Author: Hovik Karapetian

Empty seats anger stranded BA flyers
by Helen Nugent and Joanna Bale
The Times (London)
August 15, 2005, Monday
BRITISH Airways faced a fresh row last night over flying with empty
seats while refusing to take passengers still stranded at Heathrow
airport by last week’s wildcat strike.
Customers who had been stranded for 72 hours after a walkout by
baggage handlers reacted with disbelief when they learnt that they
could have been spared another night of sleeping rough.
BA’s rivals leapt upon the latest disclosure as a further public
relations disaster for the company after the walkout last Thursday,
which delayed more than 100,000 passengers and cost an estimated
£40 million.
Around 600 frustrated travellers were still waiting for their flights
last night and BA admitted that the backlog would take until tomorrow
to clear.
However, the airline refused to say how many flights had departed
with empty seats in first and business class because of its refusal
to offer an upgrade to marooned economy-class customers.
Passengers advised by their travel agents to request an upgrade were
told that the airline’s policy was to keep economy ticket holders in
economy class despite the long delays, The Times has learnt.
A spokeswoman for BA admitted: “Some flights have gone out with empty
seats as our policy has been to keep people in the same class as their
tickets. However, we have upgraded some people on a discretionary,
case-by-case basis.”
She refused to reveal how many economy passengers were upgraded and
how many empty seats in other classes were left unfilled. Customer
groups criticised BA’s attitude.
Ann Hervey, of Holiday Which? said: “These people have had a hideous
experience and as a matter of policy you would want BA to do whatever
was possible. It is a matter of good customer care. You would expect
them to do everything in their power to get passengers to destinations
as quickly as possible.
“However, deciding who gets the better seats could be difficult as
they risk everyone demanding an upgrade by way of compensation.”
Rival airlines also expressed disbelief and said that their own
approach would have been different. A spokeswoman for Virgin Atlantic
said: “Our priority would be to get passengers to destinations as
quickly as possible and to give them the best possible experience
after the distress of being delayed for so long.”
A spokesman for American Airlines said: “We would do everything
possible to get passengers away if seats were free in the aircraft.”
Sebouh Nahabedian, a financial analyst from New York, and Ara
Asatoorian, a transport consultant from Los Angeles, said that they
were astounded when a BA manager told them they could only have seats
in economy class, no matter what seats were free in business class.
They were supposed to fly to Armenia from Heathrow on Thursday but
were told by BA that they could not leave until Sunday. But when they
rang their travel agent in the US, they discovered that business-class
seats had been available on Saturday’s flight.
Mr Asatoorian said: “We rang BA and asked if we could be upgraded but
the guy would not do it because we had economy tickets. We asked if
showing up at the airport and waiting to see if the business seats
were claimed would help but he told us that if that were the case
then those seats would fly empty. The guy said nothing would help.
That was just the cherry on top of the whole situation. This trip
has cost us each $ 3,000 (£1,600) and we have missed three days of
our conference. The business-class thing was unbelievable. The guy
just would not budge.”
Helen Shepherd, 41, was flying back to Cape Town last night. The
housewife said: “I think it’s disgraceful that BA didn’t upgrade
economy.”
Under Article 8 of the European Passenger Rights Regulation, passengers
are entitled to rerouting under comparable transport conditions to
their final destination at the earliest opportunity if flights are
cancelled. However, it was unclear last night whether passengers
would be entitled to challenge BA’s refusal to upgrade them.
A BA spokesman said last night that it was back to 95 per cent of
its scheduled service at Heathrow.
“Everybody who was on a cancelled flight now has a reconfirmed
ticket. If they’re not going out today, they will be going out in
the next day or two,” he said.
–Boundary_(ID_RAUOH8zHxd840Rxyv31zJA)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Armenia, China to expand bilateral relations
Mediamax news agency
8 Aug 05
YEREVAN
The co-chairman of the Armenian-Chinese intergovernment commission and
head of the Armenian presidential administration, Artashes Tumanyan,
received the special representative of the government of the People’s
Republic of China and foreign affairs vice-minister, Qiao Zonghuai, in
Yerevan today.
Tumanyan said that Armenia attached great importance to the expansion
of relations with China. The sides pointed out that the bilateral
Armenian-Chinese cooperation based on the high-level political
dialogue and mutual understanding has been developing quite
dynamically.
Expressing confidence that Armenian-Chinese relations have big future,
the sides especially noted the work of the intergovernment commission,
a regular meeting of which was planned to be held in Beijing this
autumn.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

National Security Watch: FBI whistle-blower petitions high court
U.S. News & World Report
Aug 5 2005
Linda Spillers/Getty Images
Former FBI linguist Sibel Edmonds poses for a portrait at her home in
Alexandria, Virginia.
Posted 8/5/05
By Danielle Knight
Lawyers for Sibel Edmonds, the former translator for the FBI, have
petitioned the Supreme Court to hear her case. Edmonds claims that
she was fired in retaliation for reporting security breaches and
possible espionage within the bureau. The FBI hired Edmonds, who is
fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani, shortly after the 9/11
attacks. She was fired in 2002 and filed a lawsuit later that year
arguing that her firing was in retaliation for blowing the whistle
on other FBI officials.
In its defense, the Justice Department is using the “states secrets
privilege,” an argument that information related to Edmonds’s case
is highly classified and cannot be disclosed without endangering the
nation’s security. The states secrets privilege is an executive power
that is not a law, but based on a series of legal precedents. In July
2004, a federal district court ruled in favor of the government’s
use of this privilege in Edmonds’s case. In May 2005 the D.C. appeals
court upheld the district court’s opinion.
If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, the court’s decision
could influence the fate of several other lawsuits involving national
security and intelligence in which the administration has used the
states secrets argument. The government has relied on this argument
in several high-profile federal cases, including that of Maher Arar,
the Canadian citizen who claims the U.S. government interdicted him
at JFK Airport in New York in 2002 and sent him to be interrogated
in Syria, where he alleges he was tortured.
“We are urging the Supreme Court, which has not directly addressed
this issue in 50 years, to rein in the government’s misuse of this
privilege,” says Ann Beeson, associate legal director at the American
Civil Liberties Union, who is one of the lawyers representing
Edmonds. The states secrets privilege, she says, “should be used
as a shield for sensitive evidence, not a sword the government can
use at will to cut off argument in a case before the evidence can
be presented.”
Edmonds told U.S. News that she and other whistle-blowers from the FBI,
CIA, National Security Agency, and Department of Homeland Security are
so furious with the lack of congressional oversight on intelligence
and national security that they plan to launch an advertising campaign
targeting government officials who have allegedly endangered national
security. The newspaper ads, which could be launched as early as two
months from now, would name officials, their titles, their salaries,
where they work, and their alleged or documented wrongdoing, says
Edmonds. The campaign would be funded by private donations and would
be coordinated by the recently formed advocacy group she heads,
the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
Edmonds is the subject of a 10-page story in September’s Vanity
Fair released this week. The article reveals some new details of the
wiretaps Edmonds translated that involved conversations by members of
Turkish associations and the Turkish Consulate in Chicago as part of
an FBI counterintelligence investigation. According to the wiretaps,
the article claims that members of these Turkish groups had arranged
for tens of thousands of dollars to be paid to the campaign funds of
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, in small checks
under $200, so they wouldn’t have to be itemized in public campaign
filings. Hastert’s voice was never heard in the recordings, however,
and his office denies knowing anything about this.
The article says that the wiretap recordings contained repeated
reference to Hastert’s flip-flop in 2000 on a congressional proposal
to designate the killings of Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923
a genocide. At first he supported the idea, but later he withdrew
the proposal. Hastert explained that he changed his mind because
President Bill Clinton was concerned about the resolution harming
U.S. interests abroad. But the Chicago wiretaps, according to Vanity
Fair, revealed that “a senior official at the Turkish Consulate is
said to have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to
withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000.”
The article cautions, however, that “the reported content of the
Chicago wiretaps may well have been sheer bravado, and there is no
evidence that any payment was ever made to Hastert or his campaign.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

SLOVAKIAN MFA TO OPEN EMBASSY IN SOUTH CAUCASUS
PanArmenian News Network
Aug 1 2005
01.08.2005 02:35
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Slovakian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA)
intends to open embassies in a number of countries, including those
of the South Caucasus within the next few years. Before the end of
2007 Slovakia will open diplomatic missions in Lithuania, Estonia
and Luxembourg. Before the end of 2005 the Slovakian MFA will open
a diplomatic representation in Romal (Pakistan) and will send a
diplomat to Pristina (Kosovo). The MFA considers important opening
of an embassy in the South Caucasus. Tbilisi will be the residence
of Slovakian Ambassador to Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to all
appearance, reported RFE/RL.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ARMENIAN PRESIDENT LEAVES FOR BULGARIA
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
July 20 2005
YEREVAN, July 20. /ARKA/. President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan
left for a five-day informal visit to Bulgaria, the RA Presidential
Press-Service reports. Kocharyan left for Sofia at Bulgarian President
Goergi Pyrvanov’s invitation. A.A. -0–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ARMENIA AND THE ARMENIAN ON THE WAY BACK
Azg/arm
17 July 05
Montevideo-born philologist and publicist Vartan Matevosian presented
to the Armenian public yesterday another book. The new book is called
“An Endless Return. The Roads of Armenia”. The book comprises the
articles of the author written during the period of 1989-2004 and
printed in different magazines. He chose the following words of Kostan
Zaryan as an epigraph to the book: “We carry our Armenia within us,
as a universe, as a destiny”.
Vartan Matevosian thinks that the traveler should try to give meaning
to all that he sees and the “third eyes” should look for the reflection
of that meaning in themselves.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Sailing through turbulence
TDN
Monday, June 20, 2005
OPINIONS
Opinion by DoÄŸu ERGÄ°L
DoÄŸu ERGÄ°L
There was lot of talk about Turkey’s slackening of preparations for
the start of EU membership talks. There were times when the political
actors seemed to turn to internal politics under the spell of a common
disillusionment with European demands that were found to be unfair and
unwarranted. Hardships to be experienced during the accession
negotiations, a difficulty in adapting to the degree of recognition
and the disheartening resistance of many European peoples and elites
to Turkey’s membership all added up to the making of this sour feeling
and attitude. The passive but continuous resistance of Turkish
nationalists and state worshippers acting out of fear of losing their
privileges and relative unaccountability in a system that is neither
responsive to popular demands nor fully transparent must also be
mentioned.
All of a sudden the dominant actors on the Turkish political scene,
such as the civilian bureaucracy and the military together with a
section of the mainstream media, which has backed up the government’s
European vocation in the recent past, have began to escalate their
criticism of the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP)
government. The president of the republic lent weight and clout to
this bunch with his latest demarches.
President Sezer recently issued a public declaration in which he
announced the number of government proposals to assign officials to
various official posts in the bureaucracy and with reasons he blocked
them when they were submitted for his approval. Mr. Sezer has turned
down 251 formal government appeals. This is a substantial number,
indicating a major schism between the AKP government, or the main
political actor, and the presidency, which represents the state, the
body of the unelected, the power of which is no less than the
popularly elected branch of government. This is a form of castration,
or trimming down, of the powers of the government, and here is the
president’s justification: 58 of the officials proposed for
bureaucratic posts did not have the necessary experience. Thirteen of
them had legal obstructions. Seventeen did not possess the legal
qualifications to hold the proposed position. What about the remaining
163 who were vetoed by the president? There is no mention of their
presidential rejection. The obvious reason, then, is ideological
resistance to the spawning of the AKP government, which is still
suspected by the `state’ of a `hidden agenda’ to undermine the present
structure of the secular nation-state. You may read this as a
top-heavy bureaucratic system where the state has primacy over the
nation and the bureaucracy controls social change, the judicial
process, security issues and internal and international affairs to a
great extent.
Such friction between the state and government is indicative of a
serious gap between the political process shaped by rule of law and a
bureaucratic centralism that borders on arbitrariness guided by
ideology (a blend of nationalism, centralism and statism). That
ideological framework emanates from the supremacy of the state and its
privileged position in shaping the nation (considered as an
undifferentiated, solidaristic, monolithic body) and its
deeds. Politics that emanate from popular demands and popular
preferences are secondary to this kind of statecraft and the political
cultural it is based on. This relationship, or reality, becomes more
obvious as the government, the elected part of the executive, loses
its grip in and over the system.
Viewing it from this perspective, the eruption of a barrage of
criticism and pseudo internal frictions based on the headscarf issue,
government initiatives to assign personnel to official posts, Abdullah
Ocalan’s retrial as recommended by the European Court of Human Rights
and a forced debate by some European circles on Turkey as to what
happened to the Armenians at the time of the demise of the Ottoman
Empire (early 20th century) must have been no coincidence. If it is no
coincidence, what is the rationale behind such a tactical move?
One strong or determining reason must be the upcoming presidential
elections in 2007. With its two-thirds domination in the parliamentary
arithmetic, the AKP will be able to select a president from among its
ranks. (Presidents are elected within Parliament in the Turkish
political system. Initially, candidates for parliamentary seats were
hand picked by the ruling party to guarantee a monolithic political
process that was disrupted after the inception of multi-party politics
in 1950). The obvious candidate for the next Turkish president is
Mr. R.T. Erdogan, the incumbent prime minister. His religious
background, which surfaced during his insistence on penalizing
extramarital relationships at a very critical juncture of EU-Turkish
relations that could have been as make or break for the process of
granting Turkey a starting date for accession talks, his unpredictable
initiatives in international relations, his cocky mannerisms in
internal politics and his parochialism, reflected in the attire of his
family’s women, fall short of the republican elite’s worldly and
predictable leadership style, which does not lose elbow contact with
the state, are sufficient reasons to keep him away from the seat of
Ataturk, who still sets the standards of statesmanship in Turkey. The
STATE does not want Mr. ErdoÄŸan or another AKP member to be the
next president of Turkey.
The abundance of controversy on this issue these days emanates from
this fact, and it is very likely that there will be no end to it any
time in the near future.
What will happen then? Mr. Erdogan’s realization that he is losing the
support of the United States, without which he cannot keep the economy
in shape and be effective on either the European front or in the
Middle East, forced his hand to repair damaged relations with the
United States. He saw this as necessary because he has increasingly
realized that the way to Europe is long and arduous. At the same time
he has realized that slackening relations with Europe were detrimental
to the only sound political platform that his party/government shared
with other, mostly adverse, groups in the country. That is why the
delayed appointment of the chief negotiator with the EU has lately
been realized in a jiffy. Now he is faced with the challenge of early
elections, which the adversaries of an AKP government will push him
into. These adversaries are aware that the next AKP group in
Parliament will be smaller than of today, although the party will
emerge victorious from the elections in the absence of any other
viable alternative. A smaller AKP parliamentary group will run into
difficulties in naming the next Turkish president, especially if it
faces problems of legitimacy and representation. (Even today the AKP
dominance in Parliament is based on one-third of the electorate’s
support due to the vagaries of an electoral system that favors the
winner.)
There are rough times ahead in Turkish politics, not all of which will
be that rational or savory. Let us wait and see.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Turnout exceeds 73 percent in Karabakh parliamentary election
By Tigran Liloyan
ITAR-TASS News Agency
June 19, 2005 Sunday 3:08 PM Eastern Time
YEREVAN, June 19 — The turnout was high in the Sunday parliamentary
election in the unrecognized republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. 73.6
percent of voters visited the polling stations to elect the republican
legislature, a source in the Karabakh Central Electoral Commission
told Itar-Tass.
The count of votes is underway, and preliminary results will be
announced within hours.
Observers from several countries, including Armenia, Russia,
Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, France, the Czech Republic and the United States,
are generally satisfied with the elections, the source said. He added
that the international observers did not register serious violations
in the ballot.
This is the fourth parliamentary election in Nagorno-Karabakh after
it proclaimed independence in 1991. Not a single country of the world
has recognized the republic yet.
The ballot was held at 274 polling stations throughout the republic
of Nagorno-Karabakh and at a polling station in Yerevan, which was
opened to provide for the election rights of Karabakh citizens staying
in Armenia.
The republic has 89,500 voters, but 2,000 voters less took part
in the ballot in majoritarian single-mandate districts as Karabakh
conscripts have the right to take part in the elections only on the
proportionate system.
There are 33 deputies in the Karabakh parliament. Twenty-two of them
are elected in majoritarian single-mandate districts, and eleven are
elected on proportionate party lists. There were 106 candidates in this
election. Several parties and blocs took part in the Sunday election,
but observers believe that the ruling Democratic Party of Karabakh,
the opposition bloc of the nationalist Dashnaktsutyun Party and the
political organization Movement 88 have the highest chances to win.
The Karabakh authorities attribute large significance to the
elections. “The elections are of paramount international importance
for Nagorno-Karabakh,” Karabakh President Arkady Gukasyan said on
Saturday. “We must show the world our attitude to the elections,
which mirrors the irreversibility of democratic transformations
and can promote the international recognition of the Republic of
Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said.
Meanwhile, Azerbaijan has pronounced the elections illegal.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ARMENIAN NATIONAL SECURITY ARRESTS TURKISH STUDENT ON CHARGES OF SMUGGLING
Armenpress
YEREVAN, JUNE 17, ARMENPRESS: Armenian national security officers
arrested a Turkish student who they said was trying to smuggle out
of Armenia tens of books “of historical and cultural value” dating
back to 17 and 20 centuries.
A statement by the national security service said Ektan Turkilmaz,
33, a Turkish citizen from Istanbul and a student of a US-based Duke
University, in North Carolina, was arrested aboard a plane bound from
Yerevan to Istanbul. It said the books were about Armenian religious
rites, history and culture, Armenian traditional parties.
Turkyilmaz, who speaks Armenian, was the first and so far the only
Turkish scholar given access to Armenia~Rs state archives. He was
taught the language by an Armenian teacher in Istanbul, and arrived in
Armenia to work on his doctoral thesis that focuses on the creation
and activities of Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian parties during the
final decades of the Ottoman Empire. The national security service
said a criminal case was opened to investigate how the student was
able to take hold of these books.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ACCORDING TO THE NKR PRESIDENT’S DECREE EDWARD ATANESYAN IS ENTRUSTED
WITH THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE NKR PRESIDENT PRESS SECRETARY
YEREVAN, June 14. /ARKA/. NKR President Arkadi Ghukasyan signed a
decree, according to which the Chief Assistant of the NKR President
Edward Atanesyan is entrusted with the responsibilities of the Press
Secretary of the NKR President, according to the Chief Information
Department adjunct to NKR President. Before the responsibilities of
the Press Secretary were taken by Deputy Head of the Chief Information
Department at the NKR President Marina Hakobjanyan. A.H.-0–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress