Author: Kanayan Tamar

AZERBAIJANIS STEAL ARMENIAN SINGER’S SONG (VIDEO)

March 30, 2012 | 00:23

Azerbaijanis stole Armenian singer Razmik Amyan’s ‘Vay vay’ song,
Razmik Amyan’s producer Armin Movsisyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am.

For already 3 days the song is on YouTube by the performance of Farid
Dadashov and Ali Aliyev but Razmik Amyan performed that song in the
summer 2011. The Armenian singer did not apply anywhere, he just
mentioned that the Azerbaijanis steal the song from Armenians.

We present the Armenian and Azerbaijani versions of the song.

STATE COMMITTEE OF REAL ESTATE ALLOWED FLAWS IN ACTIVITIES WITH CITIZENS – ARMENIA’S OMBUDSMAN

news.am
March 30, 2012 | 10:45

YEREVAN. – Armenian Ombudsman Karen Andreasyan has issued an evaluation
of the State Committee of the Real Estate activities for 2011.

The assessment is as follows:

Shortcomings and problems identified:

In some cases the State Committee of the Real Estate of the Republic
of Armenia (hereinafter Cadastre) provided citizens with information
existing in the system, but which wasn’t sufficient for implementation
of the required functions.

During the state registration the Cadastre in certain cases required
from citizens such documents or refused the state registration for
such reasons which are not foreseen by the Legislation.

Some lands formerly provided to citizens with gardening purposes and
not used by the latter for a long time were included in a communities’
land balance and given to other people by community leaders. In
these cases the Cadastre did not take into account the fact of lands
previously given to citizens by gardening firms, and the rights of
the new owners have been registered upon them.

In certain cases the information given to persons on state registration
of property rights and registered rights and restrictions did not
coincide with reality.

The Cadastre officers, in assessing the cadastral value of
property, in certain cases were not led by coefficients foreseen by
the Legislation.

Discussions of the Human Rights Defender’s recommendations on
reconsidering the norms that contradict the legal acts of a higher
legal force have been carried out with delay (for instance, the RA
Government decision N719, made on 7th April, 2005, the 30.10.2008
joint official clarification of the RA State Committee of the Real
Estate President and the Yerevan Mayor).

Positive developments:

During 2011 comprehensive reforms in the real estate cadastre
system have been implemented, which aimed at increasing transparency
of the system functions, simplification of administration, exclusion
of necessity of the official-citizen direct contact, hence leading
to the reduction of corruption risks.

Since 25th April the applicants have an opportunity to get the
registration certificates in shorter terms by means of applying
coefficients towards charged fees.

The compulsory notary ratification requirement of real estate
transactions (except for unilateral transactions), foreseen by the
RA Civil Code, has been eliminated; in this respect an institute of
execution of transactions by recognition of authenticity of signatures
has been imported by cadastre system, and execution of transactions
in cadastre system in the order prescribed has been carried out free
of charge.

By introduction of electronic document circulation system between
cadastre offices and territorial subdivisions the applicants got an
opportunity to introduce applications on registration of rights and
provision of information and obtain the documents by their choice in
any cadastre service office (even without coming to a service office –
by e-mail) regardless the real estate location.

The obligatory requirement of providing information about the real
estate property or an obligatory requirement of property measurement or
technical inspection in case of state registration of rights emerged
from deals with regard to the property.

The requirement to introduce applications about implementation of
functions of providing information and a state registration of rights
according to the location of the property has been eliminated, as
well as specialized facilities- service offices have been established
aiming to serve applicants to use the system services.

RICHARD GIRAGOSIAN: DESPITE ODDS, CONFIDENT MOOD IN KARABAKH

Noyan Tapan
2012-03-29 22:28:27

Armenian residents still as determined as ever to win international acceptance.

By Richard Giragosian – Caucasus
CRS Issue 635,
27 Mar 12

After 20 difficult years living in Azerbaijan’s shadow, Armenians in
Nagorny Karabakh appear increasingly confident about the future.

Although the conflict remains unresolved and Karabakh has not won
international recognition as a separate state, people there remain
steadfast about holding onto their hard-won independence.

Progress on building a new state and establishing a political process
continues regardless of the problems. In fact, Nagorny Karabakh’s
electoral record suggests its democratic credentials are better than
Armenia’s, let alone Azerbaijan’s.

Such developments tend to be ignored by outsiders, for whom Karabakh
is either a focus for geopolitical competition or the subject of
mediation by major powers like France, Russia and the United States.

On the ground, though, perspectives and priorities are quite different.

For most people in Karabakh, the most pressing concern is the state
of the economy, rather than the dormant peace process. While proud
of their republic, they struggle to make ends meet, and many rely on
money sent back from relatives working abroad. And as the situation
has deteriorated in recent years, some residents will admit – albeit
reluctantly and in private – that they too are thinking of leaving
in search of work. Young people, too, acknowledge that they worry
about finding work once they graduate.

Take Anna, a 23-year old holding down a job in one of the better
hotels in the local capital Stepanakert. Her sense of satisfaction
with having a steady and reasonably well-paid job is tempered by
frustration and regret.

“I like my work and I’m happy – but I am also ashamed,” she told me.

“I am sad because I do have a job while my brothers and my father
can’t find work. And my friends are jealous. I feel guilty sometimes,
and sad too.”

The general lack of optimism about the economy and job prospects also
applies to politics. Asked about the upcoming parliamentary election in
neighbouring Armenia in May, very few people expressed much interest.

“Sure, the Armenian election is obviously important, but not so
much for us,” Tevan, 21, a university student studying politics
and international relations, said. “In any case, everyone knows the
outcome – the Republican Party will win. But that doesn’t really affect
us here in Karabakh. The real difference is that here in Karabakh,
every election that we’ve ever had has been free and fair, whereas
in Armenia, I can’t remember any free or fair election.”

This strong sense of pride in Karabakh’s democratic credentials – which
many feel is not sufficiently appreciated elsewhere – is widespread.

As Anahit, a middle-aged housewife put it, “We are never going to
leave our lands, and you must understand that we’ll never ever accept
anyone trying to hand us back to the Azerbaijanis. After all, we are
free, strong, and living in a democracy. Why we would we ever want
to revert to Azerbaijan?”

As justification for this position, other residents noted that February
19 marked the eighth anniversary of the murder of an Armenian army
officer by an Azerbaijani soldier while both were attending a NATO
course in Hungary. Memories of the incident reinforce fears of
Azerbaijan, especially as some officials there hailed the murderer
as a true patriot.

The escalating tensions along the front line that separates
Armenian-held territory from Azerbaijan, with sniper fire that is now
almost routine, only seem to make Karabakh’s residents more determined
to claim independence.

The threat of renewed conflict is never far from people’s minds. This
underlying mood continues to permeate Karabakh. People living in
border areas believe an Azerbaijani attack is increasingly likely,
although they believe the Karabakh military would be able to fend
off any assault.

In urban centres, the possibility of war in nearby Iran is also
a preoccupation.

According to Hamlet, a father of four, “It isn’t like we are siding
with the Iranians. But we don’t want war to return to this region. We
can remember what war is really like, and no one deserves that again.

We trade with the Iranians, and Iran has never betrayed us by
supporting Azerbaijan as the Turks did. But I am worried.”

War with Iran would, Hamlet said, harm Karabakh’s already frail
economy.

“If there is war, the [Iranian] trucks will stop coming and, God
forbid, the Azeris may think they can attack us if there is a war
going on nearby,” he said.

The danger of renewed hostilities with Azerbaijan is real enough. The
divide between how Armenians and Azerbaijanis see Karabakh’s future
remains insurmountable. And since the Karabakh Armenians are blocked
from participating in the peace talks, which involve Yerevan and Baku
only, the chances of progress seem remote.

For the people of Karabakh, the next two decades are likely to be full
of challenges just as daunting as those they have weathered over the
past twenty years.

Richard Giragosian is director of the Regional Studies Centre, an
independent think tank in Yerevan, Armenia.

BAKU EXPECTS PROGRESS IN NAGORNO-KARABAKH PEACE PROCESS

Vestnik Kavkaza
March 29 2012
Russia

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will discuss prospects of
cooperation in Azerbaijan. Russia and Azerbaijan have a wide range of
issues to discuss, Ali Gasanov, head of the Socio-Political Department
of the Azerbaijani Presidential Administration, said on Thursday,
Trend reports.

The official said that there are big expectations from Russia in
settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Gasanov noted that Russia
has great influence on Armenia and may coordinate it for constructive
talks. Putin and Medvedev have shown efforts in the Nagorno-Karabakh
process and further contribution is expected.

Political analyst Fikret Sadykhov, Professor of the Western University
of Baku, told Vestnik Kavkaza that Lavrov’s visit is of protocol
and formal nature. Russia and Azerbaijan have common grounds on many
issues. But Lavrov is unlikely to make global decisions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit Azerbaijan on
April 3-4.

ISRAEL – AZERBAIJAN MILITARY RELATIONSHIPS WORRY TURKEY

11:36 – 29.03.2012

Azerbaijan has granted Israel access to airbases in its territory
along Iran’s northern border for potential use in a military strike
against Iranian nuclear facilities, a report published Wednesday in
Foreign Policy magazine quoted senior US officials as saying.

“The Israelis have bought an airfield,” an official said, “and the
airfield is called Azerbaijan.”

Even if Israel doesn’t use the fields for a direct air strike on
Iran, Azerbaijan could still prove useful for Jerusalem’s interests
in the region. The bases could be used as a jumping point for IDF
search-and-rescue units, the report quoted a US intelligence official
as saying.

According to the Foreign Policy report, the Obama administration
believes the Jerusalem-Baku relationship is raising the risk of an
Israeli strike on Iran. Senior US officials have said that Israel’s
military expansion into Azerbaijan is complicating US efforts to
defuse Israeli-Iranian tensions. “We’re watching what Israel is doing
in Azerbaijan. And we’re not happy about it,” one official said.

The relationship between Israel and the predominantly Muslim country
on Iran’s northern border is believed to be robust. The Foreign Policy
report quoted a 1995 article in The Jerusalem Post as saying bilateral
relations started in 1994 and have blossomed ever since. “Strauss ice
cream, cell phones produced by Motorola’s Israeli division, Maccabi
beer, and other Israeli imports are ubiquitous [in Azerbaijan],”
the Jerusalem Post article stated.

TURKISH TELEVISION COVERS STORY OF ARMENIAN GIRL WHO COMMITTED SUICIDE AS RESULT OF SEXUAL BLACKMAIL

March 29, 2012 | 11:16

“5N1K” program on Turkey’s CNN Turk television covered the story of
21-year-old Narine Lazarian, who had gone from Armenia to Istanbul
with her stepfather and half-brother, and who was sexually blackmailed
by two Turkish brothers and subsequently had committed suicide.

The program’s special guest was Istanbul’s Agos Armenian bilingual
weekly’s reporter Lilit Gasparyan, who wrote about Narine’s suicide.

Gasparyan noted that it was after when she covered Narine’s suicide
story that virtually all Turkish media began reflecting on this
incident.

In Lilit Gasparyan’s words, it was only after when Agos informed about
this story that the brothers who caused Narine to commit suicide were
arrested.

“This was an example of the difficulties and loneliness of the
immigrants [in Turkey], and how women are subjected to violence every
day,” Agos’ reporter stated.

As Armenian News-NEWS.am informed earlier, the two Turkish brothers,
who caused Armenian citizen Narine Lazarian to commit suicide in
Istanbul, are taken into custody.

The arrestee Orhan Okumus noted that he was considering marrying
Narine, and he had gone to bed with her several times, Agos informs.

Orhan claimed that Narine had told him she was raped by her
stepfather, and, after hearing this, he refused to marry Narine.

“I told Narine that I don’t want to marry her. She committed suicide
several days thereafter,” Orhan said, and claimed he had not taken
naked pictures of Narine in secret and had not blackmailed her.

Narine’s brother Zhora informed that Narine was in love with Orhan,
but the latter was cheating on her. After having sex with Narine,
Orhan somehow managed to take naked pictures of her, Agos informed.

Then, Orhan’s brother Baris tried to persuade her to live together by
blackmailing her with the photographs. But having been refused, he
showed the pictures to Narine’s brother. As a result, Narine and her
brother started arguing, and Zhora slapped her in the face.

Orhan and his brother started blackmailing Narine, demanding money and
threatening to post her naked pictures on the Internet. And being
unable to cope with this situation, the girl ultimately committed
suicide.

Narine’s stepfather discovered her body, but they did not report this
to the police, since they were staying in Turkey illegally.

Having been informed about Narine’s death, her mother went to Turkey,
and she reported the incident to the police.

SECURITY, INTEGRATION AND THE CAUCASUS
ZAUR SHIRIYEV

Today’s Zaman
March 28 2012
Turkey

It is often said that security is still the dominant issue for the
Caucasus region and that its “frozen and unfrozen conflicts” remain
the critical obstacle to the development of a regional security
architecture.

The problem, of course, is that, while there is available terminology
to discuss security issues at a regional level, history indicates that
an understanding of country-based security is both more pertinent and
more productive. Currently, countries in the Caucasus think about
security through the question “How safe do we feel?” rather than
considering how the region could be safer.

Nonetheless, fragile stability is the region’s only security
achievement. What is clear is that peace and security in the Caucasus
only seem possible in a situation whereby each country perceives any
threat to a neighbor as a threat to itself and protects the interests
of its neighbors as it would protect its own. On this topic, last
week’s Wilton Park conference on “Security of the South Caucasus”
in Tbilisi shed some light on the region’s security-related questions.

Discussion was wide-ranging, but the region’s unresolved conflicts
and integration into EU and NATO were key focal points.

During the discussions on the conflicts in Georgia, most experts agreed
that in the short term, it will be difficult to achieve resolution,
but in the long term, Georgia could “win the hearts and minds”
of the Abkhaz and Ossetians by continuing to pursue democracy and
economic reform. In this matter, Georgians see Russia’s attitude as
an obstacle to conflict resolution in Abkhazia and South Ossetia;
although dialogues is open and ongoing, there have been no concrete
achievements. The situation is best described as a “manageable
stalemate,” rather than genuine conflict resolution. The Georgian
government only has one chance to take back its territories via
the “State Strategy on Occupied Territories: Engagement through
Cooperation,” which has full support from the West. Georgia’s
commitment is positive and sounds convincing, but will the de facto
authorities and population truly be able to commit to these proposals?

Indeed, the very designation of the South Ossetia and Abkhazia as
occupied territories is likely to trigger anger and resentment insofar
as it implicitly denies that the local populations have any say over
how and by whom the regions are administered.

For that reason, some conference participants argued that the strategy
is hardly conducive to promoting engagement, given that the populations
have different perceptions of the conflict. Moreover, EU integration
and conflict resolution are seen as somehow interlinked, not only
by experts but also locally. For example, the Caucasus Research
Resource Center’s 2009 poll on knowledge and attitudes towards the
EU in Georgia showed that for Georgians, the two biggest issues were
territorial integrity and jobs. By 2011, following five years of
failed conflict resolution, it seems that people have given up hope —
only 42 percent deemed territorial integrity a national priority. In
both years, the survey revealed that more than 50 percent of people
believe that the conflicts are an obstacle to EU integration. The
other argument was that the peace process was internationalized as
a result of the August 2008 Russian-Georgian war; an EU presence on
the ground had been out of the question before that.

It took a war to get the EU monitoring mission out there.

On the other side of the region, debates on resolution of
Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict seemed to pivot on the
idea that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” The most
interesting aspect of the debates on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
is Armenian officials’ references to their constructive role in the
resolution process, and their practice of blaming the other side,
which one Azerbaijani speaker correctly identified as their “need to
name the aggressor; i.e. whose forces are on whose territory?” There
is a belief among Azerbaijani experts and officials that the OSCE
Minsk Group exists to continue the conflict rather than to solve it;
in support of this point one Armenian expert argued, “The Minsk Group
is more Minsk than Group.” Another Azerbaijani expert argues that the
Minsk process has been delegated to the Kremlin, thereby opening the
gates for Russian resurgence in the region, with the West unable or
unwilling to restore international law on the ground.

Armenian representatives spoke about recurring violence along the
“line of contact,” while the Azerbaijani side declared its readiness
for “contact without lines.” The major concern among most experts was
that prospects for a lasting solution presently seem as remote as they
were a decade ago, while the risk of a renewed conflict now appears
to be growing appreciably, with some analysts arguing if hostilities
continue, they may accelerate, leaving the region in the grip of a
“short, accidental war” that will destroy the current negotiation
mechanisms.

An additional matter that was raised was the forgotten side of the
conflict: the refugees and IDPs. Last year, the Brookings Institution
and London School of Economics published a joint report, “Projection
Internal Displacement,” which argued that 20 years of living in
displacement has shaken the confidence of many that they will be able
to return any time soon, but at the same time military rhetoric has
increased; “Can you be an IDP for 20 years?” was a recurrent question
heard from IDPs in Baku and in remote rural areas. Unfortunately,
refugees and IDPs remain largely forgotten, and new generations on
either side of the divide are growing up without a real grasp of
their roots, and with an increasingly angry resentment and hatred
for the other side.

Ultimately, better security and more integration westwards remains
for the most part on paper. Despite documents on the region’s security
issues, and the “reset button” between Russia and the United States,
and regional countries’ move towards integration into EU/NATO, there
is little serious commitment in Moscow or Washington or Brussels
to properly address security in the Caucasus. The Russian saying
“Mnoqo shuma, iz nicheqo” translates as “Much ado about nothing.” It
sounds better in the original, but its pertinence transcends the
language barrier.

ARMENIAN OPPOSITION LEADER MEETS EU AMBASSADORS

Vestnik Kavkaza
March 28 2012
Russia

Armenia’s first president, leader of the opposition Armenian National
Congress (ANC), Levon Ter-Petrosyan met the EU ambassadors at the EU
Delegation Embassy on Wednesday, News.am reports.

As the press service of ANC informs, the aim of the meeting was to
discuss the upcoming parliamentary elections and ANC’s actions.

The ambassadors asked Levon Ter-Petrsoyan to present his considerations
on the legitimacy of the upcoming parliamentary elections.

SENATE SPEAKER, CHAIRMAN OF ARMENIAN NATIONAL ASSEMBLY MET IN ALMATY

Journal of Turkish Weekly
March 28 2012

Kazakh Senate Chairman Kairat Mami met with Chairman of the National
Assembly of Armenia Samvel Nikoyan on the sidelines of the sitting
of the Council of the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly on Tuesday
in Almaty.

The parties discussed the issues on development of Kazakh-Armenian
relations. Mami congratulated Nikoyan on his election as Chairman of
the National Assembly of Armenia.

The Kazakh Senate Speaker noted the active participation of the
Armenian colleagues as international observers in the elections in
Kazakhstan. He said that the deputies of the Senate would join the
mission of observers for the parliamentary elections in Armenia in
May this year.

Nikoyan said that “the CIS IPA is a platform where we can work together
and strengthen our bilateral relations.” According to him, Kazakhstan
is home to a large Armenian Diaspora. He expressed his gratitude to
the Kazakh people and its leader for the current policy of peace and
tolerance in society.

EARTHQUAKE HITS IN ARMENIA

Vestnik Kavkaza
March 28 2012
Russia

Armenia was hit by an earthquake 5 km north of Artashat of the Ararat
Region at 11.43 am today. It had a magnitude of 2.7, Aysor reports.

The earthquake center was registered 7 km deep 40.030 north latitude
and 44.550 east longtitude with a magnitude of 3-4.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 3 points was sensed in Artashat,
Verin Dvin and Aygestan.