Author: Hovhannisian John

Armenpress
ARMENIAN-GEORGIAN ASSOCIATION TO MEET IN BATUMI IN MAY
YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS: Vladimir Badalian,
an Armenian parliament member and a cochairman of
Armenian-Georgian and Armenian-Ajarian Associations,
told Armenpress an Armenian-Georgian-Ajarian business
forum will be held in Ajaria’s capital Batumi in late
May, to be followed by the meeting of the
Armenian-Georgian intergovernmental commission on
cooperation in Tbilisi.
Badalian said the Associations have been active for
two years already and have managed to remain balanced
organizations despite some tension in bilateral
relationships. Badalian said the major goal of the
Armenian-Ajarian Association is to expand the network
of resorts on the Black Sea coast of Georgia’s
autonomous region of Ajaria that could be available to
Armenia’s middle class. He said last year some 12,000
Armenians spent their summer vacations in Ajaria. He
said if the government of Georgia repairs roads
leading to the region this number may double.
Now it takes 16 hours for mini-buses to travel from
Yerevan to Batumi, but a massive repair of roads
launched by the government of Georgia in Javakheti is
expected to cut the trip to a 6 hour journey.

CBA PLACES MID-TERM GOVERNMENT (TREASURY) COUPON BONDS WORTH AMD 1.5BLN
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
April 19 2006
YEREVAN, April 19. /ARKA/. Central Bank of Armenia placed mid-term
government (treasury) coupon bonds worth AMD 1.5bln on Tuesday. The
CBA press service told ARKA News Agency that AMGN48184109 are
placed. According to the press release, total amount of applications
made AMD 2225550 thousand, of which AMD 128200 thousand on agents’
non-competitive applications. As many as 6 dealers and 6 agents
took part in the bids. The bonds’ average yield made 6,5267% with
maximum 6,8990%.
It should be reminded that the emission announced earlier was equal to
AMD 1.5bln. Coupon yield was initially set at 7% annual interest rate
and calculated taking into account the bonds in circulation. ($1 =
AMD 450.15).

LOVE IS GOLDEN
Blacktown Advocate (Australia)
April 19, 2006 Wednesday
IT was love at first sight for Khorand Zeinali.
Fifty years ago the then goldsmith met his future wife Salbi at a
market in Tehran, Iran. The next day he visited her hairdressing
salon and asked her hand in marriage.
The couple, Christian Armenians, were married 18 days later.
“I felt in my heart she was right for me,” Mr Zeinali, now 75, said.
Though Salbi was at first coy demanding that her suitor ask her
parents for permission first the sentiments were mutual.
“I knew his family, I knew they were nice people . . . and he was
such a handsome man,” Mrs Zeinali, 66, said.
The couple spoke to the Advocate in Farsi as their daughter translated.
While Mrs Zeinali moved to their Marayong home eight years ago,
her husband could not make arrangements to follow from Tehran for
another three years.
They say the separation was tempered by a constant exchange of love
letters and international phone calls.
“It was like I had the world again when I saw her again,” Mr Zeinali
said.
They have five children three living in Sydney and 14 grandchildren.

IRAN TO WARN BAKU ABOUT “SURPRISES” POSSIBLE AFTER JOINING ANTI-IRANIAN COALITION
PanARMENIAN.Net
19.04.2006 01:26 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The visit of the Iranian Defense Minister to
Azerbaijan scheduled for April 19 is conditioned by the anxiety over
Azerbaijan’s possible joining the anti-Iranian coalition, Azeri
political scientist Zardusht Alizade stated. In his words, before
attacking Iran the United State will make an attempt to involve just
one Muslim state into the anti-Iranian coalition. “It’s not ruled
out that Azerbaijan can become this very state. That is why the
Iranian Defense Minister is arriving to Azerbaijan to explain what
“surprises” the joining the anti-Iranian coalition is pregnant with,”
Alizade said, reported Day.az.

IRAN, IRAQ ON AGENDA OF G8 FOREIGN MINISTERS’ SESSION
RIA Novosti, Russia
April 19 2006
MOSCOW, April 19 (RIA Novosti) – The June session of foreign
ministers of the Group of Eight industrialized nations will cover
topics including Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa,
the U.S. under-secretary for political affairs said Wednesday.
Nicholas Burns, attending a meeting of G8 political directors in
Moscow, said a number of countries had also proposed discussing
the situation in the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Moldova and
Georgia, as well as Nagorny Karabakh, a largely ethnic Armenian enclave
inside Azerbaijan, and Abkhazia, a self-proclaimed republic in Georgia.
The session of G8 foreign ministers is scheduled for June 28 prior
to the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in July.

MILITARY TRAININGS WILL BE HELD IN ARTSAKH
A1+
[11:55 am] 18 April, 2006
Military trainings will be held in the NKR from April 18 to 20 in
which all the categories of the NKR armed forces will be involved.
According to the data of the RA Defense Ministry Press Service the
Defense Ministers of the RA and NKR as well as the representatives
of the officer’s personnel of the two countries’ military forces will
be present during the trainings.
The trainings will start in the NKR capital Stepanakert and will
continue in other regions. They will be covered by the “A1+”
correspondent.

OSMAN’S DREAM
By Caroline Finkel
Wall Street Journal
April 11 2006
(Basic Books, 660 pages, $35)
The Ottoman Empire passed into history in 1922, a mere lifetime ago.
Yet in a certain way it feels as distant as ancient Athens or Rome,
known to us mostly through architectural relics, a few striking events
and a mythical aura. Kemal Ataturk’s secular Turkish republic, the
empire’s successor state, consciously rejected much of the Ottoman
heritage and most of its traditions, while the empire’s colonial
outposts have reverted to the imperatives of their local identities.
Yet the religious aspect of the 9/11 attacks has made the Ottomans,
who led the Muslim world for half a millennium, topical again. The
sultans are famous for sacking Constantinople in the 15th century and
besieging Vienna in the 16th. Both events became symbols of Muslim
aggression against Christendom. And the “barbarian Turk” is still
a villain in the folklore of the empire’s northern reaches. Yet
such caricature fails to do justice to the remarkable Ottomans,
whose story is a corrective to the perceived wisdom that Islam is
inherently unable to reconcile itself with the West.
Caroline Finkel takes the title of her Ottoman history from a founding
myth, apparently invented in the 1500s, nearly two centuries after
the death of the first sultan, Osman. It was said that, one memorable
night, Osman dreamed of a beautiful, enormous tree growing from his
navel, a tree whose shade “compassed the world,” including distant
mountains and mighty rivers. It was a tale heavy with imperial
symbolism, meant for a young state that, despite humble beginnings,
had come to dominate parts of Europe and would eventually extend
across northern Africa, including Egypt, through the Middle East and
eastward toward Persia. Osman’s tribe was, after all, only one of
many Turkomen groups that had ventured into Anatolia from Central
Asia and fought against other Muslims for supremacy.
The Ottomans first got Europe’s attention by conquering parts of
Byzantium, the eastern half of the Roman Empire and the protector
of the eastern Christian church. They went on to take the Balkan
peninsula and moved northward toward Hungary. Indeed, for much of
their history, the Ottomans were a notable European power — and not
only geographically. For all the empire’s exoticism, it was flexible
enough, as it spread across continents, to accommodate local laws and
customs, even local ideas and religions. Unlike many European states
of the day, the Ottoman regime was tolerant, multiracial and highly
decentralized, all apparent keys to its success. Jews and Christians
weren’t forced to mass convert, although many did in order to pursue
a better career or lower tax bill.
When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the Ottomans opened their arms.
“Can you call such a king” — i.e., Spain’s Ferdinand — “wise and
intelligent?” asked Sultan Bayezid at the time. “He is impoverishing
his country and enriching mine.” Even so, the Ottoman embrace was
limited. To take but one example: The Jews brought the printing press
to Ottoman lands from Spain and Portugal, but Sultan Bayezid II soon
made publishing a crime punishable by death. Only two centuries later,
during the so-called Tulip Age, when European influence was at its
height, did the Ottomans allow the printing of books in Arabic script.
Throughout the empire’s history, architecture expressed its blending
character. Ottoman mosques are decorative and warm by comparison with
those in Arab countries. They often resemble Christian churches,
which isn’t surprising, since Armenian architects designed a lot
of them. When Sultan Mehmed II captured the seat of the Orthodox
Christian church in Constantinople, the Hagia Sophia (the Church of
Holy Wisdom), he turned it into a mosque with only a few alterations.
Practicing a more tolerant strain of Islam, the Ottomans clashed with
fundamentalists, like the Wahhabi who rose up against them on the
Saudi peninsula in the 18th century. This conflict rages on today in
different forms. In the Balkans and now in Iraq, Saudi money pays for
the razing of Ottoman houses of worship. The zealots prefer glass-and-
steel mosques.
The peak of the Pax Ottomanica came in the 16th century under Suleyman
the Magnificent, who ruled, lest we forget, at the same time as
Britain’s Henry VIII and Russia’s Ivan the Terrible. He surpassed both
in the glories of his court, the arts of his culture and the extent
of his lands. Suleyman defied tradition in one crucial respect: He
fell in love with a slave girl, Hurrem, and had five sons by her; by
convention, concubines were to bear only one. When the sultan married
her, “Hurrem was accused of having bewitched him,” writes Ms. Finkel.
While the empire’s source of legitimacy was the Islamic caliphate in
Istanbul, religion played a fitful role in political life, just as
it did in Christian lands. Wars were justified as “holy” often after
the fact. At various times the French, British and Germans — even the
pope in Rome — stood with the Ottomans against Russia, the Hapsburgs
and the Poles. Such affiliations were built on the universal concept
of self-interest. Before joining the Axis powers in World War I, the
Ottoman rulers called for jihad against the Allies, but geopolitics
obviously had more to do with the alliance than religion.
Ms. Finkel describes the rise of the Ottomans in exhaustive detail,
and their fall, too. Financial trouble, internal strife, wayward
foreign ventures and rising local nationalism — all helped to hasten
the empire’s decline. Napoleon seized Egypt at the turn of the 19th
century. By the middle of it the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of
Europe,” a phrase coined by Russia’s Nicholas I, who did his share
to enfeeble his own country, not least by leading Russia against the
Ottomans and courting defeat in the Crimean War.
One wishes that Ms. Finkel had taken up the hard questions about
the empire’s end. Was there a fatal flaw — imperial overreach, for
example, or the lack of a renaissance in the Ottomans’ intellectual
culture? Was there something in Islam itself, even the Ottoman version,
that could not adapt to modernity? Ms. Finkel does not say.
But her clear prose keeps the story going right up to the end, where
we get another surprise: After the Turks killed more than a million
Armenians in 1915 — the number, the reason and the responsibility
are hotly debated to this day — the Ottoman powers investigated the
soldiers involved and started to put on “the first war crimes trials
in history.”
Ataturk put a quick stop to the trials, drawing a black line through
parts of the past after his new Turkish state was born in the so-
called 1921-22 war of independence (from whom, exactly?). Just as
the Ottomans replaced the turban with the fez in the late 1820s,
aiming to “Europeanize” their culture, Ataturk forced the brim-hat
on his people, to de-Islamicize his own. His experiment in social
engineering went well beyond clothing design.
Will Ataturk’s imperfect secular creation morph into a thriving
democracy or fail again to modernize itself? The jury is out. Yet in
no small part thanks to the remnants of the Ottoman heritage, it is
hard to think of a Muslim country that has a better chance than Turkey
of putting in place a modern economy and a liberal political order.
Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal
Europe.

A REPORT ABOUT THE SITUATION OF THE WOMEN
A1+
[06:50 pm] 17 April, 2006
Today in the RA Parliament Mrs. Vera Oskina, the reporter of the
PACE Committee of the equality of rights between men and women,
and Mrs. Zhanik Devo, worker of the PACE secretariat, were received
by Tigran Torosyan, the head of the RA delegation to PACE and NA
Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Oskina mentioned that she is preparing a report about the situation
of the women in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. She was interested
in the role of the women in the political life of Armenia, their
involvement in the local governing bodies, the issues of trafficking
and family violence in Armenia and the statistics in these fields.
Mr. Torosyan mentioned that trafficking and family violence contradict
to the Armenian traditions and form a negligible percent. Referring
to the involvement of the women in the political events he mentioned
that the Armenian women prefer to be engaged in social activities
than political, as 99% of the heads of NGOs are women.
As for the fact that 25% of the electoral rolls is allotted to women,
according to Mr. Torosyan, “positive” discrimination is not good
either and we must not contribute to the involvement of women with
unnatural steps.
During the meeting other issues of mutual interest were discussed too.

RUSSIAN ANALYZERS ESTIMATE THE 90% OF ARMENTEL SHARES $180 MILLION
Yerevan, April 13. ArmInfo. Russian analyzers appreciate the 90%
shares of ArmenTel $180 million. Referring to MDM bank expert Phillip
Townsend, ‘Vedomosti’ newspaper, Russia, reports that last year
‘Vympelcom’ company started talks with the Greek owners of ArmenTel
about the possible purchase of ArmenTel, but the talks were suspended
because of the position of the Armenian Government. Now when the
matter has been cleared with the Government, the negotiations are
renewed. To Phillip Townsend’s opinion ‘Vympelcom’, owner of BILINE
trademark, will have no problem with buying ArmenTel as in 2007 the
company will posses as minimum $850 million free cash.
According to ‘Vedomosti’, in its turn the OTE company, Greece,
stated that it has started considering various variants of dealing
with the 90% of ArmenTel shares after settling the matter with the
Armenian authorities.
Other cell-operators of Russia also expressed interest in purchasing
ArmenTel. ‘Systema Telecom’ company is also interested in ArmenTel,
told ArmInfo correspondent public contacts director of the company
Anna Boyko. Similar statements were made by ‘Megaphon’ press secretary
Marina Belasheva and ‘Vympelcom’ press secretary Yulia Ostroukhova.
“Mobile service operators are searching for new opportunities to invest
their money to promote their businesses and the purchase of Armentel
is not a bad opportunity,” says managing partner of ACM-Consulting
Mikhail Alexeyev. He notes that despite small population – 3.2 mln –
Armenia still has a low rate of mobile service use – 20%. The country’s
mobile market began to actually develop only last year when K Telecom
started its work in the country, says chief editor of Comnews Leonid
Konik. During ArmenTel’s monopoly people queued for months to get
mobile cards and bought SIM-cards for $200 on the black market.
OTE bought ArmenTel in Mar 1998 from the Armenian Government (41%) and
Transworld Telecommunications (49%). The company committed itself to
invest $200 mln in Armentel in exchange of 15-year monopoly but failed
its commitments. As a result, in late 2004 the Armenian Transport
and Communication Ministry gave one more mobile service license to
K-Telecom. ArmenTel and the ministry refuse to say yet why OTE is
going to sell ArmenTel’s assets.

U.S. DEPARTMENT FOR JUSTICE OFFICIALLY REGISTERED NKR REPRESENTATION IN WASHINGTON
PanARMENIAN.Net
14.04.2006 20:30 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The U.S. Department for Justice published a report on
the activities of formally registered lobbying organizations. According
to the report, the Department of Justice has officially registered
the Representation of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic lobbying
organization. At that the American sources remark it doesn’t mean
official recognition of Karabakh independence by the United States,
since organization by any name can be registered in the U.S.
The lobbying activities in the U.S. are regulated by the law and they
are considered to be the forth power, since their aim is to exert
influence of the U.S. policy, reported RFE/RL.