Author: Karagyozian Lena

GEORGIA ANNOUNCES NATIONAL EMERGENCY

PanARMENIAN.Net
08.11.2007 14:24 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Wednesday evening Georgian President Mikhael
Saakashvili signed a decree on establishment of state of emergency
in Tbilisi.

The measure has followed an attempt of coup d’etat, State Minister
Zurab Noghaideli said.

"The edict imposes limitations on conduction of demonstrations and
calls for violence, shift in power and organization of disorders,"
he said.

Mr Noghaideli said the state of emergency will cover Tbilisi only. At
that "freedom of speech is not limited" while "usual media work"
will be resumed after the order in the republic is established.

However, national emergency spear all over Georgia on Wednesday night.

Minister of Economic Development Giorgi Arveladze said the terms of
the edict will expire in 15 days.

Rustavi 2 private TV channel said good-bye to its audience and
promised to return in two weeks. Earlier, special forces occupied
the office of another TV channel – Imedi – belonging to entrepreneur
Badri Patarkatsishvili, Lenta.ru reports.

ARMENIAN, LITHUANIAN FM SIGN A MEMORANDUM ON COOPERATION

armradio.am
08.11.2007 14:03

RA Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian received the delegation headed
by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Petras Vaitiekunas.

Minister Oskanain highly appreciated the current level of
Armenian-Lithuanian relations. The Minister noted that Armenia is
interested in further reinforcing and developing the political and
economic dialogue between the two countries and the visit of the
Foreign Minister will become a good impetus for the development of
bilateral relations.

During the meeting the parties turned to the dynamic processes of
development of bilateral relations ever since the establishment of
diplomatic relations with Lithuania. Minister Oskanian expressed
the willingness of the Armenian side to study the opportunities of
cooperation with Lithuania in concrete spheres in the framework of
the Armenia-EU Action Plan.

The Lithuanian Foreign Minister underlined that the relations with
Armenia are one of the political priorities of Lithuania’s foreign
policy.

Official Vilnius clearly envisions Armenia’s European perspectives
and will continue its active involvement in and support for the
reinforcement of cooperation with NATO and implementation of democratic
reforms in the countries of the South Caucasus, especially Armenia.

The parties emphasized the necessity of intensifying the bilateral
economic relations. In this regard importance was attached to the
forthcoming visit of the Lithuanian Prime Minister to Armenia, in
the framework of which an economic forum will be organized.

The interlocutors discussed regional issues and referred to the events
in Georgia. Expressing concern over the tension and stressing the
importance of Georgia’s stability, Minister Oskanian noted that the
development of relations with the European Union and other European
structures will enhance the stabilization of the political situation
in the countries of the region and formation of the culture of
constructive dialogue between the opposition and the authorities.

Minister Oskanian presented the recent developments in the Karabakh
peace process. The parties exchanged views on issues of regional
energy security.

The meeting was followed by the ceremony of signing of the "Memorandum
of cooperation between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the
Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Lithuania on Issues of European
Integration" and a joint press conference.

SERGEI MIRONOV: I PLAN TO ENCOURAGE ACTIVITY OF CAUCASIAN FOUR IN NEAR FUTURE

PanARMENIAN.Net
06.11.2007 16:55 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Sergei Mironov, chairman of the Russian Federation
Council, leader of Spravedlivaya Rossiya (Fair Russia) party,
is planning to resume the work of the so-called Caucasian Four
which includes heads of parliament of Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan
and Armenia. "We have made a pause for some objective reasons but I
intend to encourage activities in the near future," he said.

"On Tuesday, the Senators discussed the trends of interparliamentary
cooperation in 2008. I am very grateful to Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov for detailed reports on the urgent issues and possibilities
of parliamentary diplomacy for promotion of Russia’s interests at
the international arena," he said, RIA Novosti reports.

LAW PAVES THE WAY TO STALIN AND BREJNEV TIMES, BLOCK MEMBER SAYS

Panorama.am
16:08 05/11/2007

"Whatever is happening with deputy Khachatur Suqiasyan and GALA TV
Channel indicates that such structures are able to carry out political
persecutions, as history shows. One should take lessons from history
and not repeat it," Viktor Dallakyan, independent deputy of parliament,
told a discussion on the Law "On special investigation service."

Earlier reports say that this structure, called special investigation
service, will implement preliminary investigation services connected
with electoral processes or crimes committed by top officials of
legislative, executive and judicial bodies. The justification part
of the draft says that this law will "contribute to stronger combat
against corruption and abuse." The president of the republic is
entitled to appoint the head of this structure as proposed by the
prosecutor general. The president is also entitled to dismiss the
person in office.

"This law will have very bad consequences in the judicial system,"
Zharangutiun member said. Orinats Yerkir (OYeK) will also vote
against. As OYeK block member Mher Shahgeldyan said, "this law paves
the way to Stalin and Brejnev times when each time new investigation
structure was being set up." The bill will be put on vote for the
first reading at a proper time.

A CROSS-STONE DEDICATED TO THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE VICTIMS ERECTED IN CARDIFF, WALES

arminfo
2007-11-05 19:45:00

ArmInfo. A khachkar (cross-stone) dedicated to the victims of the
Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey in 1915 has been erected near
the Temple of Peace in Cardiff, Wales.

The information and press department of the Armenian Foreign
Ministry told ArmInfo today that Armenian Ambassador Extraordinary
and Plenipotentiary to Great Britain Vahe Gabrielian and Speaker of
the Welsh Parliament Lord Dafydd Ellis Thomas were present at the
inauguration of the monument.

The source reports that 100-150 representatives of the Turkish
community in Wales held a demonstration of protest against erection
of the monument in Cardiff. The BBC TV channel covered both the
inauguration of the khachkar and the demonstration of the Turks.

ARAZ AZIMOV MISSES HEARINGS ON "FROZEN CONFLICTS" IN BERLIN DUE TO HIS HEALTH PROBLEMS

APA
[ 05 Nov 2007 14:57 ]

Hearings on "frozen conflicts" organized by the Monitoring Committee
of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) and German
Institute for International and Security Affairs have started in
Berlin today.

APA reports that spokesman for Foreign Ministry Khazar Ibrahim
said Deputy Foreign Minister Araz Azimov was expected to head the
Azerbaijani delegation, but he was replaced by Foreign Ministry’s
department chief due to his health problems.

Five members of Azerbaijani parliament – members of the Monitoring
Committee Samad Seyidov, Gultakin Hajiyeva, Aydin Abbasov, members
of the parliament’s international affairs commission Asim Mollazadeh
and Chingiz Asadullayev also participate in the hearings. Conflicts
of Nagorno Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transdnestria will
be debated during the hearings.

The hearings have two goals: to unite efforts of the leading experts
and officials of ministries in order to assess the situation of
each conflict and to determine the role of the Council of Europe
in the settlement of the conflicts. The hearings will last for
two days. Historians, scientists, experts on international law,
representatives of scientific-research centers and parliamentarians,
members of the Monitoring Committee will exchange views today. Senior
officials of the interested parties will have discussions
tomorrow. Officials of all parties participate in the hearings.

Armenian delegation to PACE had appealed for participation of
separatist Nagorno Karabakh representatives in the hearings, but the
appeal was rejected.

The Toronto Star

November 3, 2007 Saturday

Pain of Holocaust felt by many groups;
Cultural and religious organizations share grief during Holocaust
Education Week

Nicholas Keung, Toronto Star

"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I
did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade
Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came
for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when
they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." – Pastor
Martin Niemoeller, a church leader who opposed Hitler
Some people take part because it relates to their own sufferings,
others as a form of penitence. The bottom line is, no one wants the
Holocaust to be forgotten and repeated.
That’s why various cultural and religious groups are championing
Holocaust Education Week as an opportunity to share their own painful
experiences of internment, enslavement and persecution – and to speak
up for one another as "one human race."
The 10-day annual commemoration, featuring more than 150 educational
and cultural programs, kicked off Thursday night. Some events are
being hosted by the African, Armenian and Japanese Canadian
communities, who have also known discrimination and racism.
"It’s just a natural fit," said Rosemary Sadlier, president of the
Ontario Black History Society and co-presenter of a Monday session on
racism and anti-Semitism. "Our experiences are very similar in terms
of enslavement and transmigration, all negative treatment a result of
our physical, cultural and racial characteristics."
James Heron, executive director of the Japanese Canadian Cultural
Centre, was thrilled to be approached by the UJA Federal Holocaust
Centre to host Monday’s screening of Chris Tashima’s Visas and Virtue,
which tells of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who
in 1940 ignored orders and issued hand-written visas to Jews fleeing
the Nazis. The film will be followed by a dialogue with Holocaust
survivor Solly Ganor on his encounter with Sugihara.
"Both the Jewish and Japanese communities realized the need not to
forget the past," said Heron, who recalls the generous support Jews
provided to resettled Japanese Canadians after World War II. "We both
would like to translate our tragic experiences (of internment and
discrimination) into lessons for our present and future generations,
to save other communities from the experience."
This year marks the first time Toronto’s Zoryan Institute will take
part. Founded in 1984 to study the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman
Empire, it has branched out to study other crimes against humanity. It
will host two sessions titled "Nazi Germany: The Armenians and the
Jews," with University of Minnesota professor Eric Weitz.
"The Holocaust is the best-known genocide in the world. It offers a
rich ground to study how genocides take place," said the institute’s
George Shirinian, pointing out that the Armenian tragedy and the
Holocaust heralded an era of atrocities where "ethnic cleansing" takes
place among citizens of the same country, whether Rwanda, Cambodia,
former Yugoslavia or Sudan.
Milton Barry, a priest at Grace Church on-the-Hill, will host a talk
by Sarah Niemoeller von Sell, widow of Martin Niemoeller, originator
of the oft-quoted thought at the top of this story.
For more on Holocaust Education Week, visit

LOVE IN THE MIDDLE OF TRAGEDY

Derby Evening Telegraph, UK
Nov 2 2007

An unconventional love story exploring the aftermath of one of the most
barbaric chapters of 20th-century history – the Armenian genocide –
can be seen at Nottingham Playhouse.

Beast on the Moon, by Richard Kalinoski, explores an issue that is
currently at the centre of a heated row between the United States
and Turkey.

The Playhouse’s artistic director Giles Croft helms this new
production, starring Youssef Kerkour and Karine Bedrossian as the
mismatched couple who must learn to embrace a new world, and Paul
Greenwood (TV’s Rosie) as the enigmatic narrator whose own story
proves to be closely entwined with theirs.

The winner of best play awards in the USA, France and Argentina,
Beast on the Moon runs at Nottingham Playhouse from tonight until
November 17.

An Armenian exile in 1920s Milwaukee, Aram is starting to make his
way as a photographer. Yet his true focus remains the family ripped
from him by the genocide in his native land. He pays to import a young
Armenian girl as his bride but Seta is not the girl whose photograph
Aram was shown. Worse, the legacy of the traumas she has endured
thwarts his desperate bid to reseed his family.

There seems little hope for their marriage.

It takes the intervention of an unlikely young stranger for this
ill-starred couple to begin to overcome the Armenian nightmare and
piece back together their American dream.

The irrepressibly warm-hearted Seta is played by Karine Bedrossian,
whose own mother tongue is Armenian.

Karine’s stage work includes Stripped, Hole in the Heart and Essex
Girls, while on TV she has featured in Life Begins and The Bill.

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NEVER CHANGING FOREIGN POLICY AND THE WAR

EUROPEUS, France
Nov 2 2007

How quickly we have surrendered to the logic of war while talking
diplomacy, dialogue and moderation. The responsibility lies with
the political elite that keeps murmuring about the same old cliches
of a non-existing world. There are foreign policy positions of
Turkey reminiscent of military fortifications. These are at the very
foundations of the Republic and were thought as definite answers to
the problems inherited from the Ottoman era: The Armenian, Greek and
Kurdish questions. Nothing has changed in Turkey’s position regarding
these three issues, except a parenthesis on Cyprus, which opened and
quickly closed in 2004 after the rejection of the Annan Plan by the
Greek Cypriots.

On the other hand, different and new approaches unrelated to these
three issues have recently emerged in foreign relations. The Justice
and Development Party (AKP) governments have started to seek new
balances in foreign policy through openings toward the Eastern,
Ottoman and Islamic worlds. Turkey, for now, has not received anything
in return for these openings. To the quite contrary, alliances the
country formed with the West and Israel are seriously harmed by the new
positions. That is to say, in an attempt to change something once in
a blue moon, we ended up with negative results due to miscalculation
and bad timing.

Our public diplomacy on the other side starts and ends with to
the slogans of " multicultural/ multi-religious tolerance" and
"asylum granted to Sephardic Jews 500 years ago." However, the acute
anti-Semitism, widespread animosity against minorities and racist
tantrums everyday prove how far we moved away from these values in
compliance with nation-state’s rigid rules.

As a consequence, Turkey today is no more a decision-maker but a
country reacting to the decisions of others. The reactionary state
of mind, obsolete yet inflexible, lays the ground for loneliness and
does not help anything but to deepen the victim psychology. A deep
sense of not being understood and aloofness emerges: "Turk has no
friend but another Turk." The next stage is the transformation of
the victim psychology into legitimate defense syndrome and thereby
setting the stage for conflict.

"No more words nor law," or "let’s finish the outlawed Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK)" slogans we are hearing louder every day are in
fact the language of lack of policy. Diplomacy continues even during
wartime. International law pertaining to the war exists since 1864
(Geneva Conventions); "no law" means the jungle law. As for finishing
the PKK, to listen what the Chief of Land Forces Gen. Ýlker Baþbuð
said recently is sufficient. The situation we are in now makes us
forget that fighting violence only with violence, as it has been
the case for decades, brings no solution. Moreover, even experts
have reservations about the military feasibility of the projected
operation. Unless brand new proactive policies are designed for
Iraqi as well as Turkish Kurds, effects of military action, even if
battles are won, won’t last. Just recall the "29th Kurdish revolt"
formula used by the former President Suleyman Demirel on the PKK and
20 plus hot pursuits realized until today into northern Iraq.

On top of that, Turkey was involved since the beginning with the
shaping of the de facto Kurdish state. Following the first Gulf War,
the security zone declared beyond the 37th parallel in order to protect
Kurds from the wrath of Saddam Hussein was the brainchild of President
Turgut Ozal. Today Turkish companies are building the Kurdish region’s
economic infrastructure. Turkey transfers electricity, buys and sells
oil to northern Iraq. This economic dependency may lead to a healthy
and permanent solution. However, current foreign and security policies
have not sustained these economic initiatives.

Last but not least in the aftermath of the U.S. occupation, Kurds
becoming the only U.S. ally in the Iraq quagmire was evident from
the beginning. Thus adapting to this eventuality was essential.

In the country, political reforms of 2002-2004 for the benefit of Kurds
couldn’t be backed by economic structuring but precipitated a return
to the same old military customs to fight PKK violence, which awakened
in July 2004. The AKP’s failure to generate a comprehensive Kurdish
policy passed the ball once more to the court of the military. In
this regard, the AKP did not manage to design policies different from
classical foreign and internal policy options of its rivals. Hence it
has lost the bet of being different, for doing politics cornered in
between the main street and the nationalist CHP-MHP opposition as well
as the military. At the end of the day, since everyone acknowledges
a positive military outcome is almost impossible, the operation would
be held to appease the opposition and the man-in-the-street.

However this time, the war may yield unexpected results, and alter
never changing foreign policy fortifications. Just like in Cyprus and
Greece after the military coup that took place in Cyprus in 1974. Or
more recently like Serbia who, while destroying Yugoslavia ended up
exhausting itself.

Cengiz is head of the EU Research Center of the Bahcesehir University
– Istanbul

02/never-changing-foreign-policy-and-the-war.html

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WE CAN’T AFFORD TO SUPPRESS MEMORIES OF GENOCIDE

Baylor University , The Lariat Online, TX
Nov 1 2007

Last month, I heard an Armenian talk about how his family’s history
was violently shattered by the Armenian genocide.

It was a unique moment listening to him.

I’ll never forget the despair engraved in his face that had been passed
down through generations of an oppressed and forgotten Armenian people.

That moment spoke to my heart, and from that day on I felt like I was
missing something — some vital part of history that I had never known.

What was the Armenian genocide, and why had I never heard of this
dark secret of humanity?

Apparently Congress knows about it, since representatives proposed a
resolution to formally recognize the event in a symbolic, nonbinding
measure a couple weeks ago.

The Turks, who have denied the genocide for nearly a hundred years,
are threatening to withdraw their support in the war on terror should
the resolution pass.

After watching a short documentary, I learned a few facts about the
genocide, and they were enough to make me sick.

In 1915, the Ottoman Empire blamed its defeat in World War I on the
Christian Armenians for siding with Russia.

Legislation passed that allowed Ottoman authorities to confiscate
Armenian property, and the ruthless slaughter of the Armenian people
soon followed.

Within months, millions were deported on foot to concentration camps,
yet most didn’t survive the long journey through the desert.

The Ottomans didn’t provide the doomed Armenians with anything to
keep them alive during the perilous march, and often, they brutally
raped or killed them on the spot.

In the film, I saw photos of starved, brittle-boned children lying
dead in the streets and on barren trails. They were forced to walk
until their little bodies gave out.

I saw photos of mothers kneeling next to their dead children —
some looking lifelessly into the camera, others crying out in agony
as they cradled their child’s limp head in their laps.

I saw photos of hundreds of bodies littered and tossed along a field,
while other faceless corpses were aligned shoulder to shoulder in
endless mass graves.

It’s believed that in six months, 1 million people were murdered.

This number is greater than the combined death tolls for the 26 worst
tsunamis ever recorded.

Yet these Armenian lives were not taken by a natural disaster, or by
something out of our control. They were taken by our own kind.

No matter how hard I try, my mind cannot grasp this concept.

Perhaps this is why we never studied the Armenian genocide in school;
perhaps it seemed too impossible to even imagine. Or maybe some
don’t consider this calamity part of "Western" history, and thus deem
it unimportant.

This is despicable.

The Turks are not baboons or sea lions. They are part of the same
species as you and me, which means — whether you like it or not —
we all have the capability to embody pure, unimaginable evil.

It’s imperative that we study these atrocious scars on humanity.

Yes, it’s depressing, but it’s crucial that we examine what leads
people to the unexplainable mass murdering of mankind.

We must acknowledge this buried sin so that we never again let
ourselves get carried away with it.

So, Google the Armenian genocide. Learn as much as you can about how
humans have suffered at the hands of others.

There’s something beautiful about empathizing with the souls of the
past; it’s an indescribable, yet strangely fulfilling experience.

We at least owe it to the few hundred survivors and to the thousands
of men, women and children whose bones still lie in Armenian soil.

Ashley Killough is a junior international studies major from Plano.

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