Author: Jalatian Sonya

ARTUR AGHABEKIAN: DEFENCE SYSTEM REFORM SHOULD PROCEED PARALLELLY WITH
DEVELOPMENT IN OTHER SPHERES
YEREVAN, APRIL 13, NOYAN TAPAN. The goal of Armenia’s defence reform
is to form an army corresponding to the requirements of the 21st
century. Lieutenant-General Artur Aghabekian, RA Deputy Defence
Minister, declared this during the opening of the April 12
seminar-consultation dedicated to issues of elaboration of the
Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP). He expressed a hope that as
a result of gradual changes we’ll manage to form an army capable of
resisting new challenges, completely providing country’s military
security by 2015. According to the Deputy Minister, the defence system
reform should proceed parallelly with the development in other spheres
of life. Proceeding from this necessity an inter-department commission
was established, the goal of which is to coordinate the realization of
IPAP of Armenia with NATO.

DRAFT DECISION OF NA INTERIM COMMISSION CONCERNING DRAFTS OF CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMS TO BE COMPLETED ON APRIL 8
YEREVAN, APRIL 7, NOYAN TAPAN. During the April 6 sitting RA NA interim
commission on issues of European integration finished discussing
the drafts of amendments and additions to the Constitution. During
the April 8 sitting the commission will approve its draft decision
concerning submitting the 3 bills officially put into circulation
for discussion at the NA plenary sittings. The preliminary variant
of draft decision submitted to the commission by Tigran Torosian,
NA Vice-Speaker, Chairman of the interim commission, suggests fixing
the reasons and goals of necessity in constitutional reforms and
offering NA after discussing the 3 bills as alternative ones to take
as a basis through voting the bill, which most of all corresponds to
the proclaimed goals of the constitutional reforms. The draft decision
also suggests that the authors of the bills should revise them taking
into consideration the intermediate conclusion of CE Venice Commission
and proposals made during the discussions of the interim commission
that started on February 11. The draft decision also envisages to
suggest the Venice Commission joint discussion of the revised bill
taken as a basis before the second reading in order to provide the
complete correspondence of the latter to European standards. T.Torosian
considered it expedient to fix one more “suggestion, rather a wish,
beholding to nothing “: to suggest that the authors should use all
resources to submit a united draft for the NA discussion in the
first reading. Grigor Ghonjeyan, the main reporter, objected to
the last points. In his affirmation, at present no possibility to
combine the 3 bills is foreseen, that’s why the NA is to estimate the
correspondence of the drafts to the goals of constitutional reforms. He
also doesn’t agree to the point suggesting that not the bills being
in official circulation and discussed in the interim commission but
their revised variants should be discussed in the first reading in
NA having an apprehension that the Venice Commission will object to
it in the future. The NA interim commission agreed to T.Torosian’s
proposal about officially notifying the Venice Commission on April
7 about the intention to discuss the revised variants.

KOCHARIAN MET WITH LITHUANIAN DEFENSE MINISTER
07.04.2005 03:59
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian President Robert Kocharian has met with
Minister of National Defense of Lithuania Gediminas Kirkilas, the
Press Service of the state leader reported. The Armenian-Lithuanian
cooperation in Armed Forces reform was the main topic discussed
at the meeting. The parties appreciated the level of cooperation
between the defense departments of the two countries. Besides the
interlocutors discussed the issue of Armenia’s Euro-integration.
Within that context it was noted that combining the experience of
Lithuania of accession to the EU and the country’s activities as an
EU member may be useful for Armenia.

ENEMY SILENCED BY A COUNTER FIRE
AzerTag
[April 06, 2005, 17:11:08]
On April 5 between 20:30 and 21:25, Armenian troops positioned 3,2
km east side of the village of Tapgaragoyunlu in Geranboy region
subjected to large-caliber machinegun fire positions of the Azerbaijani
armed forces located in the opposite side of the same village. The
enemy also fired on Azerbaijani positions in Namirli and Ahmedagaly
villages of Aghdam region from 00:10 to 01:35 and from 04.00 till
04.10 respectively on April 6, the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan
told. No losses were reported.

Over 200 government leaders to attend papal funeral
Apr. 05 (CWNews.com) – Over 200 heads of state are expected to attend
the funeral for Pope John Paul II (bio – news) on Friday, April 8.
The influx of world leaders for the ceremony shows the enormous
regard for Pope John Paul II among international leaders. Not a
single president attended the funeral of his predecessor, John Paul
I. And only three government heads– the presidents of Malta and
Zambia, and the former president of Lebanon– were in attendance when
Pope Paul VI was buried in 1978.
American President George W. Bush was among the first world leaders
to announce his plans to attend the funeral. President Bush, who will
be accompanied by his wife Laura, will be the first US president ever
to attend a papal funeral.
The world’s religious leaders will also be heavily represented,
including Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople; Metropolitan
Kirill, the chief ecumenical officer of the Russian Orthodox Church;
Catholicos Karekin II of the Armenian Apostolic Church; Archbishop
Christodoulos of the Greek Orthodox Church; and Grand Rabbi Shlomo
Amar of Israel. Altogether there will be 17 delegations from other
Christian denominations, along with 2 Jewish groups.
Many of the foreign dignitaries who are expected in Rome had met with
Pontiff frequently, both at the Vatican and during papal voyages to
their own countries. Poland will send a particularly large delegation
to honor its native son, led by President Aleksander Kwasniewski,
former President Lech Walesa, and Prime Minister Marek Belka.
Among those international leaders who have already announced their
plans to attend the funeral are:
from Europe
Belgium’s King Albert II and Queen Paola
Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia
Sweden’s King Carl Gustav XVI and Queen Silvia
Norway’s Queen Sonja
England’s Prince Charles
Albanian President Alfred Moisiu
Austrian President Heinz Fischer
Bulgarian president Gueorgi Parvano
Croatiann President Stipe Mesic
Estonian President Arnold Ruutel
French President Jacques Chirac
German President Horst Koehler
Greek President Carolos Papoulias
Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga
Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus
Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio
Serbian President Svetozar Marovic
Slovenian President Janez Drnovsek
Swiss President Samuel Schmit
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko
The European Union’s President Jose Manuel Durao
BarrosoRepresentatives are also expected from the governments of
Armenia, Finland, Denmark, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Romania,
Russia, and Turkey.
from Latin America
Bolivian President Carlos Mesa
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio da Silva
Costa Rican President Abel Pacheco
Ecuadorean President Lucio Gutierrez
Guatemalan President Oscar Berger
Honduran President Ricardo Maduro
Mexican President Vicente Fox
Nicaraguan President Enrique BolanosGovernment representatives will
also come from Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Panama,
Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezeula.
from the Middle East
Israeli President Moshe Katzav
Syrian President Bachar al Assad
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmad Qoreifrom North America
US President George W. Bush
Canadian President Paul Martin
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
from Asia and Oceania
Filipino President Gloria Arroyo
Australian Governor-General Michael JefferyRepresentatives will come
from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
from Africa
Congolese President Joseph Kabila
Ghanian President John Kufuor.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Glendale hosting Armenian teacher
By Alex Dobuzinskis, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Daily News, CA
Article Published: Monday, April 04, 2005 – 6:53:05 PM PST
GLENDALE — Armenian teacher Karine Jaghatspanyan took on the role of
student Monday at Balboa Elementary, learning how American children
are taught, in order to enrich her own approach.
Jaghatspanyan — one of 22 teachers from Armenia visiting the United
States as part of a State Department-sponsored exchange program —
is the only teacher from the program sent to Glendale.
“I’m impressed,” Jaghatspanyan, 42, said while visiting a third-grade
class at Balboa Elementary. “Both about teaching methods and their
knowledge, too. (The students) know so much.”
The federally funded program, known as the Project Harmony Teacher
Exchange, not only offers teachers the opportunity for professional
development but students the opportunity to learn about different
cultures.
As part of the program, students in Jaghatspanyan’s computer lab
class in Vanadzor, Armenia, have been exchanging messages with Balboa
Elementary students about their daily lives, as well as folktales
and heritage.
“My whole family is from Vanadzor, just exactly where they are from,”
said Mona Chilingaryan, 10, a Balboa Elementary student. “So it’s
pretty cool to know exactly what they do.”
Students and others also have learned of some of the challenges
the Vanadzor students can face. Earlier this year Vanadzor students
could not send online messages because the school had little heat
and it was too cold to operate the computers, said Jeff Lawson, 51,
a parent volunteer helping in the Balboa Elementary class.
Jaghatspanyan noted that the school was damaged in an earthquake in
1988, but said things are improving.
“After then we rebuilt it. We had no equipment, and day by day
everything is getting better,” said Jaghatspanyan.
Balboa Elementary teacher Maureen Miller went to Armenia last July
as part of the exchange program and noted the differences in resources.
“Sometimes we have more than we need. They certainly have less than
they need. But they work very hard to educate the students with very
little,” Miller said.
Among the differences are that elementary-school classes in the
Glendale Unified School District are broken into smaller groups in
which students can talk to or get help from an aide — students in
classes in Armenia sit in rows facing the teacher.
But Jaghatspanyan said an advantage to that system, which also has
been used in the United States, is that students maintain focus on
the teacher.
“Every method has its advantages and disadvantages. None of them is
better and none of them is worse,” she said.
Jaghatspanyan will visit other schools in Glendale this week before
heading to Washington and Philadelphia to complete the exchange
program.
—-
Alex Dobuzinskis, (818) 546-3304 [email protected]

What Comes After Rose, Orange and Tulip?
By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 3, 2005
Page B03
Shortly after the so-called Rose Revolution in the tiny republic of
Georgia, the leaders of the other nations that once made up the Soviet
Union gathered in the Caspian Sea oil town of Baku for the funeral of
Azerbaijan’s longtime strongman president. There the heads of state of
Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Central Asian republics paid their
respects to their fellow authoritarian even as they nervously eyed
the instigators of the democratic uprising in their midst.
It naturally fell to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who in private
and sometimes in public has demonstrated a taste for earthy, even
crude language, to sum up the jittery mood. He walked over to one of
the leaders of the Georgian revolution, two Georgian officials later
told us, and declared pungently that all of the heads of state in
the room were “[messing] in their pants.”
As it turned out, those presidents were right to worry. Since that day
in December 2003, two more of the men who belonged to that exclusive
club have been unceremoniously pushed out of office by popular street
revolts, first in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution last December and now in
the March Tulip Revolution in the nomadic mountain state of Kyrgyzstan,
hard up against the Chinese border.
The swift spread of the revolutions has unsettled tyrants and inspired
democrats throughout the vast reaches of Moscow’s former empire,
generating excited, if overheated, discussion of what some analysts
over the last week were quick to dub “the second breakup of the
Soviet Union.” Some were even daring to ask the ultimate question:
Could Russia itself be next?
After four years as The Washington Post’s bureau chiefs in a country
where even the past, as the old Soviet joke goes, is unpredictable,
we learned that just about anything is possible. But we also spent
our entire tour watching Putin’s Kremlin systematically embark on a
project to avoid any threat to its rule, methodically neutralizing
alternative power centers that one day might conceivably challenge the
former KGB colonel’s grip on power. And the lesson he seems likely
to learn from Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan is not to open up the
political process but to crack down even harder.
The results of the Kremlin campaign that began with Putin’s election
five years ago last week are evident today — no independent television
to serve as a bullhorn for revolution, as it did in Georgia; a
divided, weak and unpopular reformist opposition unable to unite
around a single leader, unlike the broad coalition that formed in
Ukraine; and cowed businessmen unable or unwilling to finance rival
political efforts after watching the Kremlin jail Russia’s richest
man and confiscate his oil company.
Even in the early days of Putin’s presidency, when it was still
unclear to many where he intended to take the country, his advisers
were plenty clear about the project. “Putin has said he wants to end
the revolution,” his political consultant, Gleb Pavlovsky, told us
at the time, “not to start a new one.”
And so there was Pavlovsky last week, telling a Moscow news conference
confidently, “There is no threat that what happened in Georgia and
Ukraine may happen in Russia.”
Unlike the fading, aging leaders there and in Kyrgyzstan, Putin,
he intimated, would not hesitate to stop any such uprising by force.
“Weapons should be used against rebel groups and criminals who actually
stormed the parliament building in Bishkek,” he said, referring
to the Kyrgyz capital. “If the authorities fail to perform their
institutional duties in those cases, they give away power. . . . In
all cases where organized citizens promote this revolution scenario,
they should be suppressed.”
When he came to power, Putin was determined to end a revolution
— Boris Yeltsin’s. Even though Yeltsin had handpicked him as his
successor, Putin saw the 1990s not as the heady if flawed start of
a new democracy but as a period of roiling instability, economic
dislocation and crumbling state power.
“If by democracy one means the dissolution of the state,” he once told
a group of American correspondents when we asked him about his rollback
of democratic institutions, “then we do not need any such democracy.”
Elections were part and parcel of what Putin considered the unseemly
mess of democracy and his counter-revolution was all about making
sure they did not become the trigger for revolution as elsewhere
in the former Soviet Union. At first, his Kremlin tried to control
them, coming up with the idea of “managed” elections, whose outcomes
could be manipulated by authorities. When that proved troublesome,
Putin decided simply to cancel gubernatorial elections in Russia’s
89 regions altogether.
We got an indication of this attitude toward elections early in
our tour when we went to the next-door republic of Belarus for the
balloting that would hand a second term to Alexander Lukashenko, often
called Europe’s last dictator. While Western election observers trooped
around polling places amassing evidence of manipulation, we found the
head of the Russian monitoring team at a medieval castle outside the
capital being feted at a private lunch before touring the countryside.
The official was so confident in the election’s outcome that he had no
apparent need to actually monitor it — having already told the press
that it was being conducted in a free and fair manner. Appropriately
enough, the official was Alexander Veshnyakov, head of the Russian
Central Election Commission.
In the various corners of the old Soviet empire, we met hundreds
of activists over the last few years from political parties, human
rights groups and media organizations who dreamed of toppling the
repressive regimes that had emerged from the ashes of communism. In
Belarus, we watched burly police beat young boys on a Minsk street for
daring to hold an unauthorized protest. In Uzbekistan, we visited an
aging Soviet-era dissident who had taken up the cause of persecuted
Muslims imprisoned merely for wearing beards as a sign of faith. He
interrupted the interview to show us his bloodstained shirt from the
day police stormed into his apartment.
Nowhere was the discontent stronger than in Georgia, Ukraine and
Kyrgyzstan.
From the moment we set down in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, for
instance, we could find not one person outside government who still
supported then-President Eduard Shevardnadze. In a market one day,
vendors we interviewed grew so agitated that one woman began gesturing
with a butter knife and vowing that she would kill Shevardnadze if
she had the chance.
Some of the preconditions of revolution were similar in all three
countries: long-standing grievances over poverty; corruption; and
a distant, calcified government that had long since overstayed its
welcome. In each case, the ruler had evolved from an ostensible
democratic reformer to a dynastic ruler guarding his own family’s
interests — Shevardnadze’s son-in-law made millions in Georgia,
Leonid Kuchma’s son-in-law became one of Ukraine’s biggest tycoons
and Askar Akayev’s son and daughter have just been installed in the
Kyrgyz parliament.
Perhaps most important, though, was that in each country there was
just enough political space for the opposition to operate, making for
noticeably more open environments compared with neighboring countries.
By contrast, in Azerbaijan, a tough-minded new president — son
of the old KGB general at whose funeral Putin made his comment to
the Georgians — quickly quashed street protests by the opposition
after his election, determined not to follow the revolutionary
script. It worked, and we watched as Baku’s Freedom Square turned
into a battlefield, with hundreds of baton-wielding police beating
demonstrators, many of them women and unarmed men. Opposition leaders
were then rounded up and jailed. No one thinks Azerbaijan is on the
brink of revolution today.
In a joint message to the Kyrgyz people last week, the leaders of the
Georgian and Ukrainian revolutions, Mikheil Saakashvili and Viktor
Yushchenko, hailed the developments in Bishkek. “These events showed
that in our three countries the elections were just one of the reasons,
the last straw that broke the people’s patience and moved them towards
the uprising.”
But they also added an important caveat; for all the buzz
about democratic upheaval sweeping the former Soviet Union, such
revolutions can happen only when they are fueled by local conditions
and people. “Revolutions cannot be exported,” they wrote. “They happen
only where there are objective grounds in place.”
While many call this the second wave of democratization across
the Soviet Union, that may misjudge the nature of the regimes that
took hold when the union fell apart in 1991. In many of the newly
independent states, the old communist boss simply became the new
“democratic” president, and others who later took over, like
Lukashenko, were simply old apparatchiks.
“There wasn’t really a democratization wave 15 years ago,” a senior
Bush administration official told us the other day. “The old regime
crumbled, and it was replaced by local authorities. This is really the
first wave. It’s a delayed thing. These countries came out blinking
and confused into the light of sovereignty, not democracy, and they
were taken over by local strongmen. These strongmen sometimes paid
lip service to democracy, but the people knew the difference.”
Alexei Mitrofanov, a member of the Russian State Duma, the lower house
of parliament, is one of the most outlandish nationalist politicians
in Russia, but he put his finger on it when he told the newspaper
Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the revolutions around the perimeter of the
old empire mirrored Yeltsin’s revolt against Soviet power. “They’re
the equivalent of August 1991 with a 14-year delay,” he said, not
meaning it as a compliment.
If that’s the case, then, Russia may not feel the need to head down
the same road. To many Russians, revolution and democracy have become
tainted terms, equated with chaos and hardship, not freedom. Unlike
what we saw in Georgia, Belarus or Ukraine, we rarely encountered
deep-seated grass-roots discontent with Putin when we traveled the
Russian countryside. Outside the narrow circle of intelligentsia in
Moscow and St. Petersburg, many Russians agreed with Putin that a
little autocracy was a good thing, and they handed him a second term
in last year’s flawed but probably representative election.
But many uncertainties remain as Russia heads toward the crucial year
of 2008, when Putin’s second and final term under the constitution
expires. Many in Moscow believe he will try to find a way to
hold onto power, and the city is abuzz with various schemes he
could use to remain in control. “Well, who could stop them?” Olga
Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies the Russian elite, said in
Profil magazine. “The opposition? We don’t really have an opposition
at all.”
Putin’s former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, recently broke a
year-long silence to criticize his ex-boss and seems to be positioning
himself to be a Russian Yushchenko. But many say they doubt he could
pull it off, especially given his own unpopularity with the masses,
who blamed him for anything they did not like in Putin’s first term.
And so, if there were a revolution in Russia, many worry that it
would not happen peacefully. The color of revolution in Moscow, then,
might be red for blood.
Authors’ e-mail: [email protected] [email protected]
Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, who finished a four-year tour as The
Post’s Moscow bureau chiefs in November, are authors of “Kremlin
Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution,” to be
published by Scribner in June.

RA CENTRAL BANK OPERATES AT A LOSS IN 2004
YEREVAN, APRIL 1, NOYAN TAPAN. In 2004, the RA Central Bank (CB)
incurred losses in the amount of 8.9 bln drams (about 19.1 mln USD)
against a profit of 10.3 bln drams in 2003. According to the RA CB
press service, the bank’s assets decreased 1.3% to 378 bln 803 mln
drams last year. In the year under review, the dram assets incresed
about 68.7% to 27.5 bln drams, while the cash amount of the gold and
foreign currency assets decreased 20.3% to about 263.6 mln drams. In
the same period, the CB’s liabilities grew 3.8% to about 377 bln 738
mln drams, 129.5 of this amount being foreign currency. The CB’s
authorized capital made 100 mln drams, its main reserve – about 9.8
bln drams.

Armenian speaker, OSCE chief discuss legislative reforms
Arminfo
31 Mar 05
YEREVAN
The speaker of the Armenian National Assembly, Artur Bagdasaryan, and
Slovenian Foreign Minister, OSCE Chairman-in-Office Dimitrij Rupel
yesterday discussed issues of implementing legislative reforms in
Armenia.
The meeting discussed the process of reforming the Electoral Code, the
legal system, local self-government, as well as constitutional
changes, the press service of the National Assembly told Arminfo.
In the process of implementing constitutional reforms, Artur
Bagdasaryan drew attention to providing precise guarantees for
protecting human rights, balancing the rights and powers of the three
branches of power, securing the independence of courts and reforming
the system of local self-government.
The speaker said that Armenia honours its commitments to the Council
of Europe according to schedule.
Moreover, the parliament has set up a working group with the aim of
harmonizing Armenian legislation with European Union legislation.
In turn, Rupel expressed his satisfaction with the work of the
Armenian parliament and outlined the importance of carrying out
legislative reforms in conformity with international standards. The
meeting also discussed issues of deepening Armenian-Slovenian
relations and Slovenia’s support for Armenia in the Expanded Europe:
New Neighbourhood programme.

NGO AND MASS MEDIA HAVE EASIER ACCESS TO FORCE BODIES’ ACTIVITY
YEREVAN, MARCH 30, ARMENPRESS: Alvard Barkhudarian, an expert of
the Armenian Center for National and International Studies (ACNIS), a
think-tank headed by a former foreign minister Raffi Hovhanesian,
claimed today that local non-governmental organizations and mass media
have now a broader access to what is going on within law-enforcement
bodies and the armed forces.
She was speaking at round table discussions on civil supervision
over armed forces, convened by a non-governmental organization, called
partnership for Open Society. She, however, added that there is still
a great deal of work to be done to make armed forces as transparent as
possible.
Ms. Barkhudarian said heads of force bodies have come to understand
that the more transparent a force agency is the bigger public’s trust
in it. She also commended the Armenian defense ministry for launching
its web site at , which she said is the sole such web site
in the South Caucasus,but argued that Armenia, which is still formally
at war with Azerbaijan, has tokeep part of information closed to
public.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress