ARMENIA: U.S. RADIO CONTRACT NOT RENEWED
Stratfor
July 26 2007
Armenian state radio has refused a contract extension for the
U.S.-funded Liberty Radio broadcast, raising concerns of a clampdown
on independent media ahead of the 2008 presidential election,
Agence France-Presse reported July 26. The move follows the Armenian
parliament’s early July refusal to amend a law that forbids the airing
or re-broadcasting of foreign-produced programs.
RUSSIA NOT INTEND TO INCREASE ARMED CONTINGENT IN ARMENIA: DEPUTY MINISTER
Trend News Agency, Azerbaijan
July 26 2007
Azerbaijan, Baku /corr. Trend K.Ramazanova / Russia does not intend
to increase armed contingent in Armenia after absolving from the
Treaty on Conventional Arms in Europe (TCAE), said the Deputy Foreign
Minister of Russia, Sergey Kislyak, on 26 July in Baku.
According to him, Russia does not intend to use these measures as
a response to the decision of the USA to establish missile defense
system in Eastern Europe.
Touching upon Russia’s absolving from TCAE, Kislyak said that Russia
does not seek confrontations. According to him, all their steps are
directed towards returning the situation into more normal and more
controlled manner. "If our colleagues are not interested, there will
be no conflicts. However, naturally the absence of the predictability
in establishing armed forces has never strengthened international
security," he said.
On 14 July the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, issued an order
terminating Russia’s participation in the Treaty and Treaty-linked
international agreements.
TAXI DRIVERS PROTEST STRICTER LICENSING RULES
By Hovannes Shoghikian
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
July 25 2007
Several dozen taxi drivers parked their cars outside the main
government building in Yerevan Wednesday in protest against new
government regulations that could lose them and many of their
colleagues their jobs.
The protesters honked on the horns as they drove from the southern
Erebuni suburb to the city’s central Republic Square in a convoy of
some 60 cars, their headlights full on.
The taxi business has had a huge expansion in Armenia in the past
few years, creating thousands of new jobs and catering for a growing
clientele. The government moved to regulate the thriving industry last
March with a decision that set for stringent licensing requirements
for tax firms and independent cab drivers.
In particular, they will now have to install electronic fee meters
and pay an annual state duty of 200,000 drams ($590) per vehicle. The
new rules, effective from August 1, also ban use of cars older than
10 years. Government officials say this will complicate tax evasion
and improve passenger safety.
But critics say the measure will force most small taxi firms and
self-employed drivers dominating the sector and ensuring tight
competition there out of business. They claim that it will only
benefit large carriers that are owned by wealthy business and can
afford buying new cars. Some senior government officials are thought
to partly or fully control such firms.
The protesting cab drivers, most of them self-employed, made similar
claims as they stood outside the government building, demanding a
meeting with Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian. But only Arshak Petrosian,
head of a Transport Ministry division regulating public transportation,
was on hand to hear their complaints.
"By gathering here you are interfering with the government’s day-to-day
work," Petrosian told the protesters before agreeing to meet five of
them in his office in the nearby ministry building.
The protest organizers were dissatisfied with what they were told,
saying that the official made it clear that the government will not
reconsider the new rules. "Mr. Petrosian only said, ‘Guys, don’t
worry, we won’t let any of you starve to death, I too was born to a
poor family, and will help you find jobs in taxi companies,’" one of
them told RFE/RL.
He and other organizers pledged to hold more such protests in the
coming days.
DERRY BOW OUT IN YEREVAN
Irishfootballonline.com
July 25 2007
Luckless Derry City exited European competition at the first hurdle
today as they fell to a 2-0 aggregate loss to Armenia’s Pyunik in
Yerevan. After a scoreless first leg, Derry conceded in both halves.
Derry had chances but having fallen 2-0 behind midway through the
second half, there was no way back despite a couple of late flurries.
Derry packed the midfield for the game but their plans were hampered
after only a minute as captain Barry Molloy picked up a knock. He
would eventually limp off before half-time.
Gevorg Ghazaryan chased an early high ball into the box and as the
ball bounced around in the area Levon Pachajyan had ambitious shouts
for a penalty after colliding with Ken Oman.
Goalkeeper Pat Jennings picked up a booking for time wasting after
only 16 minutes but Derry were doing well at containing the home
side. Kevin McHugh fired over at the other end following a good run
before Slovenian referee Robert Krajnc called a water break midway
through the half and did the same again in the second period.
Pyunik went ahead on 29 minutes when Arsen Avetisyan turned the ball
home at the second attempt. His initial volley from Levon Pachajyan’s
cross was pushed out by Jennings. With the Derry defence watching
and Jennings struggling to keep his feet, Avetisyan slipped the ball
between his legs to the net.
Eddie McCallion’s speculative shot forced a save after bouncing
awkwardly on the uneven surface. Ken Oman almost rounded off a great
run down the left wing with some reward but saw his shot just curl
past the back post.
Pachajyan twice went close for the home side ten minutes from
half-time. He shot off target after a strong run but wasn’t helped
by a tight angle. His initial shot was then saved by Jennings before
hesitancy from McCallion and Darren Kelly almost let Avetisyan in
for another.
Molloy hit a dangerous low bouncing shot just wide before being
withdrawn five minutes before the break.
Derry might well be still in Europe had they been awarded a penalty
in the closing minutes of the first half. Ciaran Martyn broke into
the Pyunik box and Rafael Nazaryan looked to clearly bring him down
just inside the box.
On the stroke of half-time, Sammy Morrow sent Killian Brennan’s deep
cross back across the face of goal. Morrow was too close to the endline
when he got the ball and could just divert back across goal where no
Derry player was waiting.
Substitute Greg O’Halloran shot just over the Pyunik bar from well
outside the box. Ghazaryan forced a good near post save from Jennings.
Derry could have levelled and clinched the vital away goal they craved
just after the hour. Kelly headed against the Pyunik crossbar from
Kevin Deery’s corner kick.
Just with Derry getting into the game, Pyunik struck to make it 2-0.
Pachajyan crossed low and Ghazaryan slipped the ball past the wrong
footed Derry defence and Jennings.
The goal knocked the stuffing out of Derry and Pachajyan’s run
was only halted by a good block from McCallion in the closing ten
minutes. Henrik Mkhitaryan went close moments later from outside the
Derry box.
In the final minute Kelly had another header go close as he powered
at goal from another set-piece only to be denied on the line by
goalkeeper Gevorg Kasparov.
Derry and manager John Robertson will now switch their attentions
back to domestic action and climbing up the League of Ireland Premier
Division table.
Derry City : Jennings, McCallion, Brennan, Oman, Kelly, Molloy
(O’Halloran 41), Martyn, Deery (Higgins 83), McCourt (Farren 64),
McHugh, Morrow.
A SHOW OF SPIRIT
By Erica Liu
Burbank Leader, CA
July 25 2007
‘Spirit of Armenia’ brings singers and dancers to the Hollywood Bowl.
"Spirit of Armenia!," a night of dance and music focusing on Armenian
culture, will take place on Sunday as part of the KCRW World Festival
series at the Hollywood Bowl.
The concert will feature 15 performing acts presenting everything
from more traditional Armenian music to modern Armenian pop tunes and
performances by Armenian vocalists and dance ensembles, said Stepan
Partamian, who is producing the event in collaboration with the Los
Angeles Philharmonic Assn.
This concert is the first of its kind in both ambition and scope,
Partamian said.
"This is the first time ever that we are presenting our own culture
to the general Los Angeles public and seeing Armenians collectively
contributing to a nonprofit organization that enriches cultural
awareness in Los Angeles," he said.
By organizing this concert, Partamian hopes to squash the
preconceptions that Armenian musicians have to imitate mainstream
artists in order to be accepted, and that there is no room for
authentic Armenian artists.
"My philosophy is totally different: I can go in and perform my own
culture and people will come and accept me," he said.
In choosing artists to perform at the concert, Partamian had only
one requirement.
"I don’t want to pick people that want to sound like someone else,"
he said. "A music note is a music note, but how you use it becomes
cultural."
The show will be divided into two contrasting styles, said Laura
Connelly, the program manager for jazz and world music at the Los
Angeles Philharmonic Assn.
"We wanted to reflect the breadth of the Armenian culture. The first
half is the more traditional and classical side of the music and the
second half is the more pop and fusion side," Connelly said.
Sako, an Armenian pop artist who has lived in Burbank for the past
15 years, is one of the artists scheduled to perform Sunday.
For the concert, Sako will perform "Shall We Dance?" and "Life is
Good," his upbeat tribute to life.
"What I try to do is make people happy with my music," he said. "That
is my main intention."
Sako considers his music to be a blend of trance and pop boosted by
traditional instruments.
"It has the groove of trance music but the melodies of Armenian music,"
he said.
Sako is also known as a pioneer of the genre within the Armenian
community, said Susan Piliguian, Sako’s manager.
"With his music, he is ahead of his time by about 15 years," she
said. "He introduced a different kind of music to the Armenian music
industry. It’s very new to the young generation and now, after 15
years, they’re listening to old CDs and going ‘Wow, is this new?’"
This is the first time Sako will be performing under the white shell
of the Hollywood Bowl and also before an audience of what ticket
sales so far indicate will be at least 50% non-Armenian.
"It’s a big honor, he said.
"I grew up attending concerts there. It’s amazing to see yourself
up there. I hope people will see that we, as Armenians, do have very
professional singers and dancers. It’s really going to feel good to
show them what we are made of."
He remembers sitting in the audience during Luciano Pavarotti’s
"Good-Bye" concert, wondering "Oh my god, will I ever be on that
stage performing one day?" he said.
"I don’t try to copy other people’s style," Sako said. "I come up
with my own original style. "I’m very extremely picky in what I do.
That makes it definitely sound different."
Armenian dance will also be prominently featured by 125 dancers from
the Glendale-based Zvartnots dance ensemble and Vartan & Siranoush
Gevorkian dance ensemble, Connelly said.
"The costumes they have are so amazing, the moves … ," Connelly said.
"It’s like having an army of dancers out there. It’s quite a
spectacle."
In addition to both dance ensembles, also appearing from Glendale are
Winds of Passion, Hovhannes Shahbazyan, Soseh Keshishyan of Element
Band, Gagik Badalyan, Araks and Alik Karapetyan.
"We’ve never really done a whole night of Armenian music and thought
it was time to do it," Connelly said.
"We’re hoping a lot of non-Armenians come to the show and experience
what a really vibrant culture it is."
ATATURK’S TURKEY OVERTURNED
By Hillel Halkin, a contributing editor of The New York Sun.
New York Sun, NY –
July 24 2007
Some 12 or 13 years ago, when I was reporting from Israel for the
New York weekly, the Forward, I wrote a piece on Kemal Ataturk, the
founder of modern secular Turkey, that I submitted to the newspaper
with some trepidation.
In it, I presented evidence for the likelihood of Ataturk’s having
had a Jewish – or more precisely, a Doenmeh – father.
The Doenmeh were a heretical Jewish sect formed, after the conversion
to Islam in the 17th century of the Turkish-Jewish messianic pretender
Sabbetai Zevi, by those of his followers who continued to believe
in him.
Conducting themselves outwardly as Muslims in imitation of him,
they lived secretly as Jews and continued to exist as a distinct,
if shadowy, group well into the 20th century.
In the many biographies of Ataturk there were three or four different
versions of his father’s background, and although none identified him
as a Jew, their very multiplicity suggested that he had been covering
up his family origins.
This evidence, though limited, was intriguing. Its strongest item was
a chapter in a long-forgotten autobiography of the Hebrew journalist,
Itamar Ben-Avi, who described in his book a chance meeting on a rainy
night in the late winter of 1911 in the bar of a Jerusalem hotel with
a young Turkish captain.
Tipsy from too much arak, the captain confided to Ben-Avi that he
was Jewish and recited the opening Hebrew words of the Shema Yisra’el
or "Hear O Israel" prayer, which almost any Jew or Doenmeh – but no
Turkish Muslim – would have known. Ten years later, Ben-Avi wrote, he
opened a newspaper, saw a headline about a military coup in Turkey,
and in a photograph recognized the leader that the young officer he
had met the other night.
At the time, Islamic political opposition to Ataturk-style secularism
was gaining strength in Turkey. What would happen, I wondered,
when a Jewish newspaper in New York broke the news that the revered
founder of modern Turkey was half-Jewish? I pictured riots, statues
of Ataturk toppling to the ground, the secular state he had created
tottering with them.
I could have spared myself the anxiety. The piece was run in the
Forward, there was hardly any reaction to it anywhere, and life
in Turkey went on as before. As far as I knew, not a single Turk
even read what I wrote. And then, a few months ago, I received an
e-mail from someone who had. I won’t mention his name. He lives in a
European country, is well-educated, works in the financial industry,
is a staunchly secular Kemalist, and was writing to tell me that he
had come across my article in the Forward and had decided to do some
historical research in regard to it.
One thing he discovered, he wrote, was that Ataturk indeed traveled
in the late winter of 1911 to Egypt from Damascus on his way to join
the Turkish forces fighting an Italian army in Libya, a route that
would have taken him through Jerusalem just when Ben-Avi claimed to
have met him there.
Moreover, in 1911 he was indeed a captain, and his fondness of
alcohol, which Ben-Avi could not have known about when he wrote his
autobiography, is well-documented.
And here’s something else that was turned up by my Turkish e-mail
correspondent: Ataturk, who was born and raised in Thessaloniki, a
heavily Jewish city in his day that had a large Doenmeh population,
attended a grade school, known as the " Semsi Effendi School," that
was run by a religious leader of the Doenmeh community named Simon
Zvi. The email concluded with the sentence: "I now know – know (and I
haven’t a shred of doubt) – that Ataturk’s father’s family was indeed
of Jewish stock."
I haven’t a shred of doubt either. I just have, this time, less
trepidation, not only because I no longer suffer from delusions of
grandeur regarding the possible effects of my columns, but because
there’s no need to fear toppling the secular establishment of Kemalist
Turkey.
It toppled for good in the Turkish elections two days ago when the
Islamic Justice and Development Party was returned to power with
so overwhelming a victory over its rivals that it seems safe to say
that secular Turkey, at least as Ataturk envisioned it, is a thing
of the past.
Actually, Ataturk’s Jewishness, which he systematically sought to
conceal, explains a great deal about him, above all, his fierce
hostility toward Islam, the religion in which nearly every Turk of
his day had been raised, and his iron-willed determination to create a
strictly secular Turkish nationalism from which the Islamic component
would be banished.
Who but a member of a religious minority would want so badly to
eliminate religion from the identity of a Muslim majority that, after
the genocide of Turkey’s Christian Armenians in World War I and the
expulsion of nearly all of its Christian Greeks in the early 1920s,
was 99% of Turkey’s population? The same motivation caused the banner
of secular Arab nationalism to be first raised in the Arab world by
Christian intellectuals.
Ataturk seems never to have been ashamed of his Jewish background. He
hid it because it would have been political suicide not to, and the
secular Turkish state that was his legacy hid it too, and with it,
his personal diary, which was never published and has for all intents
and purposes been kept a state secret all these years. There’s no
need to hide it any longer. The Islamic counterrevolution has won
the day in Turkey even without its exposure.
EU’S NEW EUROPEAN NEIGHBORHOOD PROGRAM TO BE DISCUSSED IN YEREVAN
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
July 24 2007
YEREVAN, July 24. /ARKA/. The EU’s New European Neighborhood Policy
in Armenia will be discussed in Yerevan on July 25. The initiator of
the event is the Partnership for Open Society Organization.
The aim of the discussion is to raise public awareness of the
activities carried out by ministries and departments during the
past months for the implementation of the Action Program within the
framework of the European Neighborhood, as well as to discuss the
future plans.
For the purpose of establishing new lines of cooperation, new
approaches and proposals made by civil society will be discussed in
the course of the event.
Armen Bayburdian, RA Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, together
with representatives of Armenian ministries, international and local
organizations and European ambassadors to Armenia will present the
RA Government’s approaches to the issue.
The EU-Armenia Action Plan as part of the New Neighborhood Policy
was adopted and came into force on November 14, 2006 during the 7th
plenary meeting of the Armenia-EU Cooperation Committee in Brussels.
The program will enable the sides to pass from cooperation to
integration, opening a new page in the relations between Armenia and
Europe.
EU SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE TO VISIT NAGORNO KARABAKH IN SEPTEMBER
armradio.am
23.07.2007 15:15
EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus Peter Semneby is
scheduled to visit Nagorno Karabakh in September of the current year,
Semenby told a press conference in Baku dedicated to the results of
his visit to Azerbaijan. He noted that this will be his first visit
to Nagorno Karabakh.
"The visit is targeted at finding ways for rapprochement of the two
sides and communities in the direction of peaceful settlement of the
Karabakh conflict," the EU Special envoy underlined.
ARMENIAN-OCCUPATION OF AGHDAM TURNS 14
Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
July 23 2007
The occupation of Azerbaijani region of Aghdam turns 14 today,
APA reports.
Aghdam with population of 150,000 and territory of 1154 square
kilometers was occupied by the Armenian Armed Forces on July 23,
1993. For the time being only two villages of Agdam are administered
by Azerbaijan. Armenians knocked down historical monuments, cemeteries,
hospitals, libraries, schools, offices in Aghdam.
Armenia still continues to ransack Azeri cultural heritage in defiance
of the Hague Convention concerning the protection of cultural property
in the event of armed conflict and the Paris Convention concerning
prohibition and prevention of illicit import, export and transfer of
ownership of cultural property.
PRESS RELEASE
Catholicosate of Cilicia
Communication and Information Department
Contact: V.Rev.Fr.Krikor Chiftjian, Communications Officer
Tel: (04) 410001, 410003
Fax: (04) 419724
E- mail: [email protected]
Web:
PO Box 70 317
Antelias-Lebanon
Armenian version: nian.htm
TELEPHONE CONVERSATION BETWEEN HIS HOLINESS ARAM I
AND MP WALID JUMBLATT
Member of Parliament Walid Jumblatt held a phone conversation with His
Holiness Aram I on July 20. The MP first congratulated the Pontiff for his
newly published book, focusing particularly on the section on
Christian-Muslim dialogue. The Catholicos and Jumblatt also assessed the
current situation in Lebanon.
Jumblatt extended an invitation for lunch to His Holiness.