Author: Kalashian Nyrie

VARUZHAN VOSKANYAN HAD TO WITHDRAW HIS CANDIDACY
ArmRadio.am
30.10.2006 16:42
The European Commission expects Romania to suggest new candidacy
for European Commissioner. Primarily the Prime Minister of Romania
CÄ~Clin Popescu-TÄ~C riceanu had proposed the candidacy of Varuzhan
Voskanyan – Head of the Armenian National Union of Armenia. However,
the latter had to withdraw his candidacy after separate episodes of
his biography were revealed. Thus, according to European mass media,
Voskanyan is suspected of serving as agent of the ” Securitate”
special service and leading a rightist political party financed by
one of Romanian businessmen.
Voskanyan himself categorically refutes this kind of accusations.
President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barosso supports
the candidacy of Romanian Justice Minister Monika Makovey.
–Boundary_(ID_xPITjJ00cXpgfWYXt6owhw)–

DEAD RECKONING: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE POLITICS OF SILENCE
By Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker, USA
Oct 30 2006
On September 14, 2000, Representatives George Radanovich, Republican
of California, and David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan, introduced a
House resolution-later to be known as H.R. 596-on the slaughter of
the Armenians. The measure urged the President, in dealing with the
matter, to demonstrate “appropriate understanding and sensitivity.”
It further instructed him on how to phrase his annual message on
the Armenian Day of Remembrance: the President should refer to the
atrocities as “genocide.” The bill was sent to the International
Relations Committee and immediately came under attack. State Department
officials reminded the committee that it was U.S. policy to “respect
the Turkish government’s assertions that, although many ethnic
Armenians died during World War I, no genocide took place.”
Expanding on this theme, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in a
letter to Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, wrote that while
he in no way wanted to “downplay the Armenian tragedy . . . passing
judgment on this history through legislation could have a negative
impact on Turkish-Armenian relations and on our security interests in
the region.” After committee members voted, on October 3rd, to send
H.R. 596 to the floor, Turkish officials warned that negotiations
with an American defense contractor, Bell Textron, over four and a
half billion dollars’ worth of attack helicopters were in jeopardy.
On October 5th, the leaders of all five parties in the Turkish
parliament issued a joint statement threatening to deny the U.S. access
to an airbase in Incirlik, which it was using to patrol northern
Iraq. Finally, on October 19th, just a few hours before H.R. 596
was scheduled to be debated in the House, Hastert pulled it from
the agenda. He had, he said, been informed by President Clinton that
passage of the resolution could “risk the lives of Americans.”
The defeat of H.R. 596 is a small but fairly typical episode in a
great campaign of forgetting. Like President Clinton, President Bush
continues to “respect the Turkish government’s assertions” and to issue
Armenian Remembrance Day proclamations each year without ever quite
acknowledging what it is that’s being remembered. If in Washington
it’s politically awkward to refer to the genocide, it is positively
dangerous to do so in Istanbul. Last year, Turkey’s leading author,
Orhan Pamuk, was prosecuted merely for having brought up the subject
in a press interview. “A million Armenians were killed and nobody but
me dares to talk about it, ” he told the Sunday magazine of the Swiss
newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Pamuk, now a recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Literature, was accused of having violated Section 301 of the Turkish
penal code, which outlaws “insulting Turkishness.” (The charge was
eventually dropped, on a technicality.) A few months later, another
prominent Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, was charged with the same
offense, for having a character in her most recent novel, “The Bastard
of Istanbul,” declare, “I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who
lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915,
but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide.” The charges
were dropped after Shafak argued that the statement of a fictional
person could not be used to prosecute a real one, then reinstated by
a higher court, and then dropped again.
It is in this context that Taner Akcam’s new history, “A Shameful Act:
The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility”
(Metropolitan; $30), must be considered. The book is dryly written
and awkwardly translated, but nevertheless moving.
Akcam grew up in far northeastern Turkey and was educated at Ankara’s
Middle East Technical University, where he became the editor of a
leftist journal. In 1976, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years
in prison for spreading propaganda. Using a stove leg to dig a tunnel,
he managed to escape after a year, and fled to Germany. Akcam is one
of the first Turkish historians to treat the Armenian genocide as
genocide-he now lives in exile in Minnesota-and in “A Shameful Act”
he tries to grapple both with the enormity of the crime and with the
logic of its repression.
Any writer who takes on genocide as his topic accepts obligations
that, if not exactly contradictory, are clearly in tension. The
first is to describe the event in a way that is adequate to its
exceptionality. (The original U.N. resolution on the subject, approved
in 1946, describes genocide as an act that “shocks the conscience
of mankind.”) The second is to make sense of it, which is to say,
to produce an account of the unspeakable that anyone can understand.
Akcam begins his history in the nineteenth century, when roughly
two million Armenians were living in the Ottoman Empire, some in
major cities like Istanbul and Izmir, and the rest in the provinces
of central and eastern Anatolia. Already, the Armenians were in
a peculiarly vulnerable position: Christians living in the heart
of a Muslim empire, they were subject by law to special taxes and
restrictions, and by tradition to extortion and harassment. As the
century wore on, the so-called Sick Man of Europe kept shedding
territory: first Greece, in the Greek War of Independence; and then,
following the Russo-Turkish War, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and
Bosnia and Herzegovina. These humiliating defeats eroded the Ottomans’
confidence, which, in turn, Akcam argues, “resulted in the loss of
their tolerance.” Muslim assaults on Christians increased throughout
the empire, and the ancient prejudices against the Armenians hardened
into something uglier.
In 1876, Sultan Abdulhamid II came to power. Abdulhamid, who ruled
the empire for thirty-three of its last forty-six years, was a deeply
anxious man, perhaps paranoid. He maintained a vast network of spies;
turned Yildiz Palace, overlooking the Bosporus, into a ramshackle fort;
and demanded that each dish be tasted by his chief chamberlain before
being served. Abdulhamid soon took anti-Armenianism to new heights. (It
was rumored that the Sultan’s own mother, a former dancing girl, was
Armenian, but he always denied this.) He shut down Armenian schools,
threw Armenian teachers in jail, prohibited the use of the word
“Armenia” in newspapers and textbooks, and formed special Kurdish
regiments, known as the Hamidiye, whose raison d’etre appears to
have been to harass Armenian farmers. Encouraged by American and
European missionaries, the Armenians turned to the outside world for
help. The English, the French, and the Russians repeatedly demanded
that Istanbul institute “reforms” on the Armenians’ behalf.
Officially, the Sultan acceded to these demands, only to turn around
and repress the Armenians that much more vigorously. “By taking away
Greece and Romania, Europe has cut off the feet of the Turkish state,”
Abdulhamid complained. “Now, by means of this Armenian agitation, they
want to get at our most vital places and tear out our very guts. This
would be the beginning of totally annihilating us, and we must fight
against it with all the strength we possess.”
In the mid-eighteen-nineties, tens of thousands of Armenians were
murdered. The slaughter began in Sasun, in eastern Anatolia, where
Armenians had refused to pay taxes on the ground that the government
had failed to protect them from Kurdish extortion. The killings in
Sasun provoked an international outcry, which was answered with the
Sultan’s usual promises of reform, and then with a string of even
bloodier massacres in the provinces of Erzurum, Ankara, Sivas, Trabzon,
and Harput. In the wake of the killings, William Gladstone, the former
British Prime Minister, labelled Abdulhamid “the great assassin.”
Finally, in 1909, Abdulhamid was pushed aside. The coup was engineered
by a group composed, for the most part, of discontented Army
officers-the original Young Turks. The Young Turks spoke loftily of
progress and brotherhood-on the eve of the revolt, one of their leaders
is said to have declared, “Under the blue sky we are all equal”-and
the empire’s remaining Christians celebrated their ascendancy. But
the logic of slaughtering the Armenians had by this point been too
well established.
When the First World War broke out, the Young Turks rushed to join the
conflict. “That day of revenge, which has been awaited for centuries
by the nation’s young and old, by its martyrs and by its living,
has finally arrived,” the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies asserted in
a letter to the armed forces. By 1914, the empire was being led
by a troika-nicknamed the Three Pashas-composed of the Minister of
the Interior, the Minister of the Navy, and the Minister of War. In
December, the War Minister, Ismail Enver, decided to lead the Third
Army in an attack against the Russians on the Caucasian front. Enver
planned to press all the way east to Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan,
where he hoped to incite the local Muslims to join the Ottomans’ cause,
and, as a first step, he ordered his forces to divide up and follow
different routes to Sarikamish, a Russian military outpost. The idea
was for all the troops to arrive at the same time and surprise the
enemy with their strength; instead, they straggled in over a period
of several days, with devastating results.
The Ottomans lost about seventy-five thousand men at Sarikamish, out
of a total force of ninety thousand. A German officer attached to the
Third Army described the defeat as “a disaster which for rapidity and
completeness is without parallel in military history.” The Russians
had encouraged the Armenians to form volunteer regiments to fight
against the Ottomans, and some (though not many) had heeded this
call. The Armenians’ role in the disaster became one of the pretexts
for the genocide.
On April 24, 1915, some two hundred and fifty prominent
Armenians-poets, doctors, bankers, and even a member of the Ottoman
parliament-were arrested in Istanbul. They were split up into groups,
loaded onto trains, shipped off to remote prisons, and eventually
killed. (The Armenian Day of Remembrance is marked each year on the
anniversary of these arrests.) Around the same time, orders were
issued to begin rounding up Armenians wholesale and deporting them.
“Some regional variations notwithstanding,” Akcam reports, the
deportations “proceeded in the same manner everywhere.” Armenians
would be given a few days or, in some cases, just a few hours to
leave their homes. The men were separated from the women and children,
led beyond the town, and either tortured or murdered outright. Their
families were then herded to concentration camps in the Syrian desert,
often bound by ropes or chains. Along the way, they were frequently
set upon by Kurdish tribesmen, who had been given license to loot
and rape, or by the very gendarmes who were supposed to be guarding
them. A Greek witness wrote of watching a column of deportees being
led through the Kemakh Gorge, on the upper Euphrates. The guards
“withdrew to the mountainside” and “began a hail of rifle fire,”
he wrote. “A few days later there was a mopping-up operation: since
many little children were still alive and wandering about beside
their dead parents.” In areas where ammunition was in short supply,
the killing squads relied on whatever weapons were at hand-axes,
cleavers, even shovels. Adults were hacked to pieces, and infants
dashed against the rocks. In the Black Sea region, Armenians were
loaded onto boats and thrown overboard. In the area around Lake Hazar,
they were tossed over cliffs.
At the time of the deportations, the U.S. had not yet entered the
war. It maintained an extensive network of diplomats in the region,
and many of these provided detailed chronicles of what they had seen,
which Henry Morgenthau, the United States Ambassador in Istanbul,
urgently forwarded to Washington. (Other eyewitness accounts came from
German Army officers, Danish missionaries, and Armenian survivors.) In
a dispatch sent to the State Department on November 1, 1915, the
U.S. consul in Aleppo wrote:
It is extremely rare to find a family intact that has come any
considerable distance, invariably all having lost members from disease
and fatigue, young girls and boys carried off by hostile tribesmen,
and about all the men having been separated from the families and
suffered fates that had best be left unmentioned, many being done
away with in atrocious manners before the eyes of their relatives
and friends. So severe has been the treatment that careful estimates
place the number of survivors at only 15 percent of those originally
deported. On this basis the number surviving even this far being less
than 150,000 . . . there seems to have been about 1,000,000 persons
lost up to this date.
An American businessman who made a tour of the lower Euphrates the
next year reported having encountered “all along the road from Meskene
to Der-i-Zor graves containing the remains of unfortunate Armenians
abandoned and dead in atrocious suffering. It is by the hundreds
that these mounds are numbered where sleep anonymously in their last
sleep these outcasts of existence, these victims of barbary without
qualification.” Morgenthau repeatedly confronted the Ottoman Interior
Minister, Mehmed Talât, with the contents of these dispatches, telling
him that the Americans would “never forget these massacres.” But the
warnings made no impression. During one session, Morgenthau later
recalled in a memoir, Talât turned to him and asked if he could
obtain a list of Armenians who had purchased life-insurance policies
with American firms. “They are practically all dead now, and have no
heirs left to collect the money,” the Interior Minister reasoned, and
therefore the unclaimed benefits rightfully belonged to the government.
The official explanation for the Armenian deportations was that
they were necessary for security reasons, and this is still the
account provided by state-sanctioned histories today. “Facts on
the Relocation of Armenians (1914-1918),” a volume produced by the
Turkish Historical Society, was published in English in 2002. It
begins with an epigram from John F. Kennedy (“For the great enemy
of the truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived, and
dishonest-but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic”)
and the reassurance that it is “not a propaganda document.” The book
argues that Russia and its allies had “sown the seeds of intrigue and
mischief among the Armenians, who in turn had been doing everything in
their power to make life difficult for Ottoman armies.” Deciding that
“fundamental precautions” were needed, the Ottoman authorities took
steps to “relocate” the Armenians away from the front. They worked to
insure that the transfer would be effected “as humanely as possible”;
if this goal was not always realized, it was because of disease-so
difficult to control during wartime-or rogue bands of “tribal people”
who sometimes attacked Armenian convoys. “Whenever the government
realized that some untoward incidents had taken place . . . the
government acted very promptly and warned the local authorities.” In
support of this “Arbeit Macht Frei” version of events, “Facts on the
Relocation of Armenians” cites the very Ottoman officials who oversaw
the slaughter. Turkish officials, in turn, now cite works like “Facts”
to support their claim that the period’s history remains contested. In
March, 2005, just before the commemoration of the ninetieth anniversary
of the Day of Remembrance, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, called for an “impartial study” to look into what had really
happened to the Armenians. The International Association of Genocide
Scholars responded that such a call could only be regarded as still
more propaganda. “The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented
by thousands of official records . . . by eyewitness accounts of
missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by
decades of historical scholarship,” the association’s directors wrote
in a letter explaining their refusal to participate. An academic
conference on the massacres planned for later that spring in Istanbul
was banned by a court order. (After much maneuvering, it was held at
a private university amid raucous protests.)
The Ottomans formally surrendered to the Allies on October 30, 1918.
The Paris Peace Conference opened the following year, and it took
another year for the Allies to agree on how to dispose of the empire.
The pact that finally emerged-the Treaty of Sèvres-awarded Palestine,
Transjordan, and Mesopotamia to the English, Syria and Lebanon to
the French, Rhodes and a chunk of southern Anatolia to the Italians,
and Izmir and western Anatolia to the Greeks. Eastern Anatolia, with
a prize stretch of Black Sea coast, was to go to the Armenians. The
Bosporus and the Dardanelles were to be demilitarized and placed under
international control. From an imperial power the Turks were thus
transformed into something very close to a subject people. This was
the final disgrace and, as it turned out, also the start of a revival.
As the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks had been fighting
against history; they had spent more than a century trying-often
unsuccessfully-to fend off nationalist movements in the regions
they controlled. Now, in defeat, they adopted the cause as their
own. In the spring of 1920, the Turkish Nationalists, led by Mustafa
Kemal-later to be known as Ataturk-established a new government in
Ankara. (The government’s founding is celebrated every April 23rd,
one day before the Armenian Day of Remembrance.) During the next
three years, the Nationalists fought a series of brutal battles,
which eventually forced the Allies to abandon Sèvres. A new treaty
was drawn up, the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Republic of Turkey
was created. The big losers in this process were, once again, the
Armenians: Lausanne returned all of Anatolia to Turkish control.
In Akcam’s view, what happened between 1920 and 1923 is the key to
understanding the Turks’ refusal to discuss what happened in 1915.
The Armenian genocide was what today would be called a campaign of
ethnic cleansing, and as such it was highly effective. It changed
the demographics of eastern Anatolia; then, on the basis of these
changed demographics, the Turks used the logic of self-determination
to deprive of a home the very people they had decimated. Although
the genocide was not committed by the Nationalists, without it the
nationalist project wouldn’t have made much sense. Meanwhile, the
Nationalists made sure that the perpetrators were never punished.
Immediately after the end of the war, the Three Pashas fled the
country. (The Interior Minister, Talât, was assassinated in Berlin
by an Armenian who had been left for dead in a pile of corpses.) In
an attempt to mollify the Allies, the Ottomans arrested scores of
lower-ranking officials and put some of them on trial, but, when the
Nationalists came to power, they suspended these proceedings and freed
the suspects. A separate prosecution effort by the British, who were
keeping dozens of Ottoman officers locked up in Malta, similarly came
to nothing, and eventually the officers were sent home as part of
a prisoner-of-war exchange. Several went on to become high-ranking
members of Mustafa Kemal’s government. For the Turks to acknowledge
the genocide would thus mean admitting that their country was founded
by war criminals and that its existence depended on their crimes.
This, in Akcam’s words, “would call into question the state’s very
identity.” And so the Turks prefer to insist, as “Facts on the
Relocation of Armenians” puts it, that the genocide is a “legend.”
It is, of course, possible to question Akcam’s highly psychologized
account. Turkey has long sought to join the European Union, and,
while a history of genocide is clearly no barrier to membership,
denying it may be; several European governments have indicated that
they will oppose the country’s bid unless it acknowledges the crimes
committed against the Armenians. Are the Turks really willing to risk
their country’s economic future merely in order to hide-or pretend
to hide-an ugly fact about its origins? To believe this seems to
require a view of Turkish ethnic pride that gets dangerously close to
a national stereotype. In fact, many Turkish nationalists oppose E.U.
membership; from their perspective, denying the Armenian genocide
serves an eminently practical political purpose.
That being said, Akcam clearly has a point, and one that Americans, in
particular, ought to be able to appreciate. Before the arrival of the
first Europeans, there were, it is estimated, at least forty million
indigenous people living in the Americas; by 1650, fewer than ten
million were left. The decline was the result of casual cruelty on the
one hand-diseases unwittingly spread-and systematic slaughter on the
other. Every November, when American schoolchildren are taught about
Thanksgiving, they are insistently told the story of how the Pilgrims,
in their gratitude, entertained the kindly Wampanoag. We now know
that the comity of that original Thanksgiving was entirely atypical,
and that, by 1621, the Wampanoag were already a dying nation. While it
was cowardly of Congress to pull H.R. 596, passing it would, in its own
way, also have been problematic. We may side with the Armenians, but,
historically speaking, we probably have more in common with the Turks.
icles/061106crbo_books2
–Boundary_(ID_V5fp1qWHVa ltXA35GnUHvw)–

TO RUSSIA GEORGIA IS CLOSER AND MORE FRATERNAL, THAN ARMENIA – VICE-SPEAKER
TREND, Azerbaijan
Oct 30 2006
(PanARMENIAN.Net) November 6 the next session of Armenian-Russian
Interparliamentary Commission on Cooperation will be held in Yerevan,
Armenian Vice-Speaker Vahan Hovhannisyan stated at a news conference
in Yerevan. In his words, at the session the Armenian party intends
to discuss the situation Armenia is in due to the tension in
Russian-Georgian relations, reports Trend.
“Georgia’s actions are aimed at withdrawal of Russia from the region
at any price,” the Armenian Vice-Speaker said. In his words, Armenia’s
actions should be aimed at reduction of economic threat within the
period of Russian sanctions against Georgia.
At that V. Hovhannisyan underscored that to Russia Georgia is a closer
and more fraternal people, than Armenia. “Not Armenia, but Georgia
is Russia’s advanced post. Georgian leaders want to turn the Georgian
people towards the West,” he said. He said that if Abkhazia and South
Ossetia do not want to live with Georgia it is their business. “I
do not think Armenians should interfere with internal affairs of
neighboring states,” Hovhannisyan added.

RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
_________________________________________ ____________________
RFE/RL Iran Report
Vol. 9, No. 40, 30 October 2006
A Review of Developments in Iran Prepared by the Regional Specialists
of RFE/RL’s Newsline Team
******************************************** ****************
HEADLINES:
* CANDIDATES REGISTERED FOR LOCAL COUNCIL POLLS
* IRAN PREPARES FOR CENSUS
* RIGHTS GROUP GATHERS SIGNATURES TO BAN STONINGS
* END TO STONINGS DEMANDED
* RIGHTS GROUP WANTS INVESTIGATION OF EVIN PRISON
* DISSIDENT RELEASED ON BAIL
* REPORTS HIGHLIGHT PRECARIOUS RIGHTS IN IRAN
* STATE NEWSPAPER RESUMES PUBLICATION
* TEHRAN STUDENTS DISCIPLINED, CAMPUS JOURNAL SHUT DOWN
* DISSIDENT CRITICIZES EU INDIFFERENCE TO ABUSES
* SENIOR IRANIANS CHARGED IN 1994 BOMBING IN BUENOS AIRES
* FORMER SECURITY AGENT IN JAIL FOR REVELATIONS ABOUT DISSIDENT KILLINGS
* FOREIGN MINISTRY SUMMONS EUROPEAN ENVOYS OVER MEETINGS WITH TERRORISTS
* SANCTIONS DISCUSSED IN MOSCOW
* GUARDS CORPS EYEING ENEMY MOVEMENTS
* AHMADINEJAD DEPLORES ‘AGGRESSIVE’ U.S. ADMINISTRATION
*********************************** *************************
CANDIDATES REGISTERED FOR LOCAL COUNCIL POLLS. Registration of
aspiring candidates for local council polls due in December ended
late on October 22, with some prominent Iranians registering to run,
agencies reported. They included former Tehran police chief Morteza
Talai; Masumeh Ebtekar, a vice president in the reformist government
of Mohammad Khatami; Ishaq Jahangiri, former industry minister under
Khatami; and Ahmad Masjid-Jamei, Khatami’s former culture and
Islamic guidance minister. Others registering were prominent
reformist Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, former state budget chief Muhammad Ali
Najafi, and conservative Mehrdad Bazrpash, who, until recently, was
an adviser to President Ahmadinejad, “Aftab-i Yazd” reported on
October 23.
Candidacies must be approved by the Guardians Council, a body
of clerical jurists. On October 23, leftist cleric Hadi Khamenei said
unfair disqualifications, bias among Guardians Council or related
personnel involved in electoral supervision, or the “citing of
amazing excuses or raising pseudo-legal obstacles” for aspirants will
discredit the upcoming polls for local councils and the Assembly of
Experts, a clerical body. “If…the gentlemen want to resort to their
old methods, the elections are flawed, even if nobody says so,” ISNA
quoted him as saying. Khamenei is the brother of Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Vahid Sepehri)
IRAN PREPARES FOR CENSUS. Iranian authorities are preparing to carry
out the country’s sixth nationwide census from October 28 to
November 27, IRNA reported on October 26. Officials reportedly expect
new surveying methods to give the count a 99.8 percent level of
accuracy. Households will answer 26 questions chosen “with
international advice” from 900 relevant questions used in similar
measurements. The survey is expected to cost $40 million and will be
carried out by 88,000 people, with the final results expected in
March 2007, IRNA reported.
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad told a gathering of officials
and statisticians involved in the project on October 26 that “precise
and scientific planning” are necessary for the government’s
stated plans to “implement justice and build the country,” IRNA
reported. “A correct response to the country and the people’s
needs requires correct and comprehensive information and figures,”
Ahmadinejad said. (Vahid Sepehri)
RIGHTS GROUP GATHERS SIGNATURES TO BAN STONINGS. Amnesty
International has gathered some 160,000 signatures to pressure
Iran’s government to ban the practice of stoning, a lethal
penalty imposed on people — more often women — convicted of
adultery or extramarital sex, “El Pais” reported on October 25. The
rights group said seven women are now waiting to be stoned to death
in Iran, while a man and a woman were stoned in May, reportedly for
the first time since December 2002, according to elpais.es.
Iran’s Islamic laws forbid extramarital sex. Articles 102
and 104 of its Penal Code explain the modalities of this punishment,
whereby men and women are buried to the waist or chest respectively,
before being stoned by mid-sized stones to ensure pain before death,
the daily reported.
Rights activist Mehrangiz Kar told Radio Farda on October 24
that the time has come for legal reformers to call for the
elimination of stoning from Iran’s laws. She said a recent letter
written by jurists to judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmud
Hashemi-Shahrudi observed that even existing legal stipulations on
stoning are not properly implemented and there is “inconsistency” and
“subjectivity” in sentences issued by judges, Radio Farda reported.
(Vahid Sepehri)
END TO STONINGS DEMANDED. Women’s rights activists in Iran have
called on the head of the country’s conservative judiciary and
the parliament to end the stoning to death of convicted adulterers.
Under pressure from the European Union, Iran was said to have
introduced a moratorium on stonings in 2002. But activists accuse
judges of perpetuating the practice.
Reports suggest that two people were stoned to death in May
and at least eight women currently face stoning sentences.
Under Islamic laws as applied in Iran, the punishment for
adultery is stoning. It is widely considered to be among the cruelest
of punishments. Women are buried up to their chests in a pit; men are
buried up to their waists. And their hands are tied behind their
backs.
Then, as lawyer Elham Fahimi explains, they are struck with
rocks until they die.
“They put them in a hole and they wrap them in a kafan [a
white sheet used for burial] — this is how it should be done,
according to the law,” Fahimi says. “Then they call on those who have
not committed any crimes to come and throw stones.” Death by stoning
is slow and painful. Islamic code prescribes that “the stone should
not be so big as to kill the offender with one or two stones” and
“nor should it be as small as pebbles.”
Still Happening
The latest case of a judicially ordered stoning was
reportedly carried in early May in a cemetery in the holy city of
Mashhad in eastern Iran.
A woman, identified as Mahbubeh M., and a man, identified as
Abbas H., had been convicted of committing adultery and murdering the
woman’s husband. Activists say that before the two were stoned to
death, they were treated like “lifeless corpses.” They were given
final ablutions and then buried in a hole in the ground. Reports
claim that more than 100 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard
and Basij paramilitary forces participated in the stoning.
The case alarmed and outraged women’s rights activists.
Their investigations suggested that judges in several cities have
continued to condemn people to death by stoning, despite the reported
moratorium.
Women’s rights activist Mahbubeh Abbasgholizadeh tells
RFE/RL that one of the reasons new stonings are being ordered is
because the moratorium was not enshrined in law.
“Since under our laws, judges are independent, one reason
[for continued stonings] might be that with the new government [of
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad] coming to power and the change in the
political atmosphere, judges who are in favor of such sentences have
become more active,” Abbasgholizadeh says. “Therefore, we think
stoning should be banned by law — otherwise judges can issue such
sentences as they desire.”
Silent Killings
Abbasgholizadeh says it is unclear how many stoning sentences
have been issued and carried out in Iran since reports of the
moratorium emerged four years ago.
“Currently they don’t carry out stoning in public. I
don’t know [why], maybe because of public opinion or
international pressure,” Abbasgholizadeh says. “Now it seems that
they do it in the prison courtyards by prisoners or prison guards
[casting the stones]. I even know…a political prisoner who was
detained three or four years ago and had seen from his cell that they
brought a woman and forced other female detainees to stone her.”
The head of Iran’s judiciary, Ayatollah Shahrudi, has not
reacted publicly to the activists’ calls for an end to stonings.
Parliamentarian Elham Aminzadeh was quoted by Iranian media
as saying after a trip to Brussels in mid-October that stoning
sentences are no longer being handed down in Iran. She said EU
officials had asked about the resumption of the practice. Aminzadeh
said they had referred to an Amnesty International statement and an
Internet list, which she described as invalid.
Abbasgholizadeh dismisses Aminzadeh’s claim and says
rights activists have carefully documented stoning cases.
“We don’t speak without proof,” Abbasgholizadeh says.
“This lady speaks in a way that shows she’s denying stoning and
saying that the judiciary has replaced it with other sentences. This
means she’s saying stoning should not exist. Our point is that as
long as [a ban] doesn’t become law, judges can [issue stoning
sentences] and are doing it. So this lady, who is a legislator and
opposes it, should make the ban a legal one.”
Pressure Continues
On October 10, Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene
Khan called on Iran to abolish stoning “immediately and totally.”
Activists have published the names of nine women and two men
whom they claim have been sentenced to death by stoning.
One of them is Shamameh Malek Ghorbani, who was reportedly
sentenced to stoning in June after relatives found a man in her home.
Amnesty International reported that her brothers and husband murdered
the man and also stabbed Ghorbani with a knife.
Ghorbani’s lawyer, Fahimi, tells RFE/RL that the case is
being reexamined by a higher court.
“She is in Urumiyeh prison,” Fahimi says. “Her crime is
adultery, and she has been sentenced to stoning. I visited her while
my colleague went to Qom to study her case, which is before the Qom
supreme court. The sentence has most probably been overturned.”
Reports suggest that the stoning sentence against another
woman identified by Amnesty International, Ashraf Kalhori, has also
been suspended.
But activists are determined to continue their efforts until
the practice is rooted out of Iran.
Women’s rights defenders say adultery cannot be
considered as deserving of such harsh punishment. They are quick to
add that “no crime deserves to be punished by stoning.”
With officials largely silent on the issue except to deny
that it occurs, it is unclear how many more Iranians might be stoned
to death before authorities throughout the country are forced to
agree. (Golnaz Esfandiari)
RIGHTS GROUP WANTS INVESTIGATION OF EVIN PRISON. Four Iranian human
rights organizations have called on the United Nations and other
human-rights bodies and organizations to send an independent
delegation to investigate the situation in section 209 of
Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. The human rights groups say most
prisoners held in section 209 are being maltreated and have no access
to their family or lawyers. Section 209 is reportedly controlled by
Iran’s Intelligence Ministry and no other government bodies have
access to it.
Abdolfattah Soltani, a prominent human rights lawyer, was
detained in a cell measuring about five square meters in section 209
of Evin prison for more than seven months.
He was not physically tortured but he told RFE/RL that during
the first two months he was completely cut off from the outside
world.
Held Incommunicado
“One doesn’t have any contact with family, a lawyer. For
two months I didn’t have a television, radio, newspapers, or a
book — just a Koran and maybe a [prayer book],” he said. “It is the
worst form of psychological torture when one has no contact outside
of the prison cell; many were ready to confess to anything just not
to be forced to bear those conditions.”
Section 209 is Iran’s most notorious detention center for
detained critics and activists.
Located inside Tehran’s Evin prison, the names of the
individuals held there are not recorded on the official list of
Evin’s prisoners and families of the detainees are sometimes left
clueless about where their loved ones are being held.
Political- and security-related prisoners are sometimes held
in section 209 in solitary confinement for months without being
charged or put on trial.
Reports Of Abuse
Detainees are reportedly subjected to long and multiple daily
interrogations. Some former detainees have said they were deprived of
sleep and medical care. Others have said they were threatened by
authorities with indefinite imprisonment. Some said they were beaten
up.
Soltani says prisoners in section 209 do not enjoy the same
rights as prisoners held in other wards of Evin prison.
“If anybody becomes sick there is a room there they call the
infirmary, inside 209, and only after many demands will they take
prisoners there where there is a general doctor with very limited
possibilities,” he said. “I had a heart problem and I asked for an
appointment for two months — then I was freed and still hadn’t
had an appointment.”
Four Iranian human rights groups have expressed concern over
the situation of scores of political prisoners, including dissidents,
human rights activists, and students who are reportedly being held in
section 209.
The rights groups that have sent an appeal to international
human rights bodies include the newly founded UN human Rights
Council, Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI), the Committee for the
Defense of Human Rights in Northwest Iran, the Kurdish Human Rights
Defense Organization, and the Ahwazi Human Rights Organization.
Secret Service Controlled
HRAI’s spokesman in Europe, Sadegh Naghashkar, says
section 209 is out of the control of bodies such as Iran’s prison
organization and Evin’s prison officials.
“[Section 209] is one of the most dreadful sections of
Evin’s prison, and it is controlled by the Intelligence
Ministry,” he said. “No one else has control over this section. The
interrogators in this section put pressure on detainees based on
their assessment.”
Last summer, when a group of Iranian legislators visited Evin
prison, they were not allowed into section 209. One of the
legislators, Akbar Alami, said “most regrettably” the wing was closed
and added that this has contributed to “doubts” about what goes on in
section 209.
In recent years there have been reports of other unofficial
detention centers that are not under the control of Iran’s prison
authorities. Their number is not known, however, as they are
officially not registered as prisons and are reportedly being run by
certain security bodies.
Some have been reportedly closed, including Prison 59, which
is controlled by the Revolutionary Guard.
Unexplained Deaths
Many reformist figures and human rights activists have
described such detention centers as illegal and called for their
closure.
Soltani says all detention centers should be under the
control of relevant authorities.
“According to the law, the Intelligence Ministry does not
have the right to have a detention center,” he said. “It doesn’t
have the right to do interrogations; it should do its investigation
and give its information to the police. The police then have the
right to make arrests with orders from the judiciary. But, in section
209 there is unfortunately no control over the actions of officials;
anything can happen to the detainees and that’s a tragedy.”
Soltani says there should be tighter control by the relevant
authorities of the prison situation and also monitoring should be
done by independent human rights groups. He said such measures could
prevent “tragedies” such as the murder of Iranian-Canadian
photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who died from a head injury suffered
during beatings while in custody in Evin.
The human rights groups who have called for an international
investigation into the conditions in section 209 have published the
names of some of the detainees that are believed to be held there.
They include the outspoken Ayatollah Kazemeyni Borujerdi — who was
arrested after calling for the separation of religion from politics
— and student activists Kayvan Ansari and Kianush Sanjari. (Golnaz
Esfandiari)
DISSIDENT RELEASED ON BAIL. Former legislator Ali Akbar
Musavi-Khoeini was released on bail on October 21 after 130 days’
detention, Radio Farda reported on October 23, quoting his wife,
Zohreh Islamian. Musavi-Khoeni reportedly had to post bail of 150
million tomans (roughly $160,000). He said after his release that he
was jailed for his “useful and effective” activities when a member of
parliament and an activist, including for calling state officials to
account and defending the rights of detainees. Musavi-Khoeini was
arrested on June 12 after he participated in a Tehran demonstration
for women’s rights (see “RFE/RL Iran Report,” September 26,
2006). He vowed to continue his “social and human rights” activities,
Radio Farda reported.
Separately, Muhaddaseh Saberi, a supporter of detained cleric
Ayatollah Seyyed Hussein Kazemeyni Borujerdi, told Radio Farda on
October 22 that reports of that outspoken cleric’s release are
false and that Borujerdi remains in Tehran’s Evin prison. “They
want to make it seem as if [Borujerdi] has been released,” she said,
so that no one “follow[s] up” on his case. (Vahid Sepehri)
REPORTS HIGHLIGHT PRECARIOUS RIGHTS IN IRAN. In a Reporters Without
Frontiers (RSF) report on press freedom in the world over the past
year, Iran is listed as a state that restricts free speech, Radio
Farda reported on October 23. The report includes Iran’s Supreme
Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad among the prominent enemies
of the free press, Radio Farda added. Separately, Iran’s
Defenders of Human Rights Center has issued a report on the state of
human rights in Iran over the past six months, Radio Farda reported.
The center’s report cites rights irregularities including 29
cases of legal action against journalists in that time; 38 cases of
interference in court cases by “irresponsible individuals”;
prosecutions of 35 press editors; seven publications being banned;
books removed from bookshops; refusing to allow the publication of
certain books; 130 cases of disciplinary measures taken against
students; and 21 cases of prosecution or imprisonment of students,
Radio Farda reported. (Vahid Sepehri)
STATE NEWSPAPER RESUMES PUBLICATION. Publication of the “Iran”
newspaper resumed on October 28. “Iran,” which is published by the
official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), was shut down in May
after its publication of a cartoon led to riots in the northwest and
demonstrations by ethnic Azeris elsewhere.
Islamic Culture and Guidance Minister Hussein Safar-Harandi
told state television on October 23 that there would be some changes.
“The way the work is done has been reviewed so that the newspaper
would look more pleasing to readers.” (Bill Samii)
TEHRAN STUDENTS DISCIPLINED, CAMPUS JOURNAL SHUT DOWN. Three students
from Tehran’s Amir Kabir University were summoned to the
university’s disciplinary committee on October 21, while another
was temporarily banned from studying, on charges a university
official said are confidential, ISNA reported on October 23. Mohammad
Salmanpur told ISNA that he, Ibrahim Rahmani, and Saman Khosravi were
summoned to the disciplinary committee, adding that his own charges
related to allegedly disruptive behavior. The same university
confirmed a previous order to ban another student, Abbas Hakimzadeh,
from entering the campus, Hakimzadeh told ISNA. He said the
university also shut down his journal “Vazhe-yi-i No” (New Word). The
head of the student-affairs department at the university, identified
as Ataipur, told ISNA on October 23 that student dossiers are
“entirely confidential” and any disciplinary rulings are for presumed
political or campus-related misconduct. “If any student has been
prevented from entering the university, it must have been in line
with regulations, and if the disciplinary committee has issued an
order, we are not allowed to divulge its contents,” he said. He added
the university does its best to respect students’ rights. (Vahid
Sepehri)
DISSIDENT CRITICIZES EU INDIFFERENCE TO ABUSES. Government critic
Akbar Ganji was in Strasburg on October 24, where he met with EU
parliamentarians and criticized what he called EU tolerance of rights
abuses in Iran so as not to jeopardize commercial interests, Radio
Farda reported. He told the broadcaster that he met with German
Liberal and Greens parliamentarians the same day, and with Angelika
Beir, head of the European Parliament’s Human Rights Committee,
with whom “we discussed the extensive violation of human rights in
Iran.” Ganji also addressed the legislative body and answered
members’ questions, reportedly criticizing the EU for “shutting
their eyes to rights abuses” for the sake of economic interests,
Radio Farda reported. (Vahid Sepehri)
SENIOR IRANIANS CHARGED IN 1994 BOMBING IN BUENOS AIRES. Argentinean
prosecutors have charged leading Iranian statesmen and Lebanon’s
Hizballah militia with the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in
Buenos Aires in 1994, AFP and AP reported on October 25 (see RFE/RL
Iran Report,” November 10, 2003). Chief prosecutor Alberto Nisman
issued a statement accusing Iranian leaders of planning the bombing
in 1993. Hizballah has close ties to Iran’s government.
Prosecutors have asked a federal judge to issue arrest warrants for
Iran’s then President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani and his
intelligence and foreign ministers, Ali Fallahian and Ali-Akbar
Velayati, among other suspects, AP reported.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Husseini on October
26 rejected the charges by “certain Argentinean judicial agents” of
official Iranian involvement in the 1994 AMIA bombing and repeated
the oft-stated Iranian stance, that Iran is a victim of terrorism,
IRNA reported. Iran “is itself a victim of various terrorist
activities and has borne heavy human, material, and moral costs,” he
said. Husseini said previous irregularities in Argentina’s
investigations into the bombing, and the acquittal by a British court
of Iran’s then ambassador in Buenos Aires, Hadi Suleimanpur,
showed ” the claims made about” Iran’s involvement in the bombing
are “baseless.”
The “new publicity,” Husseini said, is “being fanned within
the framework of the political hostility of Zionists” and designed to
sow discord between Iran and Argentina and offset “the anti-Israeli
atmosphere” after recent “violations” against Palestinians and
Lebanese. Husseini said Argentinean officials must “move away from
past mistakes, and make reasoned and firm evidence the basis of any
statement of opinion,” IRNA reported.
Separately, the public prosecutor in Rome asked for a life
sentence at an October 25 court session for a former Iranian diplomat
accused of orchestrating the murder of another former Iranian
diplomat-turned-government-opponent, Radio Farda reported. The court
is examining the 1993 killing of Mohammad Hussein Naqdi, a case in
which diplomat Amir Mansur Bozorgian is a suspect. Neither he nor an
attorney were present at the latest session, Radio Farda reported.
(Vahid Sepehri)
FORMER SECURITY AGENT IN JAIL FOR REVELATIONS ABOUT DISSIDENT
KILLINGS. The Student Committee of Human Rights Reporters of Iran
reports that Intelligence and Security Ministry official Reza Malek
has been held in Tehran’s Evin prison for six years now for
having revealed parts of a report on the murders of dissidents in the
late 1990s by Iranian security agents, Radio Farda reported on
October 26. The group reports that Malek was given a 12-year prison
term for disclosing excerpts of an 80-page report on the killings,
which included the stabbing deaths in their home of prominent critics
Darius and Parvaneh Foruhar. Malek is reportedly in Evin’s
section 209, where political prisoners are kept.
A group of political inmates in the Gohardasht prison in
Karaj, a city outside Tehran, have issued a statement expressing
concern over the condition of prisoners in Evin’s 209th wing,
Radio Farda reported. Their statement reports that unspecified
detainees in the 209th wing are on hunger strike or “in an unsuitable
condition.” It called on the UN Human Rights Council to send
inspectors there, Radio Farda reported. (Vahid Sepehri)
FOREIGN MINISTRY SUMMONS EUROPEAN ENVOYS OVER MEETINGS WITH
TERRORISTS. The Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned the ambassadors of
Finland and Belgium on October 25 to express its displeasure at
meetings held in Belgium between parliamentarians and Iranian exiles,
including prominent opponent Mariam Rajavi, ISNA reported. Finland
currently holds the rotating EU Presidency. Rajavi is a self-styled
Iranian president-in-waiting and a leader of the National Council of
Resistance and the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (commonly known as
the MKO or MEK, and which uses a variety of cover names including
People’s Mujahedin of Iran), both part of a left-wing militant
grouping considered terrorists by Iran, the United States, and the
European Union.
Rajavi met with Belgian Senate leader Anne-Marie Lizin on
October 24, while a 20-member delegation with her later met other
senators, AFP reported the same day. The visit was unofficial, but
Tehran had already summoned the Belgian envoy on October 22 to
protest it, AFP reported.
On October 25, Ibrahim Heidarpur, the director-general for
Western European affairs at the Foreign Ministry, said the
Senate’s invitation was unfriendly toward Iran and a gesture of
support for terrorism, ISNA reported. Heidarpur told the envoys that
the EU is applying a “double standard” in its response to terrorism
and that “political games” like this could be “dangerous” for Iran-EU
relations, ISNA reported. (Vahid Sepehri)
SANCTIONS DISCUSSED IN MOSCOW. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice sought support from top Russian officials in Moscow on October
21 regarding the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, news
agencies reported. But even before she arrived, Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov repeated his opposition to tough sanctions
against Iran. He told the Kuwaiti news agency KUNA that “any measures
of influence should encourage creating conditions for talks.” Lavrov
added that “we won’t be able to support and will oppose any
attempts to use the Security Council to punish Iran or to use
Iran’s [nuclear] program [as an excuse] to promote the idea of
regime change there.” In addition to discussing North Korea, Rice
appealed to Russia and Georgia to reduce the tension between their
countries.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Husseini said
in Tehran on October 22 that Iran will respond if sanctions are
imposed over its nuclear activities and contrasted Western threats
with what he suggested was Iran’s cooperative approach, ISNA
reported. “If the West chooses sanctions, we too will decide in line
with their choice,” he said, adding that the West’s choice of
“the Security Council path, threats and…resolutions” will have
“regional, international, and global consequences and the West knows
this very well. Meanwhile, we have always stressed dialogue and
negotiations,” ISNA reported.
Husseini said Iran’s calls to form an international
consortium in Iran to produce nuclear fuel — one of the activities
the West wants Iran to stop due to its potential military
applications — are among the confidence-building measures that Iran
has taken, “which should have been encouraged and welcomed by other
states.” Iran proposed talking about a “limited suspension” of
uranium enrichment and related activities if “conditions were fair,”
he said, while rejecting suspension in principle. Husseini asked why
Iran should accept suspension beyond the requirements of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which it is a signatory. “We had
duties we have carried out, for which we must enjoy certain rights,”
he said. “They want to deprive us of those rights.”
Senior legislator Alaedin Borujerdi said in Tehran on October
22 that Iran has no option but to “stand firm in the nuclear field,
and the entire system shares this view,” IRNA reported. Borujerdi,
the head of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy
Committee, was speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of members of
the three branches of government. He said the nuclear dossier
constitutes a “difficult passage” for Iran. “We have no authority but
to go through this passage. America’s red line is Iran’s
enrichment and that is precisely our red line, and that is the point
causing the challenge. We must either surrender or tolerate difficult
events,” he said.
“The West wants Iran to be a weak and impotent country, but
that will never take place because the government and parliament will
not accept it.” Borujerdi said Iran must “state its case” but
“establish peacefulness in foreign policy,” IRNA reported.
Parliament, he added, has passed three laws to safeguard Iran’s
nuclear rights.
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said on October 23 in Rey, south
of Tehran, that all Iranians wish to have “the full use of nuclear
energy” and “are standing by their right,” IRNA reported. Iran, he
said, will continue to pursue activities that are “within the
framework of the law and regulations” in contrast to the conduct of
“certain forceful powers” that trample on “justice” and “morality.”
He said he was certain the “nation will stand firm until the last
stage of its goal,” though he urged foreign powers to “let us resolve
problems in an atmosphere of dialogue.”
Also on October 23, Supreme National Security Council
Secretary Ali Larijani suggested Western powers accept the “formulae”
Iran proposed in recent talks between Larijani and EU negotiator
Javier Solana. These include, he said, Western recognition of
Iran’s right to make nuclear fuel and engage in attendant
activities, and the formation of a multinational fuel-making
consortium to reassure the West there are no deviations in Iran’s
program to bomb-making activities, IRNA reported. He was speaking
after a meeting in Tehran with Georgian Foreign Minister Gela
Bezhuashvili. (Patrick Moore, Vahid Sepehri)
GUARDS CORPS EYEING ENEMY MOVEMENTS. Islamic Revolution Guards Corps
(IRGC) commander Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi said in Tehran on
October 22 that Iran’s armed forces “have intelligence dominance
over supra-regional enemies and are precisely observing their
movements,” IRNA reported, citing the IRGC public-relations office.
He said after a troops review that foreign powers have concluded that
the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon have learned to resist
“foreign domination” from Iran and its defense against Iraq from
1980-88, and that Iran’s armed forces are “a powerful force,
equipped with advanced, contemporary equipment and technology.”
Iran’s armed forces have a “strategy of comprehensive deterrence
and defense,” he said. (Vahid Sepehri)
AHMADINEJAD DEPLORES ‘AGGRESSIVE’ U.S. ADMINISTRATION.
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad met with Belarusian Foreign Minister
Syarhey Martynau on October 22, stating Iran’s desire for optimal
ties with Belarus and cooperation in energy, industry and defense
sectors, IRNA reported. Ahmadinejad said Iran wishes to work with
“independent” and “friendly” states to break the alleged injustice of
“the existing unipolar system in the world.” The two discussed a
coming visit by President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, although IRNA gave
no date for that trip.
Ahmadinejad said in a speech in Shemiranat, a suburb of
Tehran, on October 23 that “we have no problem with the people of
America, and believe [it] is currently under the sway of an
aggressive government,” ISNA reported. Ahmadinejad was touring and
speaking in Tehran’s environs that day.
He said there are two foreign policy perspectives in the
world presently, “the first perspective is [of] humiliation and
insults to nations” and seeks to curb the progress of nations. The
other perspective, Iran’s, is of religious piety and “respect for
nations and human dignity.” The United States, he said, now
fingerprints visiting Iranians at airports “like criminals,” but Iran
“has not engaged in this policy toward American nationals, and we
believe [they] can easily travel to Iran. Of course if anyone wants
to spy or commit violations, we shall…not permit them to enter,”
ISNA quoted him as saying. He said “we asked parliament” to halt a
proposed bill to fingerprint U.S. visitors. (Vahid Sepehri)
**************************************** *****************
Copyright (c) 2006. RFE/RL, Inc. All rights reserved.
The “RFE/RL Iran Report” is a weekly prepared by A. William Samii on
the basis of materials from RFE/RL broadcast services, RFE/RL
Newsline, and other news services. It is distributed every Monday.
Direct comments to A. William Samii at [email protected].
For information on reprints, see:
p
Back issues are online at

Desastres.org, Peru
Oct 27 2006
Russia Develops Unique Seaplanes
Publicado – Published: 27/10/2006
MOSCOW, October 27(Yury Zaitsev for RIA Novosti).- Fire-fighting and
rescue operations, as well as cargo and passenger traffic in remote
areas, are very expensive and involve the use of airplanes,
helicopters, ships, hovercraft and other specialized equipment.
However, experience shows that flying boats are the best option
because they can effectively fight natural and man-made fires.
Their efficiency is enhanced by the ability to scoop up water from
local lakes and rivers and promptly pour it on the seat of the fire.
Russia`s newest Be-200 flying boat, which was developed at the
Taganrog-based Beriyev scientific-technical complex (TANTK) in the
early 1990s, is the last word in Russian seaplane construction and is
best suited for the job, because virtually every Russian forest has
large lakes, rivers and reservoirs.
This seaplane is a descendant of the Be-12 Mail and the A-40 Mermaid
(Albatross) ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) planes, which have proved
their worth in emergencies and do not require airfields to land and
take off.
TANTK, as the main national agency for implementing a joint seaplane
construction policy, planned to develop passenger airliners, cargo
planes and other versions on the basis of the Be-200.
The Be-200 project was not closed after the Soviet Union`s break-up,
but construction was delayed because of financial problems. The first
Be-200, which took off in September 1998, featured special equipment
for scooping up water.
In September 2000, it was first displayed in Gelendzhik on the Black
Sea coast and subsequently traveled to India, Myanmar, Malaysia and
South Korea.
The EU, the United States, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, South
Korea, India and Australia are all interested in this flying
fire-fighter.
Indonesia is interested in leasing two Russian Il-76 fire-fighting
aircraft in the near future, and is negotiating the delivery of a
similar Be-200 seaplane.
The Be-200 was tested in Armenia, operated from a local airfield
located at the altitude of 1,580 meters and from Lake Sevan 1,950
meters above sea level.
The unique new seaplane can take off from 1,800-meter runways, from
lakes, rivers and inland seas. It can land in choppy seas among
1.2-meter waves and scoop up 12-13 tons of water in just 12-14
seconds at 150-190-kph aquaplaning speeds. The Be-200 has several
chemical tanks with a volume of 1.3 cubic meters each. Centrifugal
pumps spray their contents to fire sites together with water. The
seaplane can dump up to 270 tons of water during one fire-fighting
mission.
The seaplane`s ARIA-200 avionics, which were developed by Russia`s
State Research Institute of Aviation Systems and Allied Signals
Aerospace of the United States, ensure automatic fire-fighting
operations. Water can be dumped in salvos or from each separate tank.
The Be-200 has the following specifications:
Maximum ground take-off mass: 37.2 tons
Maximum speed: 610 kph
Service ceiling: 8,000 meters
Maximum range with 7,200-kg fuel load at 8,000 meters: 1,800 km
Ferrying range: 3,850 km
Maximum ground take-off run: 700 meters
Maximum water take-off run: 1,000 meters
Ground landing run: 950 meters
Water landing run: 1,300 meters
Fuselage length: 32.05 meters
Wingspan: 31.88 meters
Parked height: 8.9 meters
The world now operates over 120 fire-fighting aircraft, primarily the
obsolete Canadair Bombardier CL-215 and CL-415 seaplanes, which are
three times less efficient than the Be-200.
The Be-200 faces possible competition from Japanese-made Shin Meiwa
US-2 flying boats, a modified US-1 version. Due to the Be-200`s
faster cruise speed, both airplanes will deliver approximately the
same amounts of water to fire seats. Moreover, the Russian flying
boat`s greater climb speed is an advantage in mountain areas and over
forests and hills. The lighter Be-200 is nearly 100% faster than the
US-2, which has a higher power-to-weight ratio and an intricate
boundary-layer control system.
Production of Be-200-P fire-fighting planes will be sited in Irkutsk
and Taganrog.
The Be-200-T cargo plane can carry 19 passengers, whereas its
airliner version seats 72 people. The Be-200 patrol plane can search
and identify warships, merchant-marine and fishing vessels inside
200-km economic zones, land inspection teams and sink violators.
Each Be-200 has two to nine crew members; its Be-200PS
search-and-rescue version features state-of-the-art electronics and
rescue equipment.
TANTK may develop a Be-200 ASW plane.
The world`s largest flying boat, the Be-42, whose fire-fighting
version will have the capacity to carry 25 tons of water and double
the number of rescued people, is now being developed.
The light-engined multi-purpose Be-103 flying boat with a minimal
take-off mass of 2,270 kg is crewed by one pilot and carries five
passengers over a 550-km range. Its ferrying range is 1,180 km.
Holland, Spain, Malaysia, Turkey and several other countries have
expressed interest in buying it.
Russian designers want to use the more advanced foreign technologies,
avionics, materials and engines. The objective is to develop a
2,500-ton wing-in-ground effect (WIG) aircraft with a 1,000-ton
payload.
Yury Zaitsev is an academic adviser with the Russian Academy of
Engineering Sciences.
-16

ArmInfo News Agency, Armenia
Oct 27 2006
ARMENIA FROZEN IN BOW TO EAST AND WEST: ARMENIAN MP
“Armenia has got a bit confused of humanitarian generosity and
political restrictions coming from Russia and USA”, an MP Alvard
Petrosyan said at the press conference today.
She pointed out that it is typical for small countries to be at the
same time attracted by East and West. But in the case of Armenia the
continuous bowing before the countries and cultures starts to acquire
a chronic character. “Armenia is speaking too loud of its demerits
and keeping silent about its merits and as usual it stresses that it
can’t survive without Russia”, said the MP and added that she doesn’t
consider this position right.
A. Petrosyan said that Armenians have to raise their self-appraisal
and learn to respect themselves. “If we were really a strong state
and not a slavish one, then no one would have dared to talk about the
necessity for Armenia choosing between of Russia’s or Georgia’s
interests”, said the MP.

AZG Armenian Daily #205, 27/10/2006

Diaspora
HEAD OF ROMANIAN-ARMENIAN COMMUNITY ELECTED REPRESENTATIVE OF ROMANIA
IN EUROPEAN COMMISSION
Prime minister of Romania, Cãlin Popescu-Tãriceanu, has elected
senator Varuzhan Voskanian, head of the Romania’s Armenian community,
to represent his country at the European Commission. Senator
Voskanian, 48, is a mathematician and also runs the Senate’s Committee
on Finances and Budget, the Associated Press reports. Voskanian’s
candidacy is still to be confirmed by José Manuel Barroso, President
of the European Commission. Varuzhan Voskanian will take the office
as soon as Romania joins the EU in January 1 2007.

Government of France, Press Release
Oct 25 2006
Armenia/Azerbaijan: OSCE Minsk group – Oct 2006
Since the beginning of 2006 the American, French and Russian
co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group have been endeavoring to persuade
the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan to back the fundamental
principles of the future solution to the conflict in Upper Karabakh.
A first draft of this “document of principles” was examined at the
Rambouillet summit on February 10. A second version was presented to
the two heads of state by the mediators at the summit they held in
Bucharest on June 5. The heads of state and government of the G8
countries, at their meeting in St Petersburg, invited the parties to
re-examine it before the end of the year.
The new round of negotiations on this working document was begun by
the mediators in Moscow on October 6 and will continue in Paris
tomorrow. The aim is to get the parties’ reactions to the additional
proposals put forward by the mediators, with the expectation of
finalizing an enhanced version of the document of principles. The
latest version would be submitted to the two presidents at a new
meeting, which would be their third in 2006.
As part of the continued efforts by the OSCE Minsk Group mediators to
help Armenia and Azerbaijan reach a settlement to the conflict in
Upper Karabakh, efforts which President Jacques Chirac emphasized
again during his recent visit to Yerevan, the three American, French
and Russian co-chairs have invited the ministers of the two countries
for another meeting.
Foreign Minister Elmar Mammediarov of the Republic of Azerbaijan, and
his American counterpart Vartan Oskanian will accordingly meet in
Paris on October 24, 2006 for a negotiating session with the Minsk
Group co-chairs.
At that time Elmar Mammediarov will be received by Foreign Minister
Philippe Douste-Blazy on Monday, October 23. Vartan Oskanian will be
received by the minister on Tuesday, October 24.
The principles of the settlement, proposed by the mediators and
endorsed by the heads of state and government at the G8 summit in St
Petersburg, remain on the negotiating table.
With the agreement of the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, whom
the mediators met at the beginning of October, a new round of
negotiations has been launched. It began in Moscow on October 6 and
will be continued Paris next week, with the parties considering
additional proposals from the mediators.
900SID/EKOI-6UW36B?OpenDocument

MURADOVA: WE WANT GORAN LENMARKER TO REMAIN NAGORNO GARABAGH RAPPORTEUR TO OSCE PA
Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Oct 25 2006
OSCE PA autumn session will be held in Malta on November 17-19, Bahar
Muradova, the head of Azerbaijani delegation to OSCE PA told the APA.
She said that there will be a meeting of OSCE PA standing committee
and conference of Mediterranean countries within the session.
Muradova also said that she will raise arson problem in occupied
Azerbaijan territories.
“We raised this problem in summer session. OSCE special commission
visited the region and it prepares report. We will discuss the problem
in Malta, too. We are waiting for the results of the report,” she said.
Muradova also touched upon the substitution of Nagorno Garabagh
rapporteur to OSCE PA.
“We want Goran Lenmarker to remain Nagorno Garabagh rapporteur to
OSCE PA. He knows the problem and Azerbaijan’s position,” she said.

930 FAMILY DOCTORS AND NURSES OF SAME NUMBER TO UNDERGO TRAINING IN ARMENIA TILL 2009
Noyan Tapan
Oct 25 2006
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 25, NOYAN TAPAN. 320 family doctors and 440 family
nurses work at present in offices of family medicine of Armenia,
rural out-patient’s clinics and urban polyclinics. Development
of family medicine is one of important components of the four-year
credit program of 25.5 mln U.S. dollars on modernization of the health
care system. 7.1 mln U.S. dollars were allocated for it according to
the agreement signed between the RA Government and the World Bank in
2004. As Samvel Hovhannisian, the Chairman of the Armenian Association
of Family Doctors informed the Noyan Tapan correspondent, the program
envisages to train till 2009 other 930 doctors and nurses of same
number, correspondingly, according to 12-month and 6-month education
programs. In his words, family medicine chairs were created still
in 1998 at the Yerevan Mkhitar Heratsi State Medical University,
National Health Care Institute and Medical Fulcrum College. It was
also mentioned that work conditions of family doctors will be improved
by the program: 14 rural out-patient’s clinics will be restored and
5 ones will be built, and medical equipment and accessories will be
given to 150 out-patient’s clinics.