Author: Emil Lazarian

Bucharest Daily News, Romania
June 4 2006

Foreign affairs minister: No taboo themes at the Black Sea Forum
Andreea Pocotila

Basescu is seen with his Azeri conterpart, Ilham Aliyev, at te
presidential palace in Bucharest.

The Black Sea region is among Romania’s top concerns on matters of
foreign affairs, as today it holds a forum aimed at tackling the main
issues of the region.

The Black Sea Forum held today in Bucharest will include debates on
multilateral issues and there will be no taboo themes during the
presidential discussions, yesterday said Foreign Affairs Minister
Mihai Razvan Ungureanu in an interview with the Mediafax news agency.
“Unfortunately, the Black Sea region has a pretty bad image – that of
an area burdened by conflicts, an area where policies seem unclear or
subversive, not open and orientated towards cooperation,” was one of
the reasons Ungureanu gave for the organization of the Black Sea
Forum.
The Black Sea Forum is aimed to help build mutual trust in the
region, facilitate synergy between regional initiatives, identify and
initiate ideas, promote pragmatic regional projects that meet the
actual needs of the region and generate a mutual awareness dialogue
and share lesson learned by the region with the extra regional
partners, says the event’s presentation. The forum will be based on
active and open dialogue between institutions and civil society
within the Black Sea region, as well as with European and
Euro-Atlantic partners.
The event’s purpose is to create a platform for cooperation and
commitment to development of a regional strategy and a common vision,
as manifestation of a new political vision, and to identify
coordination opportunities based on this vision.
Ungureanu said the Romanian initiative of organizing a Black Sea
Forum drew the attention of European leaders, as many representatives
of foreign affairs ministries announced their participation at the
event. He pointed out that these officials will transform the
summit’s message into a political guideline of the European Union.
“Romania is now a NATO member, it is getting ready to become a member
of the EU, it will be country on the cusp of the two clubs, the
European and the Euro-Atlantic,” Ungureanu said, adding that it is
time for the Black Sea region to be included on the agenda of serious
problems of both NATO and the EU.
The minister underlined that cooperation is rare in the Black Sea
region and there are no institutions that can guarantee or activate
collaboration.
“Indeed, the Organization of Black Sea Economic Cooperation (OCEMN)
has several successful projects that have functioned and are
functioning, but they are insufficient for the energies invested in
this format of cooperation,” said Ungureanu.
The Black Sea forum is intended to create a reflex of dialogue, and
dialogue means trust, while the latter generates cooperation,
explained Ungureanu.
“It is a Romanian idea, organized by Romania, but for a general
benefit,” said the official.
Ungureanu said there is not an incompatibility between the regional
dialogue on the Black Sea area and the internationalization of this
issue.
“International policy stopped isolating parts of the globe, it does
not hide them anymore behind tall fences, for them to be solved
through the minimum contribution of two or three actors;
globalization means drawing everybody’s attention to complicated
themes,” Ungureanu explained. The minister said globalization implies
the involvement of world players such as the Russian Federation, the
United States and China.
“The Black Sea has a global destiny, it can become not only a
European or continental sea, but a sea of the world,” Ungureanu said,
adding that it is a place where several civilizations converge and it
can either be an energetic bridge, a political one or an amalgamation
of economic factors.
“Everybody needs the Black Sea,” Ungureanu added.
Asked what gives him the guarantee that the forum will manage to ease
dialogue between regional leaders, Ungureanu’s main argument was that
nothing like this has ever been initiated: “It is the first bold step
forward.” However, he added the journey will not end until dozens of
similar steps have been taken, using the Romanian initiative as a
model.
Asked if instead of an active and cooperative dialogue the forum
might witness quarrels and arguments, Ungureanu said such things will
not happen because the region is mature enough and it only needs for
this maturity to be recognized.
Representatives from Armenia, the Republic of Moldova, Azerbaijan,
Turkey, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Romania, Greece, and Russia were
invited to the forum. Officials form European and international
organizations will also attend the event.
By yesterday no representative of Russia had confirmed his or her
presence at the forum, according to the list of participants released
yesterday by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Russia has always been
reticent about attending and consenting to agreements regarding the
Black Sea. President Traian Basescu last year said it is time for the
Black Sea to cease being a Russian lake.
The list of participants at the Black Sea Forum includes Armenian
President Robert Kocharian and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham
Aliev.
Kocharian and Aliev are slated to meet on the sidelines of the summit
in Romania, for talks over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh,
which is inside Azerbaijan but populated mostly by ethnic Armenians,
who have run it since an uneasy 1994 cease-fire ended six years of
full-scale fighting.
Kocharian on Saturday dampened expectations for today’s meeting with
his Azerbaijani counterpart, again accusing Azerbaijan of being
belligerent and insincere about peacefully resolving the nearly
two-decade conflict over the disputed area.
Talks held between the two leaders in France in February ended in
failure, despite international mediators’ involvement, and the lack
of resolution has hindered development throughout the strategic
Caucasus region.
Sporadic border clashes have grown more frequent.
“We are discussing a variation that, by my reckoning, allows a
long-term and peaceful resolution. But I have modest expectations for
this meeting,” Kocharian told reporters.
“The impression is forming that the Azerbaijani side is not fully
devoted to peaceful resolution of the conflict, which the
militaristic statements heard in Baku demonstrate,” he said.
Aliev’s spokesman, Novruz Mammadov, meanwhile accused Armenia of
stoking tensions on the eve of the meeting of the two presidents in
Romania and said Yerevan was not prepared for serious dialogue.
“On the one hand, (Kocharian) agreed to such a meeting, but on the
other, he is already anticipating no results. I think that Kocharian
wants to just protect himself,” Mammadov said.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

NDTV.com, India –
June 4 2006

Chess: Anand crashes in penultimate round

Sunday, June 4, 2006 (Turin):

World number two Viswanathan Anand crashed to a shocking defeat as
Indian men suffered another humiliation going down to a low ranked
Canada by a 1.5-2.5 margin in the 12th and penultimate round at the
Chess Olympiad.

Anand lost early against Pascal Charbonneau on the top board and that
set the tone for another disaster as Surya Shekhar Ganguly was also
stunned by unheralded International Master Thomas Roussel-Roozmon
later in the day.

Former World Junior champion P Harikrishna saved some blushes for the
Indians with a victory on the third board against Krnan Tomas while
Krishnan Sasikiran could only manage a draw against GM Mark
Bluvshtein on the second.

The second seeded Indian team struggled from the first round despite
starting as the second favourites in the 37th edition of the
Olympiad.

Meanwhile, at the top of the tables, Armenia took a huge 2.5 points
lead over nearest rivals China with a clinical 2-2 draw with France
without much ado.

Armenian players settled for peace pretty quickly while the Chinese
men had to work hard for a 3-1 victory over Czech republic and now
they are firmly in second place on 31.5 points, a half point adrift
of nearest rival Russia.

Russian also did well to beat Cuba by a 3-1 margin and even as
Armenia is now almost confirmed for the gold medal the fight for the
silver is still on between Russia and China. (PTI)

Los Angeles Times, CA
June 4 2006

Pounding at the Box Office

Sparse crowd attends card a day after title bout was canceled because
of Castillo’s failure to make weight. Promoters will take a financial
bath.
By Steve Springer, Times Staff Writer
June 4, 2006

LAS VEGAS – As the two preliminary fighters circled each other in the
ring at Thomas & Mack Center, Diego Corrales watched from a tunnel,
his infant daughter, Daylia, in his arms, agony in his eyes.

“It’s tough watching people throw punches,” Corrales said, “knowing I
can’t hit anybody because of him.”

By “him,” Corrales was referring to Jose Luis Castillo, who was back
home in Mexico on Saturday night instead of in the ring battling
Corrales for the World Boxing Council lightweight title. The fight
was canceled Friday afternoon when Castillo weighed in at 139 1/2
pounds, 4 1/2 pounds over the lightweight limit. Corrales came in at
exactly 135.

“Why didn’t he call me up and tell me, ‘I can’t make the weight?’ ”
Corrales said. “This fight could have been salvaged. I would have
done [an agreed-upon] weight of 137 pounds, 136 pounds if we had
known earlier. This is heartbreaking, being here and not being able
to fight.”

Instead, the scheduled semi-main event between International Boxing
Federation flyweight champion Vic Darchinyan, an Armenian living in
Australia, and Luis Maldonado of Mexico became the main event on a
card that included six other fights.

But the public wasn’t buying. Certainly not, for the most part, at
full price.

Arena officials would not release a crowd figure, but there appeared
to be between 2,000 and 2,500 people scattered among the great
expanse of empty red seats and that might be a generous estimate.
Gary Shaw, Corrales’ promoter, estimated the crowd would have been
between 10,000 and 12,000 had Castillo and Corrales fought.

With the hotels dropping their price to one quarter of face value,
Shaw estimated the live gate at $30,000. Shaw, who is suing Castillo,
figures both he and Bob Arum, Castillo’s promoter, will lose about
$250,000 each.

And that’s not counting a $175,000 penalty due the Showtime cable
network, according to one source.

A reporter seeking fans who’d laid out actual money for tickets went
through two sections before finding two paying customers from
Arkadelphia, Ark.

“We had never seen a live fight,” said Fred Owens.

“We were here in town anyway. And some is better than none,” said
Randy Wade.

Coincidentally, among those in the crowd was Eddie Mustafa, who
failed to make weight for his 1981 fight against Michael Spinks. That
was the only other instance longtime boxing observers could remember
when a fight failed to materialize because of a weight issue.

Mustafa, who weighed in at 177 in Washington, D.C., for the 175-pound
match, continued to maintain Saturday night, a quarter of a century
later, that, unlike Castillo, he was the victim of a rigged scale.

The crowd finally made its presence felt during the
Darchinyan-Maldonado fight with Australian, Armenian and Mexican
flags battling for supremacy in the stands.

Darchinyan retained his title and remained unbeaten (26-0, 21
knockouts) by handing Maldonado (33-1-1, 25) his first loss. The
fight was stopped at 1:38 of the eighth round by referee Joe Cortez
after Darchinyan had previously knocked Maldonado down in the sixth.

Most fans may not have paid full price, but some were still willing
to buy Corrales-Castillo shirts, said David Goldfarb, whose company
produces them.

“They think they could be collectors’ items,” Goldfarb said.

Keith Kizer, executive director of the Nevada State Athletic
Commission, reiterated Saturday that penalties against Castillo could
be announced this week, which would be followed by an appeals
process. Castillo could be fined and/or have his license suspended or
revoked. A revocation would mean Castillo could not reapply for a
license for a year.

That would be fine with Shaw.

“Something like this breaks down the fabric of the sport,” Shaw said.
“This is a flagrant violation. The public has been defrauded.”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Boston Globe, MA
June 4 2006

The silence of God
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | June 4, 2006

“WHERE WAS God in those days?” asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood
in Auschwitz last week. “Why was he silent? How could he permit this
endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?”

It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of
death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to death as
many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them
Jews. “In a place like this, words fail,” Benedict said. “In the
end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a
heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent?”

News reports emphasized the pope’s question. Every story noted that
the man who voiced it was, as he put it, “a son of the German
people.” No one missed the intense historical significance of a
German pope, on a pilgrimage to Poland, beseeching God for answers at
the slaughterhouse where just 60 years ago Germans broke every record
for shedding Jewish blood.

And yet some commentators accused Benedict of skirting the issue of
anti-Semitism. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League
said that the pope had “uttered not one word about anti-Semitism;
not one explicit acknowledgment of Jewish lives vanquished simply
because they were Jews.” The National Catholic Register likewise
reported that he “did not make any reference to modern
anti-Semitism.”

In fact, the pope not only acknowledged the reality of Jew-hatred, he
explained the pathology that underlies it. Anti- Semites are driven
by hostility not just toward Jews, he said, but toward the message of
God-based ethics they first brought to the world.

“Deep down, those vicious criminals” — he was speaking of Hitler
and his followers — “by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the
God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles
to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid.
If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who
spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had
to die and power had to belong to man alone — to those men, who
thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world.”

The Nazis’ ultimate goal, Benedict argued, was to rip out Christian
morality by its Jewish roots, replacing it with “a faith of their
own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.”
Hitler knew that his will to power could triumph only if he first
destroyed Judeo-Christian values. In the Thousand-Year Reich, God and
his moral code would be wiped out. Man, unencumbered by conscience,
would reign in his place. It is the oldest of temptations, and
Auschwitz is what it leads to.

“Where was God in those days?” asked the pope. How could a just and
loving Creator have allowed trainload after trainload of human beings
to be murdered at Auschwitz? But why ask such a question only in
Auschwitz? Where, after all, was God in the Gulag? Where was God when
the Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians? Where was God
during the Armenian holocaust? Where was God in Rwanda? Where is God
in Darfur?

For that matter, where is God when even one innocent victim is being
murdered or raped or abused?

The answer, though the pope didn’t say so clearly, is that a world in
which God always intervened to prevent cruelty and violence would be
a world without freedom — and life without freedom would be
meaningless. God endows human beings with the power to choose between
good and evil. Some choose to help their neighbor; others choose to
hurt him. There were those in Nazi Europe who herded Jews into gas
chambers. And there were those who risked their lives to hide Jews
from the Gestapo.

The God “who spoke on Sinai” was not addressing himself to angels or
robots who could do no wrong even if they wanted to. He was speaking
to real people with real choices to make, and real consequences that
flow from those choices. Auschwitz wasn’t God’s fault. He didn’t
build the place. And only by changing those who did build it from
free moral agents into puppets could he have stopped them from
committing their horrific crimes.

It was not God who failed during the Holocaust or in the Gulag, or on
9/11, or in Bosnia. It is not God who fails when human beings do
barbaric things to other human beings. Auschwitz is not what happens
when the God who says “Thou shalt not murder” and “Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself” is silent. It is what happens when men and
women refuse to listen.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

The Scotsman, UK
June 4 2006

The bullets and the babies
PAUL STOKES

Niall Ferguson
The War of the World
Penguin: Allen Lane, £25

IN OCTOBER 1941, Walter Mattner wrote down the following account of
his activities as a policeman on behalf of the Third Reich. “When the
first truckload arrived, my hand was slightly trembling when
shooting,” he wrote. “But one gets used to this. When the 10th load
arrived, I was already aiming more calmly and shot securely at the
many women, children and infants.”

So steady was Mattner’s aim by then that he could take aim at babies
as they were tossed into the air by his comrades. “We shot them down
still in flight, before they fell into the pit and the water,” he
wrote.

It is a horrific account, but there is one more element that makes it
all the more shocking. Mattner’s narrative is not taken from a
statement in a criminal investigation, or even from a page of
confidings to his personal diary. It is taken from a letter home, to
his wife in Vienna. It is not a confession but a triumphant
description of a good day at the office.

Mattner’s letter appears about two-thirds through The War of the
World, the latest, typically ambitious, work from the prolific
historian Niall Ferguson. It is one of a number of occasions in the
book when the grand theme of global conflict just seems to vanish.
The fog of war lifts and you find yourself staring down the barrel of
a gun, on occasions being forced to confront whether you too might
have pulled the trigger. For the really shocking message of this book
is not how unusual a man like Mattner is, but how commonplace.

Ferguson’s account is not limited to horrors perpetrated during the
Third Reich and the Second World War, although that provides the bulk
of the book. On a gruesome global tour of mayhem, we take in the
trenches of the First World War, the Turkish massacres in Armenia –
the first true genocide when as many as one million, a half of the
total Armenian population were slaughtered – the civil wars, purges
and gulags of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, and the
cruelties of the Japanese empire in the East, in particular the Rape
of Nanking. War of the World sets out to explain not just why so much
conflict occurred, but why it was so bloody.

It concentrates, for obvious reasons, on the two global wars. At its
heart, War of the World is a long history of the origins and course
of the Second World War, although, for some reason Ferguson seems
quite keen to disguise that with an introduction and epilogue which
touch very briefly on the century’s many other conflicts, and which
feel slightly tacked on. Perhaps he thought that yet another book on
the Second World War would fail to spark interest. If that is the
case, then he was wrong, for as an exploration of that war in its
widest sense, it is a gripping read.

IF ALL THIS sounds unremittingly gruesome, that’s because it is. Yet,
in the hands of a skilled phrasemaker like Ferguson, it is far from a
grim read. Discussing the failure of the French to resist the German
invasion in 1940, and the British failures against the Japanese in
the Far East, Ferguson points out that both can be attributed to a
failure of nerve, saying: “If Frenchmen were not ready to ‘die for
Danzig’, their British counterparts were just as reluctant to perish
for Penang.”

There is even the odd moment of light relief, as when Ferguson points
out that the Battle of Britain fighter pilots joked that Churchill
was referring to their unpaid mess bills when he said that never in
the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

At the outset Ferguson dismisses the notion of any correlation
between rising casualty lists and increasing firepower. If that were
the case, he argues, then the end of the century would have been more
bloody than the beginning. The most recent and horrific genocide, the
slaughter in Rwanda, was committed using the most basic of killing
machinery. It is not weaponry that is the problem, it is the people
who wield it.

More controversially he also discounts the contribution of the
extreme ideologies of communism and fascism, claiming that such
extreme worldviews have existed before without resulting in such
extreme outcomes.

There is a brief examination of the lessons of evolutionary biology
and the possible insights it might have into the twin urges to kill
and rape which manifest themselves in war, and some distinctly
unsettling psycho-sexual musings on what Ferguson calls the love-hate
relationship between the Nazis and the Jews. But in the end Ferguson
attributes the peculiar bloodiness of the first half of the last
century to the coming together of three factors, ethnic hatred,
economic volatility, and the fall and rise of empires.

The scene is set by the fall of the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian,
and the Kaiser Reich, and the emergence in their place of a number of
nation states comprised of peoples of different ethnic backgrounds.
Under the loose confederation of empire such differences could be
tolerated. Inside the nation state, with its stress on uniformity,
they soon became a source of conflict.

Economics plays its part by exacerbating ethnic tension. Ferguson
stresses volatility as the important factor, suggesting that economic
growth can be as destabilising as contraction, as the benefits it
brings are never evenly spread. Time after time the ethnic groups
singled out for special treatment are prosperous minorities.

It is empire again which provides the trigger for conflict, this time
the imperial ambitions of both Japan and Hitler’s Germany, which
together set off a global war. However, it is the peculiar nature of
both these empires, their belief in their own racial superiority and
the sub-human status of the peoples they conquered, which returns us
again to the idea of ethnic difference.

The big question here is how did the extreme ideologies of the few
translate into the actions of the many? How do you transform an
ordinary policeman from Vienna into a genocidal killer? The gradual
nature of that process, as oppressed minorities are progressively
stripped of their rights, their individuality and their humanity
until they can be slaughtered with impunity, gives the lie to
assertions that it could never happen here.

For all his ability as a writer, there are times when you feel as if
Ferguson is being carried away by the neatness of his own grand
theorising when explaining the messiness of war. Citing economics,
imperial ambition and ethnicity as the cause of bloodshed is a bit
like saying everything is caused by everything else.

At the heart of the darkness of the 20th century is one man, Adolf
Hitler. Was he really inspired to fight a massive murderous war, as
Ferguson asserts, by the volatility of the German economy? It is not
a grand theory but a simple truth that Hitler was motivated by the
human emotion of hatred. That remains very difficult to explain, and
very hard to deal with.

This article:

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Agence France Presse — English
June 4, 2006 Sunday 5:58 PM GMT

Armenian, Azerbaijani presidents meet to discuss disputed enclave

BUCHAREST, June 4 2006

The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan met Sunday in Bucharest to
discuss the disputed enclave of Nagorno Karabakh.

Armenian President Robert Kocharian and Azerbaijani leader Ilham
Aliyev got together for a face-to-face meeting hosted by the Polish
embassy, an Armenian diplomat said, requesting anonymity.

It was the first meeting between the two men since the February 2006
talks in France, which failed in their aim of setting out a framework
for a negotiated settlement of the near-20-year-old conflict.

Kocharian and Aliyev, who will on Monday take part in a forum of the
Black Sea contries in Bucharest, were also received by Romanian
President Traian Basescu.

The pair discussed the Nagorno Karabakh problem with the Romanian
president, Basescu’s office said in a statement, without giving
details.

The Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno Karabakh seceded from
Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, sparking a six-year conflict between
Armenia ad Azerbaijan that claimed that 25,000 lives and displaced
hundreds of thousands of people.

Despite a 1994 ceasefire, tensions remain high and the mountainous
region, surrounded by Azerbaijani territory, is separated by one of
the world’s most militarized zones.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

The coming of the micro-states

June 05, 2006 edition

By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

MOSCOW ` As goes Montenegro, so goes Kosovo, Transdniestria, and South
Ossetia?

As Montenegro officially declared independence this weekend, accepting
the world’s welcome into the community of nations, a handful of
obscure “statelets” are demanding the same opportunity to choose their
own destinies.

In the latest example, Transdniestria, a Russian-speaking enclave that
won de facto independence in the early 1990s, declared last week that
it will hold a Montenegro-style referendum in September as part of its
campaign for statehood.

Experts fear that many “frozen conflicts” around the world – in which
a territory has gained de facto independence through war but failed to
win international recognition – could reignite as ethnic minorities
demand the same right to self-determination that many former Yugoslav
territories have been offered by the international community.

Even more significant than Montenegro’s rise to statehood would be the
international community’s acceptance of Kosovo’s bid for
independence. The province of Serbia was seized by NATO in
1999. Ongoing talks discussing that possibility are being watched with
intense interest by rebel statelets. But as tiny, newly independent
states such as East Timor find themselves mired in ethnic violence,
international observers are wary of the implications of such a move.

“If Kosovo becomes independent, this precedent will cause further
fragmentation of the global order and lead to the creation of more
unviable little states,” predicts Dmitri Suslov, an analyst with the
independent Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow.

Russia has backed the emergence of several pro-Moscow separatist
enclaves in the post-Soviet region, as a means of keeping pressure on
defiant neighbors, but has so far been deterred from granting them
official recognition by international strictures against changing the
borders of existing states. Montenegro’s successful May 21 vote of
independence from Yugoslavia – recognized by the world community – has
encouraged others’ thoughts of following the same path.

The United Nations Charter mentions both the right of
“self-determination” of peoples and the “territorial integrity” of
states as bedrock principles of the world order. But these principles
come into conflict when a separatist minority threatens to rupture an
existing country. Russia, which has a score of ethnic “republics,”
including an active rebellion in Chechnya, has long championed the
“territorial integrity” side of the equation. But the Kremlin’s
emphasis, at least regarding some of its neighbors, appears to be
shifting.

“If such precedents are possible [in the former Yugoslavia], they will
also be precedents in the post-Soviet space,” President Vladimir Putin
told journalists Friday. “Why can Albanians in Kosovo have
independence, but [Georgian breakaway republics] South Ossetia and
Abkhazia can’t? What’s the difference?”

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, all of its 15 major republics
gained their freedom and basked in the glow of global acceptance. But
within some of those new states, smaller ethnic groups raised their
own banners of rebellion. In the early 1990s, two “autonomous
republics” in Georgia – Abkhazia and South Ossetia – defeated
government forces with Russian assistance and established regimes that
are effectively independent but stuck in legal limbo because they
remain officially unrecognized, even by Moscow. The Russian-speaking
province of Transdniestria, aided by the Russian 14th army, similarly
broke away from the ethnically Romanian republic of Moldova. The
Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan fell
under Armenian control after a savage war; and rebels in Russia’s
southern republic of Chechnya briefly won de facto independence in the
late ’90s after crushing Russian forces on the battlefield.

In all of these cases, the international principle respecting the
“territorial integrity” of existing states has so far trumped the
yearning of small nationalities for their own statehood. Citing that
rule, Moscow launched a brutal military campaign in 1999 that has
since largely succeeded in reintegrating Chechnya as a province of
Russia.

But Russia’s relations with Georgia, Moldova, and Azerbaijan have
soured in recent years, as those countries have broken from Moscow’s
orbit and charted a more pro-West course. That, plus the precedents
being set in the former Yugoslavia, has led some nationalist
politicians in Moscow to demand the Kremlin salvage what influence it
can in the region by granting recognition – or even membership in the
Russian Federation – to some of those breakaway entities.

Transdniestria has already signed an economic pact with Moscow that
will allow the tiny but heavily-industrialized territory to sell its
goods in Russia and eventually join the Russian ruble’s currency
zone. Also in the focus of Russia’s changing policies are the
breakaway Georgian republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

“Russia needs to be more active in solving the problems of Abkhazia
and South Ossetia,” says Igor Panarin, a professor at the official
Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, which trains Russian diplomats. “Both
the people and governments of [these statelets] want to join Russia,
and there’s every legal reason for them to do so. Polls show the
majority of Russians support this, too.”

Eduard Kokoity, president of the Georgian breakaway republic of South
Ossetia, said last week he will ask Russia to annex his statelet,
which has existed in legal limbo since driving out Georgian forces in
a bitter civil war in the early ’90s. “In the nearest future, we will
submit documents to the Russian Constitutional Court proving the fact
that South Ossetia joined the Russian Empire together with North
Ossetia as an indivisible entity and never left Russia,” Mr. Kokoity
said.

South Ossetia, with a population of about 70,000, is ethnically and
geographically linked with the Russian Caucasus republic of North
Ossetia. Experts say there is a local campaign, supported by Russian
nationalists, to join the two territories into a new Moscow-ruled
republic that would be named “Alania” – the ancient name of the
Ossetian nation. “South Ossetia really wants to join Russia, and I
wouldn’t rule this out as a long-term prospect,” says Suslov.

Abkhazia, a sub-tropical Black Sea enclave, expelled its Georgian
residents during the 1992-93 civil war, and now is home to about
200,000 ethnic Abkhaz who eke out a living exporting fruit to Russia
and welcoming the few Russian tourists that visit each year.

Georgians cry foul, and complain the entire issue is a made-in-Moscow
land grab. “South Ossetia and Abkhazia were created as a Bolshevik
divide-and-rule device to control Georgia, and they are still being
used that way,” says Alexander Rondeli, president of the Strategic and
International Studies Foundation, an independent think tank based in
the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. “What is actually going on is the de
facto annexation of these territories by Russia. Since Russia is
strong, the Western powers let it do whatever it wants.”

Many Western experts argue that the process of dismantling the former
Yugoslavia is a unique event, directly supervised by the UN and
carried out with a maximum of democratic safeguards. If Russia acts
alone in its region, it risks alienating the world and multiplying
regional conflicts. “This is a double-edged sword,” says Ariel Cohen,
a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “By
recognizing Moscow-supported statelets, Russia would perpetuate
frictions for decades to come. Post-Soviet borders should remain
inviolate. This would save a lot of headaches, first of all for Russia
itself.”

But for now, the mood in Moscow appears to be hardening. “We disagree
with the concept that Kosovo is a unique case, because that runs
counter to the norms of international law,” Russian Deputy Foreign
Minister Vladimir Titov warned in an interview with Vremya Novostei, a
Russian newspaper, last week. “The resolution on Kosovo will create a
precedent in international law that will later be applied to other
frozen conflicts.”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

CO-RAPPORTEUR OF PACE COMMITTEE ON MIGRATION, REFUGEES AND POPULATION
TO VISIT ARMENIA

YEREVAN, JUNE 2, NOYAN TAPAN – ARMENIANS TODAY. Co-Rapporteur of the
PACE Committee on Migration, Refugees and Population Leo Platvoet
(Netherlands, UEL) will visit Armenia on June 3-5. According to the
Council of Europe Information Office in Armenia, Leo Platvoet is
preparing a report on missing persons in Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia. He will submit the report to the PACE in the first half of
2007. During his visit, Leo Platvoet will meet with families of
missing persons in each of these countries, members of the commissions
dealing with issues of missing persons, government representatives,
ombudsmen, deputies of the parliaments and representatives of the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

PanARMENIAN.Net

Greeks Going to Return Previous Status to St. Sophia Church in
Istanbul

02.06.2006 17:17 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ `Free Agia Sophia Council in America’ organizations
has launched an international campaign to make St. Sophia an Orthodox
Church again, American politician of Greek origin Chris Spiru stated a
press conference in Manhattan. He presented the plan of the
organization and emphasized that the matter concerns an international
movement initiated in the U.S. which purposes the objective to
retransform the Great Church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople into a
Cathedral for all Orthodox believers.

He said the Turkish government calls and uses the Church as a museum,
organizes trade exhibitions, concerts and fashion shows in it.
Sacrilege and desecration is taking place. We will use all the
juridical and religious methods to achieve our goal,’ Spiru
underscored. In his words, simultaneously a collection of signatures
will be organized. `Muslims grew indignant over the caricatures of
Prophet Mohammed. We assert our right to pray in the church, which is
a symbol for all Orthodox believers. I think, the moment when Turkey
is striving to join the European Union is quite appropriate for it,’
Mr. Spiru said, reported Greek.ru.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

PanARMENIAN.Net

A-320 Flight Recorders Examination Started

02.06.2006 17:53 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ `The experts and specialists of the International
Aviation Committee proceeded to the forensic examination of the A-320
flight recorders that were withdrawn from the Black Sea bed,’ says the
statement of the Russian Office of Prosecutor General.

According to the statement, the examination of the jet pieces and
genetic investigation of the unidentified bodies is going on. `The
avia-technical and complex examinations are being carried out. Upon
completion of all the examinations the causes of the crash will be
known. Presently the officers are keeping in touch with the Armenian
counterparts,’ the statement says, reported RIA Novosti.

To remind, on the night of May 3 a Yerevan-Sochi flight of Armavia
national carrier crashed in the Black Sea 6 km away from Adler airport
killing all of 113 people aboard, including 6 children and 8
crewmembers. Among them were 26 Russian citizens, one Ukrainian and
one Georgian citizen, while the rest of the passengers were Armenian
citizens.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress