Author: Emil Lazarian

PROTEST IN FRONT OF HOME OF NATIONAL SECURITY
Lragir.am
20 Oct 06
The members of United Javakheti started a sit-in in front of the
building of the National Security Service demanding to set free Vahagn
Chakhalyan, one of their leaders, who had been arrested October
11 for illegal crossing of the Armenian border. The participants
of the sit-in say the real reason for arresting Chakhalyan is the
effort of the Armenian government to support the Georgian government
in repressing the Armenian movement in Javakheti. The news agency
Regnum informs that the protestors consider Chakhalyan’s arrest an
“Armenian and Georgian plot”. They announce that they are ready to
start a hunger strike for releasing Chakhalyan in case the Armenian
government fails to release Vahagn Chakhalyan within three days.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ARMENIA IS FACING LOSS OF INDEPENDENCE
Lragir, Armenia
Oct 19 2006
The leader of the Liberal Progressive Party of Armenia Hovanes
Hovanisyan stated October 19 at the Pastark Club that the Republic
of Armenia is facing the loss of independence, reports the news
agency ARKA.
According to Hovanisyan, if the election in 2007 is illegal, “Armenia
will become subject of Russia.”
“The country’s reputation was damaged, and it cannot bring their
political claims to the world,” said Hovanisyan. He stated that his
political party will run in the election and will do everything to
guarantee compliant elections.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

IN VAZGEN MANUKIAN’S WORDS, RUSSIAN PARLIAMENTARIAN’S STATEMENT IS ABSURD
Noyan Tapan News Agency, Armenia
Oct 19 2006
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 19, NOYAN TAPAN. Each of the sides in Armenian-Russian
relations pursues its interests and no one is indebted to another. RA
MP Vazgen Manukian, Chairman of the National Democratic Union, said
at the October 19 press conference. He disagreed to RF State Duma
Deputy Konstantin Zatulin’s statement on clarification of the Armenian
side’s position towards the Russian-Georgian conflict qualifying it as
“absurd.”
In V.Manukian’s words, Armenians lived side by side with Georgians
for thousands of years and are obliged to be neighbors. Besides,
two out of four neighbors of Armenia, Turkey and Azerbaijan, closed
all roads. And the road passing through the territory of Iran can be
endangered if U.S. consistently continues its policy of intolerance
towards this country. And under these conditions Armenia is suggested
aggravating its relations with Georgia, which will result in closure
of this last road.
NDU Chairman is not for Armenia’s membership to NATO, either. In
V.Manukian’s words, NATO cannot provide Armenia’s security, as in
the issue of Cyprus it did not protect a member of this organization,
Greece, from infringements of another member, Turkey. He highlighted
the necessity of preserving balanced relations with Russia, Iran,
Turkey and Europe.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Armenian Armed Forces began military trainings in occupied Aghdere region
Today, Azerbaijan
Oct 20 2006
20 October 2006 [14:22] – Today.Az
Armenian Armed Forces began military trainings in occupied Aghdere
region beginning from 09.00 today, the peasants of frontline villages
of Terter told.
The villagers said they feel the shake caused by the explosion of
heavy artillery bullets.
As APA reports, Armenians have been in large-scale military trainings
in occupied regions for three days.
During the military maneuvers cannon-ball fired in the direction
of Terter fell on the neutral area in the contact line of
Azerbaijani-Armenian Forces.
URL:

A refracted world view
Mail & Guardian Online, South Africa
Oct 20 2006
Aida Edemariam profiles Orhan Pamuk and the writings that won him
this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature
>From a very young age,” begins Orhan Pamuk’s memoir of his lifelong
home, Istanbul, “I suspected there was more to my world than I could
see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours,
there lived another Orhan so much like me he could pass for my twin,
even my double.”
When his parents’ frequent quarrels overwhelmed him, he would play what
he called the “disappearing game”: sitting at his mother’s dressing
table, he would adjust her three-way mirror until Orhans reflected
Orhans reflected Orhans, ad infinitum. He notes that it was a game he
would later play in his novels, which is true enough; they are full of
refracted selves and voices and bit parts for a narrator called Orhan.
This is also, however, a useful way to think about Pamuk the writer and
his place in the world. He is published in more than 40 languages, and
has had to slowly get used to the fact that “my books are being read
with completely different reactions in different countries”. In Turkey
he is both a literary difficult author, and a teller of absorbing
whodunnits; a European-influenced stylist and an assiduous miner of
Turkish history.
Pamuk is the author of five novels, one of which, My Name Is Red,
won the International Impac Award; another Istanbul was shortlisted
for the Samuel Johnson prize and in the history category of the
British Book Awards. So he is a major writer in the United Kingdom,
but this is nothing compared with how big he is in Turkey. Thanks
to The New Life, which, at the time of its publication in 1994, was
the fastest-selling novel in Turkish history, and the bestselling My
Name Is Red, he has been a celebrated figure at home for some time;
he was really catapulted to infamy, however, when he remarked to a
Swiss interviewer in February last year that “a million Armenians
and 30 000 Kurds were killed in this country and I’m the only one
who dares talk about it”.
Turkish newspapers launched hate campaigns against Pamuk, some
columnists even suggesting he should be “silenced”. His books and
posters of him were burned at rallies and he received death threats,
after which, for a while, he went into hiding abroad.
Eventually he returned to face trial and a possible three years’
imprisonment. In January this year the court decided there was no case
to answer. It has been said this was only because of the international
condemnation the trial provoked, yet though Pamuk now insists the
case would have been dismissed regardless, it would be foolish to
ignore the fault lines it exposed.
Snow, which he began writing two years before 9/11, is set in Kars
in north-eastern Turkey and tackles the urgent issues of secularism
and religion in a country that has been torn between the two for most
of the past century. It is full of intimations of trouble. “Can the
West endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble
them?” asks one character; another comments that “the world has lost
patience with repressive regimes”.
Pamuk begins Snow with the famous Stendhal quote: “Politics in a
literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude
affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of
very ugly matters.” The irony is that the rest of his fiction is
also political, if far more obliquely so; it has set up, within its
characters, opposing ideological poles, then patiently probed what
Pamuk calls “the confusion in between”.
>>From his penthouse window in his Istanbul home — where he grew
up — he can see Hagia Sophia, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus,
the Golden Horn, the Topkapi palace, the suspension bridge that links
Europe and Asia — “all the essentials”, as he puts it.
He hasn’t much time for my theory about how his still living here is
unusual in these days of mass migration — that is a myth, he feels,
perpetrated by a highly visible, mobile minority. “The rest of the
world lives in the same street, the same building. The father builds
a house, then the child lives there. So I don’t want to talk about
my experience as a unique thing.” On the other hand, he concedes that
still living in this place does perhaps give him “a strong centre in
my spirit. The world, for me, has obvious beginnings.”
Pamuk grew up in a rich Ottoman family that was, through profligacy
and mismanagement, progressively becoming less so. The young Orhan
was meant to become something useful, preferably an engineer or
an architect. He chose painting initially, then writing, despite
his father’s exhortations that he should enjoy himself more. When
is he happiest now? “If you leave aside sensual pleasures, sexual
pleasures, good food, good sleep, and so on, then the happiest thing
is that I have written two and a half to three good pages. I am almost
assured that they are, but I need confirmation. My girlfriend comes,
we are happy, I read to her, she says, ‘This is wonderful’ — that’s
it! That’s the greatest happiness.”
Although when he was in his 20s he read the Marxist pamphlets
favoured by his friends, Pamuk simply found Woolf or Faulkner more
interesting. He has been criticised for being too Western a writer,
though, he points out, “A bit of experimentalism is always ‘betraying
the nation’ in my part of the world.”
Pamuk’s fiction plays with voice and subject — for him, this is a
way of exploring what it means to be Turkish. So The White Castle
(1995), in which a 17th-century Italian scholar is captured by
Ottoman pirates and sold to a Turk eager to learn about the West,
“is a sort of intense personal conflict … Of course, it was also a
story of doubles. That was the first book that had some international
success. Then, when I was doing interviews, thinking about the book
in an international context, I realised that doubles are Turkey’s
subject: 95% of Turks carry two spirits in themselves. International
observers think there are the good guys — seculars, democrats,
liberals — and the bad guys — nationalists, political Islamists,
conservatives, pro-statists. No. In the average Turk, these two
tendencies live together all the time. Every person is fighting
within himself or herself, in a way. Or maybe, very naively, carrying
self-contradictory ideas.”
My Name Is Red (2003), the sprawling intellectual whodunnit that
made his name outside Turkey, dramatises the tussle between Islamic
manuscript illuminators and artists seduced by the Western concepts
of style, originality and representation.
“It’s a metaphor for a very common Middle-Eastern fantasy,” says Pamuk,
“that of taking sophisticated, attractive inventions, techniques,
[or] objects from the West, without paying the spiritual price. To
appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to
have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that
you somehow change. That is one of the things that I see in my culture
that makes me very angry.”
He is not angry, he says, because of the urge to copy in itself:
“Though that is deplorable, hateful, I have great understanding for the
inevitable desire to imitate. I’m angry because that kind of fantasy
is based on a very simplistic world picture. In the novel I’m writing
now [to be called The Museum of Innocence], there is a dialogue about
poor people. A cruel but observant upper-class person says words to
the effect that, ‘They are so naive that they believe being poor is a
sin and their guilt will be forgotten as soon as they get some money.’
“So all these fragile feelings of imitation, of not having, of being
angry with your own country, with the West, with everything — I think
that the whole non-Western world is living these damning personal
dilemmas. To understand nationalism and anti-Western sentiment in the
rest of the world, you have to go to these shadowy places, rather
than to the latest political developments, which are actually just
end products.” — © Guardian Newspapers 2006
–Boundary_(ID_wldGTjyi04A1P7J54FZxIg)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Turkish Daily News
Oct 20 2006
‘No one can legislate historical truth’
Friday, October 20, 2006
Far from criminalizing denial of the alleged Armenian genocide, we
should decriminalize denial of the Holocaust, says an article in the
Guardian
ANKARA – Turkish Daily News
What a magnificent blow for truth, justice and humanity the French
national assembly has struck, by voting for a bill criminalizing any
denial of the alleged Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman
Empire, said an article published in the prestigious British daily
the Guardian yesterday.
“Bravo! Chapeau bas! Vive la France! But let this be only a beginning
in a brave new chapter of European history,” said the article penned
by Timothy Garton Ash. “Let the British Parliament now make it a crime
to deny that it was Russians who murdered Polish officers at Katyn in
1940. Let the Turkish parliament make it a crime to deny that France
used torture against insurgents in Algeria.”
The article said the only pity was that the European Union can’t
impose the death sentence for “these heinous thought crimes,” adding
that with time that might change. too.
The French Parliament last Thursday adopted the contentious bill,
which Turkey said dealt heavy blow to Turkish-French ties. The bill
requires approval by both the Senate and the president to become law.
It is in the hands of the French government as to whether the bill
is taken to the Senate.
“What right has the Parliament of France to prescribe by law the
correct historical terminology to characterize what another nation
did to a third nation 90 years ago?” asked the article, noting that
the bill had no moral or historical justification.
“No one can legislate historical truth. In so far as historical truth
can be established at all, it must be found by unfettered historical
research, with historians arguing over the evidence and the facts,
testing and disputing each other’s claims without fear of prosecution
or persecution.”
It said the proposed bill was a step in exactly the wrong
direction. “How can we credibly criticize Turkey, Egypt or other
states for curbing free speech, through the legislated protection of
historical, national or religious shibboleths, if we are doing ever
more of it ourselves?” it asked, in apparent reference to laws in EU
countries on denial of the Holocaust.
“Far from creating new legally enforced taboos about history,
national identity and religion, we should be dismantling those that
still remain on our statute books. Those European countries that
have them should repeal not only their blasphemy laws but also their
laws on Holocaust denial. Otherwise the charge of double standards
is impossible to refute.”
Referring to British historian David Irving, who was found guilty in
Vienna for denying the Holocaust and sentenced to prison, the article
said: “Today, if we want to defend free speech in our own countries
and to encourage it in places where it is currently denied, we should
be calling for David Irving to be released from his Austrian prison.”
It added that the Austrian law on Holocaust denial was far more
historically understandable and morally respectable than the proposed
French one. “At least the Austrians are facing up to their own
difficult past, rather than pointing the finger at somebody else’s —
but in the larger European interest we should encourage the Austrians
to repeal it.
“Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be
poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and
others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for
dismantling them. We must practice what we preach.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Turkish Daily News
Oct 20 2006
RTUK recommends boycott of French media programs
Friday, October 20, 2006
ANKARA – Turkish Daily News
The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK) has recommended
a boycott of French-produced programs and films in protest of the
French Parliament’s adoption of a controversial bill that would make
it a crime to deny that Armenians were subjected to genocide at the
hands of the Ottoman Empire.
In a statement issued late on Wednesday, RTUK said its board members
had unanimously agreed that Turkish television and radio stations
should avoid airing French-made programs until France drops the
“genocide” bill.
French films, TV series and music account for about 10 percent of
the content on Turkish radio and television, according to figures
provided by RTUK.
Þaban Sevinc, a member of the RTUK, said French films were third in
popularity in Turkey behind American and Turkish films. “France is
trying to raise its voice in the world film industry. [We] hope this
decision will make some noise, even if it’s small, in the French film
industry and art world and make them ask ‘What have we done?'”
The French National Assembly last week infuriated Turkey by backing
the bill, though it is unlikely to become law due to opposition from
the Senate and French President Jacques Chirac.
Turkish consumer groups have called for a boycott of French-made
goods. Higher Education Board (YOK) Chairman Erdoðan Tezic announced
this week he was returning a prestigious French medal in protest.
But the government, while protesting the bill, has stopped short of
taking retaliatory measures such as recalling its Paris ambassador.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Namýk Tan said at a weekly press conference
yesterday that Ankara has no intention of recalling its ambassador
to France in reaction to the bill. “But this should not be regarded
as an indication of weakness. Our country’s representative should be
there to express our views to [relevant authorities] in an effective
manner,” he said.
“We are in favor of acting rationally and cool-headedly and exerting
efforts to take steps and develop a strategy in this way.”
–Boundary_(ID_BT0OPhF0GOIP+yCGcEUr3Q) —
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

“ARMENIAN BUSINESSWOMAN 2005” EXHIBITION KICKS OFF IN YEREVAN TODAY
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
Oct 19 2006
YEREVAN, October 19. /ARKA/. The second exhibition “Armenian
Businesswoman 2006” was opened in Yerevan today. ASME program
coordinator for support to Anahit Bobikyan told reporters Thursday
that 60 women-run companies participate in the exhibition.
She said that particularly food, textile, clothes, wooden and stone
ware, applied arts, leather accessories, souvenirs, handwork carpets,
embroidery, publishing and consultation services were demonstrated
at the exhibition.
The first exhibition was held in May 2005. The second one “Armenian
Businesswoman 2006” will last until October 21. The activity was
organized by the ASME (small and medium enterprises) Program in
association with the Logos EXPO Center exhibition company and funded
by the USAID.
At the exhibition, a meeting of Armenian businesswomen with beginner
representatives of business, a round table of businesswomen and
Armenian students, and also a gala-concert dedicated to Armenian
businesswomen to be participated by well-known musicians and prominent
figures of art. R.O. –0–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Turkish Press
Oct 19 2006
Press Review
AKSAM
CICEK: “ARTICLE 301 CAN BE CHANGED”
Before a meeting of Parliament’s Justice Commission yesterday,
Justice Minister Cemil Cicek spoke to reporters about possible
changes to controversial Turkish Penal Code (TCK) Article 301, saying
that only four articles of the TCK couldn’t be changed, namely 1,
2, 3, and 174. “Thus, all articles except these can be changed,”
said Cicek. “Article 301 was amended in the past. Article 301 isn’t
off-limits to change.” /Aksam/

Mail & Guardian Online, South Africa
Oct 19 2006
Turkey’s Parliament raps France’s ‘genocide’ Bill
Ankara, Turkey
19 October 2006 02:14
Turkey’s Parliament backed on Tuesday a declaration condemning the
French National Assembly’s approval of a draft Bill that would make
it a crime to deny Armenians suffered genocide by Ottoman Turks in
1915.
But the government stopped short of taking measures against French
interests and companies, aware this could harm Turkey’s economy more
than France’s.
Diplomats say the genocide Bill, approved by the lower house last
Thursday, is unlikely to become law due to resistance from the upper
chamber, the Senate and President Jacques Chirac.
Turkish lawmakers said much damage had already been done.
“Naturally, approval of the draft by the French Parliament will
inflict irreparable damage on political, economic and military
relations between Turkey and France,” said the declaration which had
the backing of all political parties.
It said Armenia would pay a “heavy price” for using lobbies in France
and in other countries against Turkey, although it did not say what
that might entail.
Turkey has no diplomatic relations with Armenia due to the tiny
ex-Soviet republic’s occupation of territory belonging to Ankara’s
Turkic-speaking ally Azerbaijan.
France is home to Europe’s largest Armenian diaspora.
Ankara denies Armenians’ claims they suffered a systematic genocide
in Turkey during World War I, saying both Christian Armenians and
Muslim Turks died in large numbers in a partisan conflict that
accompanied the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
In Tuesday’s debate in the Turkish Parliament, Foreign Minister
Abdullah Gul said the “baseless” Armenian claims were nothing more
than political propaganda.
“We hope this bill stops halfway and that the French come to their
senses,” Gul said.
Gul said the French Bill violated the principle of free speech, a key
requirement of the European Union, which Turkey hopes to join. He
said Ankara would fight the Bill in international courts if it ever
became law in France. – Reuters
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress