Author: Hovhannisian John

Armenian opposition plans another rally on 16 April
Mediamax news agency
14 Apr 04
YEREVAN
The Armenian opposition is going to stage another rally on Freedom
Square in Yerevan on 16 April, a representative of the Justice bloc,
MP Shavarsh Kocharyan, has said.
Addressing a briefing in Yerevan today, Shavarsh Kocharyan said that
this decision had been made at a meeting of the Justice and National
Unity opposition factions in the National Assembly today, Mediamax
reports.
In turn, the chairman of the political council of the Republic Party,
Albert Bazeyan, called on the party’s members and supporters to come
tomorrow to the party’s office, which had been sealed by the police,
and demand that it be opened. The Republic’s office was shut down on
the night of 13 April after the police dispersed an opposition rally
and arrested its several leaders.
“Despite the steps that can be taken against us, we will use our civil
and political rights,” Albert Bazeyan said.
Heads of the Armenian Police said on 13 April that they would not
allow the holding of unauthorized rallies in Yerevan.

Iran’s intelligence minister conferred with Armenian foreign minister
IRNA news agency
13 Apr 04

TEHRAN
Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan here Tuesday [13 April]
conferred with Minister of Information Hojjat ol-Eslam Ali Yunesi.
At the meeting, Oskanyan and Yunesi discussed issues of regional and
mutual interest, the public relations department of the ministry said.
[Passage omitted: About Oskanyan’s itinerary in Tehran]

The Russia Journal
Russian media censored in Armenia
MEDIA » :: Apr 13, 2004 Posted: 13:53 Moscow time (09:53 GMT)
YEREVAN – Issues of the Russian newspaper Independent Journal which featured
articles about the Armenian opposition have been prevented from being sold
in Armenian kiosks.
As reported to a Rosbalt correspondent by the Institute for Civic Society,
issues of the newspaper which contained articles about the leader of the
National Unity party, Artashes Gegamian, could not be found anywhere in
Yerevan. Kiosk vendors confirmed they never received copies of the issues in
question.
In addition, broadcasts by the television station NTV were suspended ‘for
technical reasons’. The suspension coincided with the broadcast of material
from April 5, which featured opposition meetings in Yerevan. /Rosbalt/

A1 Plus | 18:33:30 | 13-04-2004 | Politics |
KOCHARYAN OUTDID TER-PETROSYAN IN HIS DETERMINATION TO STAMP ON PEOPLE’S
PROTEST
On Tuesday, National Democratic Union leader Vazgen Manukyan, speaking at a
news conference, compared today’s violence with the 1996 events and said the
then authorities resorted to force after people stormed National Assembly
building.
Unlike the then leadership, the current authorities “launched military
operation” against absolutely peaceful demonstration, he said.

A1 Plus | 13:18:49 | 13-04-2004 | Politics |
AUTHORITIES MAKE EFFORTS TO RETAIN POWER
Water-jets moved toward the crowd paving way for armored soldiers. The
soldiers attacked the people who gathered outside the National Assembly
building in peaceful demonstration Monday night and beat them with
bludgeons.
Great numbers of wounded demonstrators were rushed in hospitals with various
injuries.

Zanganeh Says Draft Contract for Gas Exports to Armenia Ready
Tehran Times
13 April 2004
TEHRAN (PIN) — Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh stated that
a draft contract for gas exports to Armenia was ready.
He added that Iran’s exports to Armenia will start at 500m cu. m. and
could be increased up to 1.5b cu. m.
The minister further told Petroenergy Information Network that the
contract would soon be signed by Armenian officials.
Zanganeh noted that general talks had been carried out with Indian
companies for developing some Iranian fields and negotiations on LNG
exports from Iran to India would parallel those talks.
`If the talks prove fruitful, implementation of ensuing projects will
not take long,’ he said.
Zanganeh noted that setting a deadline by the Indian side was
pointless and new reports sometimes sought to affect the process of
negotiations.
Some news services had reported that a senior official of the Indian
ministry of petroleum had announced a four-month deadline for Iran.
Based on the deadline, if Iran wanted to export 5m tons natural gas to
India, it should give development of a big field to Indian companies.

ArmeniaWeek.com
April 18, 2003 – “Word on the Street”
A New Law ?
We asked citizens of Yerevan what they thought of the Constitutional Court’s
suggestion that the National Assembly adopt the necessary legislation to
conduct a referendum one year from now, as a sort of presidential vote of
confidence. Also, if they thought such a vote would be a solution to the
continuing doubts.
Here is what they said:
I doubt that such a law would pass, because no president would allow it,
since it would be something against him. And as for the people’s doubts,
that would be a good thing.
– Varduhi Khachatrian, 29, Designer
Knowing our people, such a law would permit them to change a president once
a year. Because of that I think passing such a law would be an ignorant
thing to do, and would solve nothing.
– Anita Grigorian, 38, Musician
In any case, it would be good to pass such a law because it would show Mr.
Demirchian that the people have chosen their president fairly and honestly.
And as for the doubts people have, this law will not put them to rest.
– Irina Lavanian, 28, Sociologist
I doubt such a law would ever pass. Each presidential candidate would be
going through it, and I don’t think it would be a pleasant thing for any of
them to leave their positions a year later. As for the people, that would be
a great for them to conduct future elections more fairly.
– Karen Barkhudarian, 33, Computer Operator
It would be stupid to pass such a law as it will become a game for them.
That will not relieve any doubts but will create more confusion.
– Mikael Babian, 25, Jeweler
If the people are unhappy with their president or have doubts about their
choice, then they have the right to express that through this law. I think
this can be a good law.
– Laura Tadevosian, 44, Lawyer
If this law passes, it will be great, because that will force the president
to work more honestly and efficiently, and to avoid mistakes. And the people
will finally have a legal venue through which they can express their
complaints to the president.
– Anahit Mkrtchain, 35, Salesperson
I highly doubt that if such a law passes, it will be useful. Just like other
laws, this too will remain on the books, and there alone. And the people
will always find something to be doubtful about their president. I don’t
think this law is any kind of solution.
– Armen Matvosian, 30, Journalist
Such a law will never pass because it will create confusion in the
government. The people will end up losing and they won’t have the means to
show their discontent.
– David Voskanian, 62, Politician

ArmenPress
April 9 2004
ARMENIAN EPIC POEM “DAVID OF SASOUN” TRANSLATED INTO UKRAINIAN
YEREVAN, APRIL 9, ARMENPRESS: The Ukrainian “Dnepro” publishing
house has released the Ukrainian translation of the Armenian epic
poem “David of Sasoun.” It was translated by a well known poet and
translator Pavlo Tichina in collaboration with Victor Kochevski. The
introductory word is written by a well known expert in Armenian
literature Vasil Shkliar.
Armenian foreign ministry said Armenian Ambassador to Ukraine
Armen Khachatrian visited Viktor Kochevski to congratulate him on his
80-th anniversary and to praise his work. The translation took him
and his co-translator about 10 years.

ArmenPress
April 9 2004
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND HISTORICAL MEMORY PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH
YEREVAN, APRIL 9, ARMENPRESS: The Armenian Genocide and Historical
Memory, this the name of a book by Verjine Svazlian, consisting of
650 survivors stories of eye-witnesses of the Armenian genocide,
methodically carried out by the government of Turkey between
1915-1922, published in English earlier this month.
Verjine Svazlian collected most of these testimonies herself
through many years, across Armenia as well as some interviews abroad.
The book also contains folk songs, many of which in Turkish,
depicting the events of the Genocide, “the screams of the unheard
suffering, protest, as well as the heroic resentment of the people
subjected to genocide, undeniable testimonies addressed to the Turk
historians and politicians of today who are denying the Genocide.
This book is a heavy contribution to the history of the Armenian
Genocide. Published in 500 copies it will be distributed to foreign
embassies in Armenia, international organizations, researching in
Armenian history. Its Turkish-language edition will appear soon.
Ethnographer and folklorist, Verjine Svazlian was born in 1934 in
Alexandria (Egypt) in the family of a writer and public man Garnik
Svazlian, himself an eye-witness survivor of Turkish tyranny. In
1947, she was repatriated with her parents to Armenia. In 1956, she
graduated with honors from the Department of the Armenian Language
and Literature of Abovian Pedagogical Institute.
Beginning from 1950-s she started on her own initiative writing
down and thereby saving from a total loss various folklore creations
communicated by the repatriates forcibly deported from Western
Armenia, Cilicia and the Armenian-inhabited provinces of Anatolia, as
well as the narrated memoirs of the eye-witness survivors of the
Genocide.

The Globe and Mail, Canada
April 6 2004
Acadia on our minds

A musical adaptation of Antonine Maillet’s epic novel of the Great
Expulsion of 1755 is being staged against the backdrop of renewed
interest in this dark chapter of our history, KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE
writes
By KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE
Wednesday, April 7, 2004 – Page R1

If lyricist and musical-book writer Vincent de Tourdonnet and
composer Allen Cole didn’t spend the past seven years collaborating
on their musical adaptation of Antonine Maillet’s epic novel about
the Acadian expulsion, Pélagie-la-Charrette, you’d think they were
busy manipulating historical dates and rearranging recent events to
give their long-awaited show maximum cultural mileage. As their
musical — retitled Pélagie: An Acadian Odyssey — opens tomorrowat
CanStage’s Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto, its historical moment
couldn’t be more fortuitous.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Samuel de
Champlain and the establishment of the first French settlement (in
what is now Canada) between New Brunswick and Maine. The Acadian
community in North America is counting down to next year’s 250th
anniversary of the 1755 Great Deportation (also known as the Great
Expulsion or Le Grand dérangement), during which thousands of
Acadians (a neutral, French-speaking Maritime community) were
separated from their families, dispersed across the continent and
also sent back to Europe after refusing to swear allegiance to the
British.
Last December, after decades of diplomatic efforts, Ottawa endorsed a
royal proclamation acknowledging the wrongs inflicted on Acadians
during the Great Expulsion.And while English Canada was too busy
following American Idol or recreating a local version of it, last
year’s winner of Quebec’s Star Académie was Wilfred LeBouthillier, a
handsome young Acadian from the fishing town of Tracadie-Sheila,
N.B., who took la belle province, particularly its thriving tabloid
culture, by storm. Shortly thereafter Acadian author and journalist
Herménégilde Chiasson was named New Brunswick’s 29th
lieutenant-governor.
Earlier this year at the Stratford Festival, a successful workshop of
a musical by Don Carrier (book) and Anaya Farrell (music) of American
poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s pastoral poem Evangeline —
inspired by the same events as Pélagie — suggests that its
production date is getting closer and that our fascination with
Acadian culture and folklore is entering a new phase to sustain not
one but two major Canadian mainstream musicals. (An American musical
version of Evangeline by composer and lyricist Paul Taranto aired on
some PBS stations in 2000.)
Why the sudden interest in a community and a culture that has been
part of the Canadian landscape, symbolically if not always
physically, for centuries? And, more peculiarly, why now? Is there
some historical lesson at work here, or is Acadian culture the
equivalent of the urban bus that you wait so long for and then two or
three turn up?
There is evidence to suggest the former hypothesis wins: It’s Acadia
and not Georgia that’s on our minds, and for good reasons. The
Acadian experience is an early prototype of numerous processes of
ethnic dispossession and, on a relatively small scale, ethnic
cleansing, that marked various chapters of the past century —
beginning with the Armenian genocide; culminating in the Holocaust in
the middle; and continuing with events in the former Yugoslavia and
Rwanda at the end. The Acadian expulsion resonates with us today in a
world where ethnicities and nationhood preoccupy headlines, and daily
add more and more grey to Kofi Annan’s hair at the United Nations.
De Tourdonnet is only too happy to see his work take on levels beyond
those of romantic musical theatre. “That’ll be my fondest dream,” he
says during a break from rehearsals. “Antonine Maillet never for a
moment saw what she wrote as exclusively a reflection of Acadian
culture. The themes of exile, longing for home, maintaining the
culture, are all striving to be universal.”
The musical focuses on Pélagie Leblanc (Susan Gilmour) who gathers
her family from the southern parts of the United States to begin
their long journey home to Nova Scotia. De Tourdonnet’s adaptation
(Cole also gets a credit as a book writer) doesn’t shy away from the
more shockingly depressing aspects of the journey (death, violence,
anti-Catholic prejudice) and, though fictional, is historically
sensitive and faithful to the political events behind them.
“It’s a dark, dark chapter of Canadian history and, of course, the
darkest chapters are the most fascinating,” he says. “I think,
historically, there has been an attempt to sweep it under the
carpet.”
But it’s more than historical significance (or amnesia) that makes
Maillet’s novel a seminal work about a seminal event. Maillet
intended her book as a response to the myth of Evangeline, as
rendered by Longfellow.
“She wanted a new myth for Acadia,” de Tourdonnet suggests.
Historians and literary critics agree that Longfellow took numerous
liberties with details of the expulsion, and the result is a “very
Victorian,” in de Tourdonnet’s assessment, take on Acadian history
where suffering and sublimation of desire assume the place of
political and cultural affiliations.
“There’s not a lot of conflict in the poem,” Carrier, better known as
a Stratford classical actor says, on the phone from Stratford. “There
are many lines about people working in the blooms and in the field.”
Instead, and as development on the musical continued over the past
five years, the original narrative “left us with a huge opportunity
to create a story using the poem as a kind of framework.”
The work’s contemporary resonance posed the possibility of updating
it and setting it in Yugoslavia, Carrier says — a scenario he
considered and abandoned.
Just as well. No myth is in more need of a cultural re-evaluation
than Evangeline, an early example of life cashing in on art.
Evangeline’s Odyssey, an exhibition at Nova Scotia’s Acadia
University Art Gallery in 2002, examined how the poem proved just as
enchanting to the commercial sector in the Maritimes as it did for
the American public — chocolate, bicycles, toothpaste bearing the
name of Evangeline — and to a tourist industry that still organizes
trips to “the Land of Evangeline.”.
“I know from talking to people in Acadia that they don’t like the
story very much. It makes the society a bit kitsch,” Carrier says.
It’s not a coincidence that the two grand narratives of the Acadian
expulsion are named after and feature women. For de Tourdonnet, it
was part of the book’s attraction.
“Our greatest heroes in the world are mothers protecting their
children but we never think of them as such,” he says. “There’s an
incredibly feminine character to our Canadian culture, and I think to
some degree the French-Canadian culture has had some effect on the
fact that that’s true of Canadian culture in general.” Don Cherry’s
comments earlier this year about the less-than-manly habits of
French-Canadian hockey players, de Tourdonnet says, “tapped into
something that’s not without its significance. And, coming from the
other side, it’s something I’m proud of.”
And while the actual events of the expulsion and the subsequent
scattering of a people remains tragic, there is something else to be
proud of in the Acadian experience.
“It’s the idea that their culture can exist whether or not they have
a chunk of land that’s ethnically their own,” de Tourdonnet explains.
“They can just exist and the celebration of that . . . is something
completely contemporary and significant to almost every country in
the world where they are minorities struggling to find their place
within the federation. To Canada, too,” he adds. “The fact that our
cultural identity can be considered more important than our national
identity is part of what this story suggests. We can be who we are,
and there’s nothing contradictory about it.”
At a time when these Canadian values are under attack by both
hate-mongers and right-wing commentators, the example of Acadia —
distinctive despite attempts at assimilation and assimilated while
remaining distinctive — should provide a role model to countries as
diverse as Sudan, Iraq or Spain, and even, it could be argued, for
the North American native population.
Instead of our own mini version of a pogrom, it becomes a story of
cultural survival and resistance. Viewed within an anthropological
framework, Acadians join other diasporic communities that challenge
the old assumption that “there is an immutable link between cultures,
peoples, or identities and specific places,” in the words of Smadar
Lavie and Ted Swedenburg in their book Displacement, Diaspora, and
Geographies of Identity.
The irony of an English-language musical about a French-speaking
people hasn’t escaped de Tourdonnet, who’s bilingual and of French
and Eastern European descent. “This is the most significant place in
Canada that I can be within the musical scene.”
For de Tourdonnet, who first met Maillet when she translated his
English musical about Joan of Arc into French for a production in
Montreal, there is no one else he’d rather entrust with the
translation of this musical version. “No question about it. Antonine
will be the one to translate it,” de Tourdonnet says. Something about
history and full circle comes to mind.
Pélagie: An Acadian Odyssey runs at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre
from tomorrow through May 1.