of voters in Karabakh. The party has only one seat in the
parliament of 33, two ministers (foreign affairs and justice) and
a few other key posts. During the presidential election in July the
party supported President Bako Sahakyan.

KARABAKH CONFLICT SETTLEMENT DERIVES FROM EVERYONE’S INTERESTS

armradio.am
05.11.2007 16:03

Today Armenia has met most of its commitments before the Council of
Europe, RA Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian and Secretary General of
the Council of Europe Terry Davis declared at a joint press conference.

Turning to the Karabakh issue Mr. Davis said he follows the issue
with great interest. According to him, the societies in Armenia
and Azerbaijan have been long waiting for the resolution of the
conflict. At the same time, he noted that he doesn’t want to blame
anyone, including the OSCE mediators. "However, besides the Karabakh
conflict there are a number of other issues to be addressed in these
countries. The Karabakh conflict settlement derives from everyone’s
interests. I hope that some day the conflict will be solved, and the
Council of Europe will be able to help the people of Nagorno Karabakh
as it helps others," Terry Davis declared.

Mr. Davis stated that the Council of Europe attaches great importance
to the forthcoming presidential elections in Armenia, and specially
emphasized the role of media in the pre-election period.

REMARKABLE ROOTS: THE VEIL TELLS GOOD STORY OF ONE WOMAN’S LIFE AMID TUMULT
By Elissa Barnard Arts Reporter

Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald, Canada
Nov 4 2007

The Veil tells good story of one woman’s life amid tumult of 20th
century in Iran and Europe

The Veil is a sweeping, epic drama that flows as fluidly and rapidly
as a good movie.

Based on Iranian historical fiction, Shahin Sayadi’s play takes one
to another time and place. It holds its audience in the grip of a
different culture and the strong voice of its women. Even Neptune’s
Studio Theatre looks entirely different with plush Persian carpets
on the lobby walls and floors.

The set, of dropping bolts of white fabric that serve as a screen for
projections and also become mundane things like blankets and doorways
is unconventional; the mix of Eastern and European music transporting,
the visuals metaphorically powerful.

Yet the heart of The Veil is its riveting story of one woman’s
remarkable life amid the tumult of the 20th century in both Iran
and Europe.

To get this story, Sayadi, the Iranian-born director of Halifax’s
OneLight Theatre, has translated and adapted the Iranian bestseller
Khanoom, a 600-page book in Farsi by exiled Iranian journalist
Masoud Behnoud.

Sayadi is blessed with two fine actors to tell the story: Valerie
Buhagiar as the old Khanoom, creating a rich and vivid character in
this grandmother, and Nadiya Chettiar as the granddaughter, Nanaz,
who also plays the young Khanoom.

Chettiar can immediately breathe the emotion into a moment no matter
how small. Whether she is nine and precocious, sick and pale, giddy and
girlish or desperate and pleading, Chettiar’s Khanoom has a forceful
presence and a clear, absorbing character.

That’s necessary since The Veil whips along quickly through many
short scenes.

It starts with the old Khanoom living in a basement bunker during
the Iran/Iraq war with her 18-year-old granddaughter. Nanaz is upset
that her mother is in jail and that she isn’t back home in L.A. being
a teenager.

Then her grandmother tells her her life story to demonstrate why she
is so rooted in Iran.

Khanoom’s tale goes back to a colourful harem in Iran in 1906 with a
beloved and witty eunuch (Marty Burt), who cures illness by warding
off the evil eye.

Also beloved is the rebellious Armenian aunt Nezhat, beautifully
played by Genevieve Steele. Nezhat dangerously supports the new
Iranian constitution and urges Khanoom’s mother (Lara Arabian) to
leave her abusive husband.

The new shah and Khanoom’s father are both ugly, dangerous men.

(Pasha Ebrahimi gets to play all the rotten men in this play and does
so with latent violence and relish in his cold cruelty.)

Sent away to Russia by her mother when she is nine, Khanoom ends up
in Paris and experiences two marriages and two wars.

Projected visual images take the audience immediately to Paris and
Berlin, inside mosques and fancy houses, to the streets of a vanquished
Germany and to the mountains of Iran.

This dense and epic story is clear. Sayadi has kept Khanoom’s voice
dominant in a play that is so rich in design it almost suffers from
an embarrassment of riches.

The key design motif is the cloth in white lengths with weighted
bottoms. Cast members endlessly move the sheets to create different
types of sets, props and situations.

In a play about a woman’s difficult choices based on family, love and
emotion the cloth easily connects one to the world of women. Women
spend their lives folding laundry, tucking in children, straightening
carpets and, in this Eastern world, wrapping themselves in cloth.

As metaphorically strong and visually magical as this technique is,
the endless resetting of the cloths can be distracting.

D’Arcy Morris-Poultney’s sensuous costumes, a labour of deep thought
and detail, ground this play in its different places and times.

The strong sense of reality is threatened by an occasional use of
puppets and particularly by a puppet doll with a giant, blank, white
head that represents a little girl.

Most of the massive technical elements, including Michael Mader’s
brilliant, comprehensive lighting and Brian Buckle’s evocative sound
design, are interwoven invisibly to create this wonderful other world,
as any good novel does.

The Veil, directed by Sayadi with a strong ensemble cast and a keen
eye for visual imagery, is, so far, one of the best shows this fall
for its thorough development and artistry. OneLight creates something
completely different without losing the joy in a good story.

The play runs to Nov. 18 as a OneLight Theatre production presented
in association with Neptune Theatre and Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia.

t/976507.html

THE YOUNG AND THE RUTHLESS

The Washington Post
November 4, 2007 Sunday
Every Edition

Stalin was a precocious gangster, robber and arsonist.

Reviewed by Ronald Grigor Suny

BOOK WORLD; Pg. BW07

YOUNG STALIN
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
Knopf. 460 pp. $30

For centuries travelers in Caucasia have depicted that mountainous
land as a mysterious, enchanted place where the locals are savage
and noble, the terrain majestic and wild, the rivers always turbulent.

But exoticizing Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan has had a dangerous
side effect: a tendency, particularly pronounced among Russians, to
demonize Caucasians as bandits, terrorists and cheats. Caucasia’s most
famous son was one of the greatest tyrants of the 20th century, Joseph
Stalin. And so it was probably inevitable that biographers would look
for some cultural link with the "wild East" to explain the ferocity
of a man who at his zenith devoured millions of Soviet citizens.

British novelist and filmmaker Simon Sebag Montefiore has long
been obsessed with Stalin and Caucasia. His initial foray into
Staliniana was a comic novel, My Affair With Stalin, in which a
malevolent 11-year-old adopts the dictator’s tactics to dominate
his schoolmates. Reborn as a popular historian, Montefiore wrote
biographies of Catherine the Great’s lover, Potemkin, and of Stalin
at the height of his power. A prodigious researcher, Montefiore has
found new archival sources, interviewed survivors and visited the
haunts and homes of the great dictator to produce a prequel to his
700-page In the Court of the Red Tsar.

Montefiore enfolds even what is familiar about Stalin in a vivid
narrative rich with new details and sensational revelations. The
future revolutionary was born in the provincial town of Gori, the
son of a shoemaker, Beso Djugashvili, and his stern, religious wife,
Keke. Determined that her "Soso" should become a priest, Keke sent
him to seminaries where the precocious boy displayed a talent for
singing and poetry and shared the romantic Georgian nationalism of his
compatriots. But as a teenager, embittered by the draconian regime
of teacher-priests, Soso abandoned both church and nationalism and
joined the fledgling Marxist movement.

Adopting the nickname "Koba" from a fictional Georgian outlaw,
young Djugashvili soon became a militant activist, leading workers
into a bloody confrontation with the police and organizing an armed
terrorist band that knocked off enemies and staged daring robberies
to finance the party. Stalin was repeatedly arrested and exiled to
Siberia, only to escape and resume his work in the revolutionary
underground. Rumors spread that he had ties to the tsarist police,
but such speculations testify more to his continual intrigues than
to any role as an agent of the infamous Okhrana.

Leading us through these obscure years of Stalin’s revolutionary
evolution, Montefiore focuses almost exclusively on his personal
rather than political side. Young Stalin is already a "gangster
godfather, audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist," a
Marxist fanatic with a need to command and dominate. The Caucasus
was the essential environment in which this "murderous egomaniac"
was nurtured. The violence of the Russian Empire’s southern periphery
— where rebellious workers, peasants, anarchists and Marxists vied
for power despite the state’s brutal reprisals — shaped Stalin’s
conviction that bloodshed and terror were necessary means to his
desired ends. "Only in Georgia," Montefiore writes, "could Stalin the
poet enable Stalin the gangster." Even Koba’s intimate relationships
were perverse. He neglected his devout and devoted mother, subordinated
his first wife to his revolutionary work, which led to her death,
and took up with whatever woman, regardless of age, could satisfy his
appetites. "Stalin," Montefiore claims, "was attracted to strong women,
but ultimately preferred submissive housewives or teenagers."

Stalin as womanizer is a new angle on the man of steel, though the
evidence for his sexual exploits, while tantalizing, is thin. In fact,
Montefiore’s portrait is often overwrought, and as an explanation of
Stalin’s path to power, it falls short, failing to deal adequately with
his politics and thought. There is almost nothing in this book, for
instance, on his intense involvement in the internal party squabbles
among the Marxists or his role as a theorist of nationalism. Geography
may be important, but it is insufficient context for a historian.

Growing up in autocratic Russia, where suppression of open political
dissent convinced thousands of people that the only way out of
backwardness and oppression was armed rebellion, Stalin was in one
sense not very unusual. But in another he was unique. His particular
talents and lack of scruples enabled him to climb rapidly up the
ladder of party politics, to impress Lenin and to build a loyal
following. In February 1917, Stalin was far from the action, still
exiled in the bitter darkness of eastern Siberia. Yet he was well
poised when the revolution opened opportunities for those prepared
to seize them. For all its drama, Young Stalin leaves that deadly
progression still a mystery. ·

Ronald Grigor Suny, the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social
and Political History at the University of Michigan, is editor of
"The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. III: The Twentieth Century."

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