Author: Emil Lazarian

PARLIAMENTARIANS WARN FRENCH COUNTERPARTS AGAINST PASSING ‘GENOCIDE’ BILL
New Anatolian, Turkey
May 16 2006
Turkish Parliamentarians Union head Hasan Korkmazcan said yesterday
that a bill about the so-called Armenian genocide facing the French
Parliament this week will set a historical test for bilateral
relations, while French Ambassador to Ankara Paul Poudade asserted
that the French government opposes the bill.
The debates about the bill proposing prison terms and fines to those
who question the claims are mounting as the date for debates of the
bill looms.
Speaking at a press conference in Parliament yesterday, Korkmazcan
said that all the propaganda steps taken regarding the so-called
Armenian genocide are aiding and abetting terrorism.
Underlining that some politicians who have been trapped by the web of
the Armenian lobby in France, which has a limited political influence,
accepted the Armenian genocide claims, Korkmazcan said that the real
leaders of the slander campaign in France are the underground forces
behind the terrorist Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia
(ASALA).
Calling propaganda over the so-called Armenian genocide a crime against
humanity, Korkmazcan said that this crime has been committed by many
Western countries since 1974.
“The bill set to be debated on Thursday extinguishes the human struggle
for the establishment of scholarly research and freedom of expression,”
said Korkmazcan, adding that the Turkish Parliament will take steps
to effectively respond if the bill is passed.
In related news, French Ambassador to Ankara Paul Poudade said
yesterday that the French government opposes the bill. Poudade also
expressed hope that the bill won’t be passed and Turkish-French
relations won’t be harmed.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

DIASPORAN ARMENIAN WRITER JIRAYR ATTARIAN PASSES AWAY IN NEW YORK
Noyan Tapan
Armenians Today
May 15 2006
NEW YORK, MAY 15, NOYAN TAPAN – ARMENIANS TODAY. Diasporan Armenian
writer and publicist Jirayr Attarian passed away in New York on May
9. The Istanbul “Marmara” daily informed about it, quoting information
of the “Hayrenik” (Fatherland) weekly published in the U.S. Jirayr
Attarian was born in Konya on August 7, 1914. He lost his father when
he was 2 years old, then when he was 9 years old he moved with his
uncle first to Damascus, then Lebanon. In Lebanon he collaborated
with the “Orian” radio. Attarian was one of the first editorial
staff members of the “Bagin” literary magazine. He was in Lebanon
a member of the Education Council for many years. During the first
years of the literary activity he wrote in the French language, then
translated his works into Armenian. In 1971 Jirayr Attarian moved
to the U.S. and settled in New York where he led the post of the
National Primacy Divine Head. Attarian is an author of two books,
the first of which is “Life is Beautiful,” was published in 1981
in Beirut, and the second “Verj, Hajordiv” (The End in Succession),
in New York in 1991. He translated in 1987 Henry Vernoy’s “Mother”
novel. Jirayr Attarian’s 4th work was given to the publishing house
and was to be published in few days, but the writer was not fortunate
enough to see publication of his new book. His articles and stories
are gathered in this book of new type, consisting of 400 pages.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

AFTER ORINATS YERKIR’S LEAVING COALITION NUMBER OF PARTY MEMBERS IN SYUNIK INCREASES
Noyan Tapan
May 15 2006
KAPAN, MAY 15, NOYAN TAPAN. No one has put in application on
leaving the Orinats Yerkir (Country of Law) Party at the Syunik
“Kapan” main regional structure of the party. The structure has 980
members. As Noyan Tapan correspondent was informed from the structure,
33 persons have applied for joining the Orinats Yerkir Party since
the party’s leaving the ruling coalition up to this day. According
to some information, Lernik Petrosian, Head of Syunik “Dzork”
regional structure, has an intention to leave OYP. L.Petrosian is the
former Head of the Education, Culture and Sport Department of Syunik
Administration and he was dismissed in April as, according to him, he
had been made to become a member of the Republican Party of Armenia
(RPA). In his telephone talk to Noyan Tapan correspondent on May 15
Lernik Petrosian said that he was non-partisan until May 6, whereas
they informed from OYP that he has been a member of OYP since 2006
February. Heads of some village communities and employees of other
structures who are members of OYP remain on theis posts. To recap,
Chairman of Syunik district electoral commission N 37 is also a member
of OYP.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

GYUMRI INHABITANTS PROUDLY SEE OFF THEIR SONS TO NATIONAL ARMY
Noyan Tapan
May 15 2006
GYUMRI, MAY 15, NOYAN TAPAN. The spring call-up has started in Gyumri:
30 conscripts have been already called up for service in the national
army.
According to the Noyan Tapan Gyumri correspondent, the parents had
high spirits and were proud to see off the conscripts gathered in
the yard of the Military Registration and Enlistment Office. “I say
proudly and I do not afraid as I know that the ministers are also
parents, they have sons and see off their sons in the same way,”
many of the parents said. And some of them mentioned: “If neither
our sons nor I and others leave for the military service, who should
serve for our homeland?” As Aram Grigorian, Head of the Call-up
Department of Gyumri Military Registration and Enlistment Office,
informed, various diseases have been revealed as a result of medical
examinations of young men of call-up age this year. At the same time
it was mentioned that the number of young men suffering from diseases
is almost the same as compared with the previous call-ups. According
to A.Grigorian, the number of those evading the call-up and applying
for the alternative military service has considerably decreased this
year compared with the previous years.

MHER SHAHGELDIAN: EACH STEP AGAINST ORINATS YERKIR WILL RECEIVE ADEQUATE ANSWER
Noyan Tapan
May 15 2006
YEREVAN, MAY 15, NOYAN TAPAN. “During this period a number of
politicians, persons, in their opinion, tried to make use of the
situation, there were and I think there will be those who will
cast political stones at the Orinats Yerkir” Mher Shahgeldian,
Orinats Yerkir (Country of Law) Party Vice-Chairman, Chairman of
RA NA Standing Committee on Defence, National Security and Internal
Affairs, expressed such an opinion about the recent home political
developments. Meanwhile, he reminded that “there is time to cast
stones and there is time to gather stones”. According to him,
attempts to apply “dirty technologies” are being already made at
present but each step against the party will receive an adequate
answer. OYP coalition partners, the Republican Party of Armenia
(RPA) and the ARF Dashnaktsutiun, are rather reserved in their their
comments. The ARF considers OYP’s leaving the coalition as a “normal
civilized fenomenon” and thinks that “there is no need to look for any
tragedy here”. In particular, according to Hrayr Karapetian, Secretary
of NA ARF Dashnaktsutiun faction, it is up to each political force
to decide its future policy and actions plan. RPA also considers
the recent home political developments to be “natural”. According
to Galust Sahakian, Head of the party’s parliamentary faction, the
above-mentioned developments are also conditioned by the circumstance
that 2006 is a preelection year. The above-mentioned two coalition
forces reaffirm that they will continue to act within the framework
of the memorandum signed on June 11 2003 being ready for cooperation
with other political forces.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

RUSAL GETS 7-YEAR $23 MLN LOAN TO MODERNIZE ARMENIAN FOIL PLANT – 1
RIA Novosti, Russia
May 16 2006
(Adds details in and after lead)
MOSCOW, May 16 (RIA Novosti) – RUSal said Tuesday it had taken out
a 7-year $23-million loan from the Black Sea Trade and Development
Bank to finance final modernization of Armenia’s Armenal foil plant.
Modernization will implement a full production cycle and broaden the
range of products the plant produces, said the leading international
aluminum and alloy producer, which also acted as guarantor on the loan.
The first stage of the $70-million modernization program began in
2004 and was completed in December 2005. Armenal, a joint venture
of RUSal and the Armenian government, is slated to come into full
operation in June 2006.
Founded in March 2000 after a merger of major aluminum plants in
the former Soviet Union, RUSal exports aluminum to 50 countries,
and operates in nine Russian regions and 13 countries. The company
holds 75% of the Russian market and 10% of the international market,
and bought Armenal in January 2003.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ROBOTIC DEVICE DEPLOYED TO FIND BLACK BOXES
The Moscow Times, Russia
May 17 2006
The federal government launched an operation Tuesday to recover the
flight recorders from an Armenian passenger plane that crashed in
the Black Sea, sending a robotic device with a hydraulic arm to the
sea floor in an attempt to bring up the “black boxes.”
Authorities hope the recorders will help determine the cause of the
May 3 crash of the Armavia Airbus A320, which plunged into the sea
in heavy rain and poor visibility as it approached the airport on
a flight from the Armenian capital, Yerevan, to the resort city of
Sochi, killing all 113 people on board.
An official involved in the operation said the recovery device was
lowered from a ship and reached the sea floor, where the recorders
were believed to be lying about 5 meters apart at a depth of just
under 500 meters, Itar-Tass reported.
The RT-1000 apparatus has been used by geologists to lift natural
objects weighing up to 40 kilograms from the sea floor, but has
not been used at such depths, Itar-Tass quoted a Transport Ministry
official, Alexander Davydenko, as saying. He said authorities believed
the device could lift fragments weighing up to 12 kilograms and the
flight recorders, which weigh 7 kilograms, the report said.
The operation to retrieve the boxes could take three days, officials
said.
Prosecutors dismissed the possibility of terrorism, and officials
pointed to the rough weather or pilot error as the likely cause. But
Armavia officials suggest air traffic controllers should at least
share the blame.(AP)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

6.htm
Armenian Genocide Remembered
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Albuquerque Journal
Copyright 2006 Albuquerque Journal
By Toby Smith
Many Americans of a certain age grew up hearing their parents issue
this dinnertime command to eat up: “Think of all the starving
Armenians!”
The curious expression was actually based on fact. Ninety years ago in
Armenia, starvation was a way of life. So was torture and mass
extermination, according to a new documentary.
On Thursday at 10 p.m., KNME-TV presents “The Armenian Genocide,” a
powerful film that details long-ago horrors.
Starting in 1915, and continuing for eight years, more than 1 million
Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks in what has been, the
documentary reveals, “one of the greatest untold stories of the 20th
century.”
Andrew Goldberg wrote, directed and produced the hourlong
film. Narration is provided by a range of American actors.
Convinced that Turkish-Armenians, most of whom were Christian, were
the cause of problems within the sprawling, Muslim-dominated Ottoman
Empire, the Turks set out on insidious revenge.
There are approximately 150 Armenians in New Mexico and none has been
untouched by the genocide.
“My mother and sisters told me things,” says Vahram “Bill” Knadjian,
who is seated at his desk in the rug shop he opened on Albuquerque’s
Central Avenue more than a half-century ago.
Knadjian (pronounced Ka-nay-jun) is 92 years old, white-haired and
stooped. But his memory is clear enough to cause his eyes to moisten
when he talks of his youth in a ravished land.
“The first 10 years of my life were hell,” he says.
Though he was barely 2 when the Turks began to systematically erase
from the Ottoman Empire all Turkish-Armenians, Knadjian still carries
the horrors around him.
First to go in 1915 was his father, Soghomon Knadjian. The older man
was pulled from the family home in Urfa, Turkey, lined up against a
wall and shot by the Turkish Army.
Next, says Bill Knadjian, the Turks tied his brother, Yervant, 14, by
the ankles and beat the bottoms of his feet until they bled and
cracked.
“Then they poured saltwater into his wounds,” Knadjian says, “and
threatened to hang him each morning. His feet swelled. His feet
finally healed, but his brain never did. I wished they had killed
him.”
In 1916, the Turks sent Bill Knadjian, his mother and his two older
sisters and two younger ones on one of the genocide’s notorious “death
marches.”
The idea was to starve to death women and children by forcing them to
walk long distances without food.
Along the way Knadjian’s two older sisters, then teenagers, were raped
and murdered, he says, by Turkish soldiers.
The march took a year. “We ate every dog and every cat we could find,”
he says. When the family reached the Euphrates River in 1917, it was
red with blood and polluted with bodies, according to Knadjian. Typhus
fever plagued his mother, but somehow she survived.
The hatred Turks had for Armenians had been born years before, says
Knadjian.
“Massacres,” he says. “Constant massacres.”
In 1855, his great-grandfather, he learned, was killed by Turks. In
1895, his grandfather, a minister, was shot in front of his six
children.
The Turkish people almost universally believe that the Armenian
genocide didn’t happen. Wartime tragedies, Turks say. A few atrocities
perhaps, but no more. The term “genocide” or references to it appear
in no history books in Turkey.
On some public broadcasting stations, a half-hour, forumlike debate on
the issue will follow the documentary.
The documentary was to be shown on nearly 350 PBS stations, but almost
a third declined to show the debate.
KNME-TV won’t air the debate, which Chad Davis, the station’s director
of content, called “flawed.”
Emriye Ormaci, vice consul at the Turkish Consulate General in
Houston, agreed the panel wasn’t very strong, “but the documentary
only shows the Armenian side of the issue.”
In 1923, Bill Knadjian left the region for the United States. After a
while he settled in Los Angeles where he learned the rug business. In
1939, he became a U.S. citizen. Fifteen years later, he arrived in
Albuquerque. He still works every day in the showroom he built just
west of the University of New Mexico.
When asked if he has been back to Turkey or Armenia, Knadjian seems
genuinely surprised.
“You want me to go back there? That will never happen. America is my
home. It always will be.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

PRESS RELEASE
Armenian National Committee
Eastern United States
P.O. Box 1066
New York, NY 10040
Contact: Doug Geogerian
Tel: 917 428 1918
Fax: 718 651 3637
E-mail: [email protected]
Web:
New York Times Rebukes Turkey over Armenian Genocide Issue
The Armenian National Committee (ANC) of the Eastern United States commends
The New York Times for pointing out Turkey’s “self-destructive obsession
with denying the Armenian Genocide” in its editorial section today. Noting
Turkey’s inflammatory and intimidating response to governments and
individuals, who speak truthfully about the first genocide of the 20th
century, The Times pointed out three of many deepl troubling examples.
“The Turks pulled out of a NATO exercise this week because the Canadian
prime minister used the term ‘genocide’ in reference to the mass killings of
Armenians in Turkey during and after World War I. Before that, the Turkish
ambassador to France was temporarily recalled to protest a French bill that
would make it illegal to deny that the
Armenian genocide occurred. And before that, a leading Turkish novelist,
Orhan Pamuk, was charged with ‘insulting Turkish identity’ for referring to
the genocide,” stated The Times.
As Turkey attempts to join the European Union, it is coming under increasing
pressure to recognize the genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians were
systematically exterminated. Turkey faces growing difficulty, and now
editorial reproach from the paper of record, for its ninety-one year
practice of persecuting journalists, government officials and ordinary
citizens who exercise what should be their right to free speech. Publisher
Ragip Zarakolu and journalist Hrant Dink, who recently addressed Armenian
communities in the US, are only two of many brave individuals who have been
prosecuted for informing the Turkish public about the genocide.
“The Armenian National Committee and the Armenian American community are
gratified to see that after changing its policy by allowing its reporters to
describe the events of 1915 as genocide, the New York Times has come to
rebuke Turkey for its sinister and anti-democratic campaign of genocide
denial. Decades of hard, thoughtful work to get the Times and the Boston
Globe to attune their coverage of the issue with historical scholarhsip have
borne valuable fruit,” said Dikran Kaligian, Chairman of the ANC in the
Eastern United States.
The Armenian National Committee (ANC) is dedicated to advancing the concerns
of Armenian-Americans, the foremost of which is achieving recognition of the
Armenian Genocide. In light of the Turkish government’s campaign to have
U.S. media organizations as well government officials deny the genocide, the
ANC strives to oppose
revisionist agendas, which either out of racists or other unscrupulous
motives, defame a people through attempting to negate the historicity of its
mass victimization.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

TURKS FUMING OVER GENOCIDE CLAIM
Rick Wallace, Victorian political reporter
The Australian
May 16 2006
,20867,19162502-2702,00.html
A LABOR MP of Greek descent who raised genocide allegations in
the Victorian parliament has sparked an international row with the
Turkish Government.
Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has warned backbencher Jenny
Mikakos against accusing Turkey of committing a “holocaust” comparable
to Adolf Hitler’s.
“This claim is just the distortion of historical facts,” it said
in a statement issued to The Australian yesterday that is likely to
infuriate the Greek Government and Greeks throughout the world.
“These baseless claims are counter-productive and in contrast with
co-operation and (the) dialogue spirit which we endeavour to develop
between Greece and Turkey.”
Ms Mikakos’s comments also incensed a fellow Labor MP, Michael
Leighton, who is the son of a holocaust survivor whose relatives died
in Hitler’s wartime slaughter of Jewish people.
The row started when Ms Mikakos called on Turkey to apologise for the
alleged killing of more than 350,000 Greeks in the so-called Pontian
genocide between 1916 and 1923.
“Unlike Germany, which has taken responsibility for the Jewish
holocaust, Turkey has never apologised to its victims,” she said.
Ms Mikakos defied Premier Steve Bracks’s efforts to quell the row
yesterday by releasing a statement repeating her accusations of
genocide, although she dropped any mention of the holocaust.
Labor sources said Mr Bracks privately “carpeted” Ms Mikakos for her
comments last week amid fears they would spark race-based bickering
within the party in the lead-up to the November election.
The two Labor MPs of Turkish descent in the parliament, John Eren and
Adem Somyurek, who interjected during her speech on May 4, refused to
fan the row yesterday, despite Ms Mikakos repeating the genocide claim.
“I raised the genocide of Pontic Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians in the
Victorian parliament in the lead-up to this Friday’s commemoration,”
she said.
“I have never vilified any community.”
Her comments relate to incidents during and after World War I,
a period when Turkey and Greece were fighting each other.
“Between 1916 and 1923 over 353,000 Pontic Greeks living in Asia Minor
and in Pontos, which is near the Black Sea, died as a result of the
20th century’s first but less known genocide,” she told parliament.
“Over a million Pontic Greeks were forced into exile. In the preceding
years, 1.5 million Armenians and 750,000 Assyrians in various parts
of Turkey also perished.
“Most victims died from exhaustion or dehydration on forced marches
or work in the so-called labour battalions.”
But the Turkish Government continues to deny that a holocaust involving
Pontian Greeks, Armenians or Assyrian Christians took place. “The
so-called Pontian genocide is devoid of historical basis,” the Foreign
Ministry told The Australian.
“We suggest that the Greek authorities and scholars evaluate the
historical events in an objective manner instead of coming forward
with these kind of allegations which would damage the Turkish-Greek
bilateral relations.”
The two countries have vastly improved their relationship in recent
years with Greece now supporting Turkey’s inclusion in the European
Union.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress