Author: Kanayan Tamar

US AMBASSADOR TO ARMENIA JOHN EVANS TO COMPLETE HIS MISSION IN SEPTEMBER 2006
Regnum, Russia
Aug. 22, 2006
US Ambassador to Armenia John Evans will finish his mission in
September of the current year, a REGNUM correspondent informs.
Responding to question of journalists, how he evaluates US Congress’
activity, which recalled him ahead of scheduler, as well as new
ambassador Richard Hoagland, John Evans said: “I do not have any
evaluation of US Congress activity; I will finish my mission in the
first part of September.”
It is worth stressing, most likely, recall of US Ambassador to Armenia
John Evans was caused by his statement on the Armenian Genocide in
1915 in Ottoman Turkey. On February 19, 2006, John Evans said about
“importance of Armenian Genocide’s recognition” during his meeting
with representatives of San Francisco Armenian community. “I will
call it Armenian Genocide today,” Mr. Evans stated.
Representatives of US administration and officials avoided to use
‘genocide’ word concerning events, which took place early in last
century in Turkey, preferring to use various euphemisms. “No US
official has ever denied the fact. Things should be called by their
names,” he stressed. “The Armenian Genocide was the first one of 20th
century,” Mr. Evans said, stressing, at that, that world was not being
prepared for appropriate reaction at that time. He assured that he
was going to work on the problem strongly.
It should be reminded that possible new US Ambassador to Armenia
Richard Hoagland is now US Ambassador to Tajikistan. A scandal is
about to happen in Armenia because of his nomination.

Eurasec to focus on energy, customs on Day 2 of Black Sea summit
RIA Novosti
16/08/2006
MOSCOW, August 16 (RIA Novosti) – Post-Soviet leaders will continue a
two-day informal summit in southern Russian Wednesday, focusing on a common
energy market and customs union as part of the five-member Eurasian Economic
Community (Eurasec).
The presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Belarus joined
Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi Tuesday,
along with the prime minister of Armenia, which is an observer in the
organization.
“The agenda includes the formation of a customs union within the
organization,” a Kremlin source said earlier in the week. “Strategy and
tactics for the community’s progress will be discussed in this context.”
Ukraine’s prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, is also attending the summit as
part of his first foreign trip in his new capacity, which he assumed on
August 4.
Putin and Yanukovych are expected to focus on controversial issues of
bilateral relations, including supplies of Russian natural gas to Ukraine.
“Russia believes President Putin and Premier Yanukovych will have the chance
to have an extensive talk during the informal summit,” said Sergei
Prikhodko, a Russian presidential aide.
Yanukovych, who is currently meeting Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov,
said he was seeking to improve Russian-Ukrainian relations during his trip
and prepare the ground for a future meeting between the Russian and
Ukrainian presidents.
The Kremlin official also said the leaders would discuss formation of the
common energy market as part of a Russian initiative to set up international
centers offering nuclear fuel services announced by President Vladimir Putin
at the Eurasec summit in St. Petersburg in January.
“We need to create a prototype of such global infrastructure that would
enable all concerned parties to have equal access to nuclear energy. I would
like to emphasize that non-proliferation requirements have to be reliably
observed in the process,” Putin said.
The president said the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic
Energy Agency, should oversee the centers.
“A system of IAEA-controlled international centers offering nuclear fuel
services, including enrichment, without discrimination, should become a key
element of the suggested infrastructure,” he said then.
The Kremlin source said the leaders would also discuss the preparation of
documents establishing the legal basis for Uzbekistan’s accession to
Eurasec.
The five members of Eurasec, set up in 2000, agreed in January to admit
Uzbekistan to the organization, which also includes Moldova, Armenia and
Ukraine as observers.

TREND Information, Azerbaijan
Aug. 18, 2006
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Visits Georgia
Source: Trend
Author: À. Mammadov
18.08.2006
() – UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres
is set to be in Georgia from August 18-20 as part of his South
Caucasian tour, which will also include Azerbaijan and Armenia,
reports Trend.
The main purpose of the visit to Georgia is to undertake high-level
discussions on the progress of peace negotiations, to visit
conflict-affected regions and populations, and to see UNHCR’s
assistance programme in the country, the UNHCR reports.
During his visit the High Commissioner will meet with senior
government officials, internally displaced persons, and refugees. He
is scheduled to visit Sokhumi and Gali in breakaway Abkhazia,
Tskhinvali in breakaway South Ossetia, and the Pankisi Gorge in north
of Georgia where Chechen refugees are living.
–Boundary_(ID_YV85wkjLSXm+9nGFbkS41A)–

ANOTHER 46 U. S. PEACE CORPS TO HOLD THEIR SERVICE IN ARMENIA
ArmRadio.am
16.08.2006 19:14
The event dedicated to the 45th anniversary of the U.S. Peace Corps
(PC) and the oath ceremony of the PC 46-member group arrived in
Armenia, took place in Yerevan, Noyan Tapan reported.
According to PC Director Patrick Hart, the volunteers’ group that
will undergo its service in Armenia during the coming two years,
participated in the preparatory courses organized in Vanadzor. He also
mentioned that more than 500 volunteers having undergone service in
Armenia from 1992 up today had a goal to present the American values
and culture to the Armenian society as well as to get acquainted with
the Armenian culture, to study the Armenian language.
According to the estimation of John Evans, the US Ambassador
Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Armenia, the cooperation taking
place in any sphere between Armenia and the U.S. assists development
and strengthening of prosperity and democracy in Armenia. According
to his words, that cooperation is based on the human and ideological
generality in the two countries’ relations.
Armenian Minister of Education and Science Levon Mkrtchian, Deputy
Minister of Nature Protection Hakob Matilian and Deputy Minister
of Health Care Tatul Hakobian appreciated the role and meaning
of activity promoted by the U.S. Peace Corps in Armenia. They also
mentioned that the PC activity is based on the best traditions of the
U.S. Constitution and democratic ideology. And according to words of
Salpi Ghazarian, the Foreign Minister’s Special Assistant, the main
mission of the PC Armenian volunteers is “to bring America to Armenia
and to take Armenia to America.”

LEADERS OF SIX EX-SOVIET STATES DISCUSS CUSTOMS UNION, ENERGY MARKET, WTO BIDS
Vladimir Isachenkov
AP Worldstream
Aug 16, 2006
Russian President Vladimir Putin met Wednesday with leaders of five
other ex-Soviet states to discuss creating a customs union and common
energy market, and to coordinate their bids to join the World Trade
Organization.
Leaders from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
joined Putin at his Black Sea residence in the resort of Sochi for
talks focused on adding more substance to the Eurasian Economic
Community _ a grouping that aims to restore economic ties lost after
the 1991 Soviet collapse.
In addition to creating a customs union and a common energy market,
proposals include water energy regulation in Central Asia and setting
up a Eurasian hydroelectric consortium.
The grouping’s long-held cooperation plans have stalled amid
differences over the size of their economies and levels of their
development as Russia maneuvers to re-establish its clout in former
Soviet republics.
At the start of the session, Putin said the group’s members should
coordinate their efforts with their bids to join the World Trade
Organization.
“Our intentions to deepen cooperation in the framework of the Eurasian
Economic Community, including the setting up of a customs union, should
be clearly and precisely coordinated with the pace and details of WTO
accession for each of our nations,” Putin said in televised remarks.
Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have been involved in WTO accession
talks, but for the grouping’s other members, joining the global trade
body has remained a distant perspective.
Armenian President Robert Kocharian was attending the meeting as an
observer, as was Ukraine’s new prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, on
his first trip abroad since being confirmed to the post by parliament
earlier this month.
The Kremlin strongly backed Yanukovych’s fraud-marred 2004 presidential
bid, and his return to the premiership was widely seen as a victory
to Moscow’s interests in Ukraine and a counterbalance to Ukrainian
President Viktor Yushchenko’s efforts to move his nation closer to
the West.
Yanukovych on Tuesday said he and his Russian counterpart, Mikhail
Fradkov, reached a tentative deal on Russian natural gas supplies to
Ukraine next year.
He also reaffirmed his campaign pledge to make Russian the second
state language in Ukraine, but added that his Party of Regions for
that needs a two-third majority in parliament which it doesn’t have.
On Tuesday, Putin met for one-on-one talks with several of the leaders,
including Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The two leaders
signed a series of agreements intended to streamline customs tariffs
and tariffs for transporting Kazakh cargo via Russian railroad lines.

NUMBER OF TOURISTS TO ARMENIA GROWS BY 11.6% IN FIRST HALF OF 2006
Noyan Tapan
Aug 15 2006
YEREVAN, AUGUST 15, NOYAN TAPAN. 122,528 tourists came to Armenia
in the first half of 2006 against 109,750 ones in the same months of
last year (a 11.6% increase). According to the RA National Statistical
Service, in the first half of this year, 119,451 people left Armenia to
travel abroad, which exceeds the index of January-June 2005 by 13.3%.

RUSSIAN-ARMENIAN TRADE TURNOVER GROWING – PUTIN, KOCHARIAN
Interfax News Agency
Russia & CIS Business and Financial Newswire
August 15, 2006 Tuesday 7:19 PM MSK
The Russian and Armenian presidents agreed that trade between the two
countries is growing and expressed their hope for good prospects in
bilateral relations.
“Trade turnover is growing, and I am sure there are good prospects
for this grow and a desire of the business community to develop
relations of partnership,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said
at a meeting with Armenian President Robert Kocharian in the run-up
to the opening of an informal Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC)
summit in Sochi on Tuesday.
The Armenian president also pointed to growth in mutual trade turnover,
but emphasized that “it would be difficult to achieve good quality
without resolving the problems of communication and transportation.”
Kocharian proposed that the two countries focus on the “investment
component” and mentioned a project in which the Russian aluminum giant
Rusal was involved and which had been announced in Sochi two years ago.
The presidents also expressed their willingness to discuss difficult
problems facing Armenia.
“As for the well-known complex problems in the region, I believe we
will have time to talk about them as well,” Putin said.

HAIGAZIAN STUDENTS HELP REFUGEES
Haigazian University, Lebanon
Aug. 5, 2006
>From the very first day of the July 2006 war, Student Life officers
started contemplating ways to have their share in ameliorating the
hardships the country faced.
Obviously student brotherly help could not proceed unless the security
situation allowed. Plans were put down, several brainstorming sessions
were held, all concluded with the determination of extending a
helping hand.
Preliminary work began; students were contacted to check about the
whereabouts and conditions of HU students of the bombed areas. Others
were asked about their availability for the university-sponsored
philanthropic work. A long list of volunteer students was prepared.
HU students from the university neighborhood checked in and offered
their assistance and help too.
Soon refugees started to pour into the Armenian Evangelical School,
next to the university. Student volunteers were called to an emergency
meeting. Plans were drawn, and social outreach assistance was put into
action in the form of entertaining the forty refugee kids of those 30
families who had taken refuge in the neighboring school, and extend
help to their parents and elderly in trying to relieve their hardship
and establish a minimum living conditions in collaboration with the
Armenian Evangelical Outreach Project coordinator, Maria Bakalian.
Now one can come across the students playing football or basketball
or table tennis with the kids. Others are coloring figures or drawing
pictures with watercolor paint.
By the end of the day the students gather at the Student Lounge,
brief on their daily activity, assess it and plan for the next day.
Apart from this university-sponsored project, large numbers of
Haigazian University students have volunteered in social outreach
centers at their residential areas.

GERMAN REFUGEE EXHIBIT BREACHES EUROPEAN TABOO
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Monsters and Critics.com, UK
Aug. 10, 2006
Berlin – A new exhibit by ethnic Germans expelled from eastern Europe
after World War II carefully avoids giving greater prominence to
German refugee experiences than to the suffering of other groups
driven from their homes by the Nazis earlier in the war.
The federation of expellees, the BdV, was warned in advance that
portraying Germans as victims would breach one of history’s most
sensitive taboos. So the controversial show seeks to put the fates
of the ejected Germans into the context of a wider European drama
of expulsions.
The professionally curated show looks at European history from
a standpoint of the expulsions, refugee treks and genocide that
devastated Armenians, Jews, Bosnian Muslims and other societies.
Housed in 600 square metres of the Kronprinzenpalais museum on Berlin’s
Unter den Linden avenue, it picks a range of examples from the Armenian
genocide of 1915-17 to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of former Yugoslavia.
A link is drawn to the persecution that caused huge numbers of
European Jews to flee after the 1933 Nazi takeover in Germany. The
exhibit quotes Israeli historian, Moshe Zimmermann, who calls this
dispossession a ‘building block of the Holocaust.’
BdV president Erika Steinbach says the show does not portray the
Holocaust as such, because that is incomparably separate.
In any case, not even expulsions can be fairly compared to one another,
says exhibition curator Wilfried Rogasch. Each was uniquely wrong,
distinct from the one that preceded it.
Entitled ‘Forced Routes, Expulsions in the 20th Century,’ the
exhibition seeks to place a personal touch on history, telling of
the lifelong psychological traumas of those who lost their homes.
Emotion, it suggests, is an unavoidable part of the story.
Items on display include the ship’s bell of the Wilhelm Gustloff,
a passenger ship sunk in 1945 by the Soviet military, causing 9,000
fleeing German refugees on board to drown in the Baltic Sea.
Ultimately, 14 million Germans forced out of the region by about 1950,
often by decrees that gave them the choice to leave or starve.
A toy car once clutched by a Greek boy as he was expelled from northern
Cyprus witnesses to a child’s sense of loss.
The curators say they wanted to avoid placing each refugee’s suffering
in a scales to compare, and simply to suggest that each misdeed was
an assault on humanity collectively. Eminent German scholars and
writers were consulted during the show’s making.
In eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and the Czech Republic,
there is deep disquiet over the exhibition, starting with the fact
that it is being put on in Berlin, once Adolf Hitler’s capital,
rather than in the refugees’ former home, eastern Europe.
The BdV set up a foundation headed by Steinbach to create
the exhibition, with the ultimate aim of integrating it into a
documentation centre as a permanent memorial to expulsions. She has
stubbornly defended the plan despite angry protests in Poland.
The exhibition runs to October 29.
On the other side of the street, the federally funded Germany
History Museum is showing another exhibition touching on the refugee
experience: how the millions of uprooted and hungry people were
integrated into West German society after the war.

AIDS KILLED 91 In Armenia
ArmRadio.am
11.08.2006 16:10
91 lethal incomes of AIDS have been recorded in Armenia over 18 years
since the first case of the disease in Armenia, Arminfo reported.
According to the Republican HIV/AIDS Prevention Center, among the
victims were 18 women and 3 children. The first lethal income of AIDS
in Armenia was registered in 2001. The number of AIDS-infected has
sharply risen also this year. Since the beginning of the epidemic in
1988, 141 cases of AIDS were recorded.
Since the registration of the first HIV-AIDS infected patient, the
number of HIV-infected patients reached 420 people (96 women and 8
children). This year 51 new cases of HIV were fixed. Majority of women
(92.7%) were neither prostitutes nor drug addicts. They were infected
by their own husbands, who in their turn, got the infection in CIS,
particularly in Russia and Ukraine. 53.2% of the infected men are drug
addicts. The specialists of the Center say the official statistics
cannot display the real situation with HIV-AIDS in the country as
the real figures ten times exceed the official statistics.
According to the assessment of the Center’s personnel, there are over
3,000 HIV-infected people in Armenia.