Author: Khondkarian Raffi

Saakashvili Comments on the Armenian President’s Visit

Baku Today

04/04/2005 18:16

In an interview with the Rustavi 2 television network on April 3,
President Saakashvili said that there was nothing surprising in
Armenian President Robert Kocharyan’s unplanned visit to Georgia on
April 1-2.

“When there are some issues that need to be discussed, or even if there
are not any, we can visit each other without any prior notifications
and meet and have a talk. We will always have something to talk about
with our neighbors, including Armenia and Azerbaijan. Because, we
are inter-linked, inter-dependent, there are many mutual problems,
so you would be a fool to reject these contacts,” said Saakashvili.

Saakashvili denied speculations that Robert Kocharyan arrived in
Tbilisi at the request of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Armenia
is an independent state and a well-disposed country towards Georgia,”
Saakashvili said.

This is a partner post from Civil Georgia

Kurds and Disappointment

Source: Turkish Daily News,
04 April 2005

Dogu Ergil

We are a nation that often confuses results with reasons. However,
we are not unique in this flaw, otherwise there would be no social
science or social theory. Yet, when a nation collectively chooses to
deal with results without pondering on reasons, problems mount up,
changes shape and, at times, turn into intractable conflicts. Then
super or superior powers are blamed for the creation of these problems
that have exceeded our ability to contain them. Three such problems
block our path to healthy relations with the rest of the world:
The Cyprus, the Armenian and the Kurdish problems. There are enough
experts to offer meaningful assessments for the first two. Allow me
to address the latter.

When one studies what may be called the “Kurdish problem” with a
historical perspective (from the 1880s through 1940s) there is enough
documentation in the archives in the form of reports by governors,
inspector generals and military commanders, in addition to special
investigators, that show objective reasons that have hardly been
noticed by officials who thought they could rule a vast country like
Turkey from an Ankara through direct orders. Well, they were wrong.
Almost all reports repeat the same point with approximately five-year
intervals written after turmoil and recurring riots in the east.
These reports allude to the poverty of the local people due to
large landlordism (aga-lik) and their dependence on the local
notables (clientelism) that allows neither entrepreneurship nor
individualization that could be the basis of democratic involvement.
The second issue is tribalism that drives a wedge between communities
who are in constant competition over pasture and cultivable land. The
keen competition among tribes has developed a harsh militant attitude
against the “others” that evinces itself in the form of armed conflict
among tribes and riots against the central authority as well as
cultural patterns like blood feuds (vendetta) and honor crimes.

Rather than eliminating these pre-capitalistic and anachronistic
socio-economic formations consonant with its vision of transforming a
traditional society into a modern one, the republican elite found it
more expedient to form alliances with the agas, tribal chieftains
and local sheiks to maintain the rural status quo for the sake
of security and stability. Of course this poor strategy betrayed
its expected purpose. Dispossessed and dissatisfied, local Kurdish
populations followed their leaders in their rebellion against the
government who tried to tighten the reigns of local notables in order
to implement the centralist policies of the new nationalist regime.
All rebellions were crushed brutally.

In the 1960s Kurdish intelligentsia sought their place in the
mainstream leftist movement of Turkey to no avail. Neither the leftist
movement succeeded in creating a more pluralist democracy due to the
lack of popular support (Turkey is a haven of small enterprise and
proprietorship), nor the ruling elite gave it a chance to do so.
The 1971 military coup swept through the country like a bulldozer
and left nothing standing other than the official view and official
organization of the state. Incipient expression of Kurdish identity
was one of the targets of official wrath that wiped out all buds of
democratic organizations. The last organization left standing was
the one that took on the challenge of an armed struggle, ultimate
hardship like living in the mountain caves and wandering from one
country to another looking for opportunities to hit back and hurt.

This illegal armed organization headed by a university dropout, a
peasant boy fashioned after Stalin proved to be the leader of a rural
movement that wanted to get rid of the traditional socio-economic
structure that dwarfed the region as well as the central authority
that neither acknowledged their cultural identity nor communicated
directly with the people in order to improve their lives. The name of
the organization was the Kurdistan Workers Party  (PKK). It carried
on a guerilla type of warfare with militia up to 15,000 at its heyday
between 1984 and 1999 until its military defeat and capture of its
leader Abdullah Ocalan (Apo).

Apo apologized to the people of Turkey for the destruction and lives
lost in the armed struggle he led for a decade and half and declared
his strategy foul. Instead he proposed to work for and to dedicate
his life to the building of a democratic republic instead of the
bureaucratic republic, which he saw as the cause of problems. He
ordered his militia to leave Turkey and wait for his orders in North
Iraq. Since February 1999 Apo has been on an island prison in the
Marmara Sea. He kept the paramilitary wing of the PKK intact to bargain
for his life and to use it as a rump card in return for obtaining
concessions from the government for his organization and his followers.

How representative is Apo and his organization of the Kurds of Turkey,
who are estimated to be approximately 15 million? My own research into
the attitude of the Kurds realized at the height of armed struggle
(1994-1995) revealed that the PKK was a locomotive intended to go to
the last station: independent Kurdistan. Only about 10 percent of Kurds
wanted to go along to the last terminal station with the PKK. The rest
got on and off the train pulled by the PKK at different stations like
cultural rights, self-respect, good governance, liberties, more income,
employment, better healthcare and educational services etc. This
data afforded clues to differentiate the militant/terrorist from the
sympathizer, which the government never acknowledged. For the ruling
elite of Turkey, the Kurdish intransigence was a security matter and
only stringent measures could eradicate it. The complex nature of the
matter was neither understood nor guided policy implementation. This
was indeed an indication of the eclipse of rational politics.

On the Kurdish side, although a small portion of Kurds support the
PKK, and the majority of whom do not vote for political parties
(HEP, DEP, HADEP, DEHAP consecutively) that it has given life to,
this organization has become the symbol of Kurdish defiance to
submission and condemnation to poverty and underdevelopment. Many
families have lost their sons in the course of struggle led by the
PKK and young women identify with it as an instrument of women’s
emancipation because the organization also defied the traditional
authorities and social relations they upheld in the region. Yet the PKK
brought more misery and pain to the Kurdish people in Turkey because
the journey it started as a staunch Marxist-Leninist organization
evolved into Kurdish nationalism that runs counter to the latter and
more reasonable proposal of Apo: A Democratic Republic that would be
the guarantee of pluralism, multiculturalism and good governance.

The inbuilt contradiction in nationalism is that it never ceases
to breed and sharpen other nationalist groups. Just as much as
Turkish nationalism is intent on Turkifying the whole population,
it has created a strong sense of Kurdish nationalism of irredentist
inclinations, Kurdish nationalism, in turn, is reinforcing Turkish
nationalism. A pluralist democracy built on culture of tolerance and
reconciliation finds it very hard to flourish in this environment. It
is no wonder that Apo had to abandon this “democratic republic”
thesis and came up with a surprising revelation last week: a “stateless
democratic confederation.” Don’t you try encyclopedias or theory books;
there is no such thing either in constitutional law or international
relations books It seems that this “people’s leader” as he calls
himself, “claims the honor of declaring this brand new invention”
(Ozgur Politika, March 22, 2005) which is no more than falling
back to his declaration of an independent Kurdistan. However,
carving a Kurdistan out of Turkey does not satisfy him. He wants
similar formations to appear in neighboring Syria, Iraq and Iran as
well. Then, these smaller statehoods will unite as a confederation
that in turn will be a part of a concentric confederation with states
out of which they have emerged. Yet, there will be no statehood over
this agglomerate. How about it?

You may not be speechless with the brilliance of the revelation
or the invention, but the four Kurdish (DEP) former M.P.s who have
suffered through a ten year prison term until recently are waiving
this proposal in their hands as the most democratic offer put forth
by the Republic of Turkey. You expect them to be wiser after ten long
years of contemplation especially after observing that while there
are about eight million voters of Kurdish origin in this country only
2 million vote for a Kurdish (nationalist) party that falls short of
the 10 percent national election threshold. Kurds simply do not see
Kurdish nationalism as a panacea to their problems, they vote for other
parties whom they believe may serve them better in practical life.

What happens in the end is the stark truth that those Kurds who are
still loyal to the PKK and its leader cannot put their weight and
energy behind the reformation and democratization of the system.
By not doing so their expectations of normalization, by which they
can have more rights, less discrimination and more power sharing
is delayed. This delay is perceived as victimization and feeds
into a vicious circle of defiance and the system’s resistance of
accommodating them.

What a pity! The six million Kurds who remain aloof to the PKK inspired
political climate is either unorganized or are intimidated by this
organization. At the same time that lack the encouragement of the
government to create a different political climate, organization and
leadership. Thus, they remain ineffective to check and neutralize the
influence of the PKK and its irrational reflexes. Millions of Kurds
remain unrepresented in the void of organizations and leaders who
would defend their cultural identities as well as their legal rights
just because they are equal citizens but at the same time assure
the government and the public at large that they are loyal citizens
of the country and they do not pose a danger to the unity of the
nation. Thus far Ms. Leyla Zana and her comrades who are preparing
to launch another Kurdish political party by consuming existing DEHAP
and other organizations affiliated with the PKK really do not offer
a fresh alternative which the country is so much in need of. Instead
they follow the instructions of a political leader in prison who
has replaced the traditional tribal system with a political one and
offering irrelevant recipes by relying on an armed guerilla force
that has no place in a democracy. With this eclipse of the mind,
how in the world can Kurds expect to have an honorable and equal
place in a democratic system which they consciously or (more likely)
unconsciously refrain from contributing to its making.

–Boundary_(ID_i3u8fr86A7H640l3UmVnaQ)–

Institute for war and Peace
01-Apr-05

Georgian Resettlement Scheme Blamed for Tensions
In an ethnically mixed part of Georgia, tensions are high as locals blame
new settlers for crime wave.
By Zaza Baazov in Tsalka, southern Georgia (CRS No. 280, 01-Apr-05)
Ethnic issues are playing a part in growing communal frictions in a region
west of the Georgian capital. But both the government and local residents
say the tension is more about crime, poverty and bad policies than real
animosity in this diverse part of the country.
Rising crime has worsened relations between original residents in the Tsalka
district – mostly Armenians and Greeks – and newcomers from other parts of
Georgia.
Feelings run so high that Tbilisi deployed a ten-man unit of crack police in
the village of Avranlo after an inter-communal clash.
The police’s job is to keep the Armenians and Georgians in check, not to
make peace between the communities.
“They haven’t been dispatched here as peacekeepers to reconcile the
Armenians and Ajarians,” said a local resident. “Instead, they are operating
at night – combating criminals, and checking the documents of everyone they
meet on the streets.”
The trouble began when an elderly Greek couple, the Kaloyerovs, were victims
of a violent mugging which left them both in hospital.
The couple’s relatives, who are Armenian, took matters into their own hands
and attacked Ajarian newcomers in Avranlo, beating up about 15 of them and
damaging a local school.
The clash was serious enough for Georgian interior minister Vano
Merabishvili to come to the village himself.
Tsalka district has always been ethnically diverse, with most villages there
inhabited by Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Greeks.
The demographics shifted radically in the Nineties: after Georgia became
independent in 1991, the collapsing economy drove many people to leave the
country. As in other parts of Georgia, many opted for Russia, but the
minorities in this district also emigrated to Armenia and Greece.
By the mid-Nineties, the area received an influx of people resettled from
landslip-prone mountainous areas of Ajaria, in southwest Georgia, and
Svanetia, high in the Caucasus mountains, under a government programme to
offer such vulnerable rural communities a more secure future.
The arrival of the settlers soon created frictions between old and new
residents of Tsalka district. And because the newcomers belonged to the
ethnic majority, the media started talking about inter-ethnic violence.
Svans are closely related to the Georgians, while Ajarians are ethnically
Georgian, differing only in that they have a Muslim rather than Christian
heritage.
Many Armenians here believe the resettlement policy is a deliberate
government attempt at social engineering, to create a more Georgian
population mix.
Not all Armenians agree with this analysis. Razmik Anesyan, from the village
of Ozni, said, ” The people who have described this as an ethnic problem are
journalists who’ve spent one hour here and drawn some odd conclusions.”
Leila Metreveli, Georgia’s deputy minister for refugees and resettlement,
says the assertion that the government has embarked on some kind of ethnic
project is nonsense. “Tsalka district was chosen [for resettlement] because
there’s a lot of abandoned houses and uncultivated land there, not because
of its ethnic composition,” she told IWPR.
Guram Svanidze of the Georgian parliament’s human rights committee, sees
ethnic differences as incidental to the real problem.
“I wouldn’t describe these conflicts as ethnic,” he told IWPR. “They are due
to another reason – social disorder and economic problems. The local,
established population consists of Greeks and Armenians, while the ethnic
Georgian newcomers have not settled in.”
Slavik Kuchukyan, who heads the Armenian community in Tsalka, says no one is
against Georgians coming into the area. “On the contrary, it is actually
better for us. We can learn the Georgian language from contact with them. If
you don’t know Georgian, you won’t be accepted into public service.”
However, language differences have proved a barrier to good relations, since
many young people in the area do not know Georgian, while their counterparts
from Ajaria often cannot speak Russian – a common lingua franca – and
certainly would not understand Armenian.
Many Armenians told IWPR they believed religious differences played a part,
with the Muslim Ajarians at odds with local Armenian and Greek Christian
practices.
Razmik Anesyan says that Ajarians in his village of Ozni “go to pray in a
mosque in an Azerbaijani village several kilometres away, and they can’t
bury the dead in Christian graveyards. It’s rumoured that there have been
acts of vandalism [of cemeteries. It all increases the tension”.
Attempts by the local authorities to build bridges between communities have
often failed to overcome the hostility. A friendly football match between
local lads and migrants in the village of Kizil-Kilisa descended into a
massive fistfight.
Many Armenians and Greeks are conscious that they too were once newcomers –
the two communities began arriving as refugees from Ottoman Turkey two
centuries ago.
Hayk Meltonyan, a local member of the Georgian parliament, says the
longstanding residents just want to see some order imposed to a chaotic
migration process. “The only thing that we want is to stop the mass
resettlement temporarily,” he said. “We need to take a look at the issues,
and provide legal arrangements for the lives of those who have already moved
to Tsalka.”
Other local officials also believe the resettlement programme has been
mismanaged. The scheme to move communities away from mountain areas prone to
landslides and avalanches started up in 1988, when Georgia was still part of
the Soviet Union.
The demand remains high – the ministry for refugees and resettlement
estimates that about 200,000 people in the highlands of Ajaria alone need to
be relocated to lower-risk areas.
But not enough new homes have been built for the settlers, and it is only in
the last six years that the authorities have started buying existing houses.
Impatient settlers have simply moved into unoccupied homes, often in Greek
villages, and tilling the farmland.
As a result, desperate migrants started illegally occupying houses and
farmland, mostly in Greek villages. Others find themselves in a subordinate
position as tenants on land owned by the original residents, and the
situation is worsened by the lack of clearly regulated ownership and
distribution of farming land
There has also been an upsurge in crime, which gets blamed on the newcomers.
“The fact is that both the local population and the migrants are hostages to
the government’s lack of professionalism and concern,” said Tsalka district
administration chief Mikheil Tskitishvili.
According to district police chief Zurab Keshelashvili, “There is zero
criminality among the local population, with the exception of minor brawls.
It is the migrants who are mostly involved in thefts, robberies and
brigandage. Visitors, as they are called, were involved in the two most
recent attacks on Greeks.”
Some villagers draw a distinction between the earlier migrants who have now
established themselves and more recent arrivals, whom they blame for much of
the trouble.
Vardo Yegoyan, from Kizil-Kilisa, recalled that after a couple of difficult
years, original residents and the early wave of settlers became good
neighbours. “The current conflicts have to do with a new group of migrants,
most of whom did not move here as part of the environmental resettlement,”
he said. “Robberies and bandit attacks have become regular occurrences.”
Yegoyan added, “No one would justify beating people or smashing things up,
but when the police stand idly by, the only thing people can do is to
resolve their own problems themselves.”
Police chief Keshelashvili said it had been hard to cope given the few
resources he had before Tbilisi sent down the extra ten-man squad, “Fifteen
policemen with two cars can hardly cope with the crime situation in 42
villages.”
Settlers say they are being unfairly branded as troublemakers because of
offences committed by a small number of criminals.
“We’re peasant farmers. Most of us never even leave our land holdings,” said
an Ajarian settler who gave his name as Jumber, “but the rules round here
are that if one person commits a crime, everyone gets beaten for it.
Property left behind by [emigrating] Greeks is being stolen, and Ajarians
are getting the blame.
“So it’s the robbers who are fomenting trouble, setting people against each
other.”
Zaza Baazov is a freelance journalist in Tbilisi.

CHARLES AZNAVOUR DEMANDS THAT GERMANY AND TURKEY RECOGNIZE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

YEREVAN, MARCH 31. ARMINFO. Turkey must recognize the Armenian
Genocide or it will not be able to live with this burden from
generation to generation, says internationally known singer Charles
Aznavour says in an interview to Die Zeit.

Descendent of the Genocide survivors Aznavour says that sooner or
later Ankara will be forced to recognize the fact of Armenian
massacres in Ottoman Empire adding that only after that Armenia and
Turkey can reconcile.

Aznavour demands that the Genocide be acknowledged by Germany too as
being Turkey’s ally during WWI this country is also responsible for
the massacres. Germany must follow the example of Switzerland and
France who have officially recognized the Armenian Genocide, says
Aznavour.

SwissInfo, Svizzera
Martedì 29 marzo 2005

Svizzera-Turchia: missione delicata

La ministra degli esteri elvetica, Micheline Calmy-Rey, rende visita
alla Turchia. Il viaggio era in programma già tempo fa, ma Ankara lo
aveva fatto cancellare.

Nell’autunno del 2003, la Turchia aveva revocato l’invito alla
ministra elvetica, dopo che un parlamento cantonale aveva
riconosciuto il genocidio degli armeni.

La consigliera federale Micheline Calmy-Rey sarà in visita ufficiale
in Turchia da martedì 29 a giovedì 31 marzo. Ad Ankara, la
responsabile del Dipartimento federale degli affari esteri (DFAE)
sarà accolta dal vicepremier e ministro degli affari esteri Abdullah
Gül. Il programma prevede anche una visita di cortesia ad Ahmet
Necdet Sezer, presidente della Repubblica turca.

Colloqui di lavoro

L’ultima visita ufficiale di lavoro tra la Svizzera e la Turchia a
livello di ministri degli affari esteri si è svolta nel 2001. I
colloqui ufficiali con Gül saranno incentrati sulle relazioni
bilaterali tra la Svizzera e la Turchia.

Stando al consigliere diplomatico di Micheline Calmy-Rey, Roberto
Balzaretti, all’ordine del giorno ci sono argomenti quali i diritti
umani, le minoranze, le relazioni economiche.

Mercoledì, la consigliera federale sarà a Dyarbakir, una cittadina
curda situata nel sudest della Turchia. Sono previsti incontri con i
rappresentanti delle amministrazioni locali e con diverse
organizzazioni non governative. Giovedì, infine, Micheline Calmy-Rey
pronuncerà un discorso presso la Camera di commercio elvetica a
Istanbul.

Il difficile confronto sul genocidio

Non si sa ancora se durante la visita in Turchia, la ministra degli
esteri elvetica affronterà il tema del massacro degli armeni avvenuto
nel 1915. Il consigliere diplomatico di Micheline Calmy-Rey ritiene
che sarà difficile evitare di parlare di un argomento come questo,
che ha creato tensione tra i due paesi. Un precedente viaggio della
consigliera federale nel 2003 era stato annullato a causa del
riconoscimento da parte del parlamento del canton Vaud del genocidio
armeno da parte dell’Impero Ottomano.

La liberale Françoise Saudan, membro della commissione di politica
estera del Consiglio degli stati, invita ad essere prudenti quando si
affronta questo tema con i Turchi. A suo avviso, il genocidio rimarrà
un problema latente fintanto che la Turchia non farà luce sul suo
passato, un po’ come ha fatto la Svizzera riguardo ai fondi ebraici
in giacenza. Ad ogni modo, la Saudan si dice a disagio quando la
Svizzera vuole impartire lezioni all’estero.

Per il momento, la Turchia non accetta che si parli di genocidio per
i fatti avvenuti tra il 1915 e il 1918. Per questo era calato il gelo
sulle relazioni diplomatiche tra i due paesi, quando in Svizzera si
era cominciato a chiedere da più parti (parlamento del canton Vaud,
Consiglio nazionale, parlamento della città di Ginevra) di
riconoscere ufficialmente il «genocidio» degli armeni invece di
parlare solo di «massacri».

La visita di questi giorni dovrebbe aiutare a superare il momento di
crisi. Un primo passo era già stato fatto ad inizio 2004, quando in
occasione del Forum economico mondiale di Davos, l’allora presidente
della Confederazione Joseph Deiss era riuscito a far incontrare
Micheline Calmy-Rey con il primo ministro turco Erdogan.

swissinfo e agenzie

Washington Post
March 28 2005

Picnic Is No Party In the New Basra

Uproar Over Armed Attack on Student Event Redraws Debate on Islam’s
Role and Reach

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page A09

BASRA, Iraq, March 28 — Celia Garabet thought students were
roughhousing. Sinan Saeed was sure a fight had erupted. Within a few
minutes, on a sunny day at a riverside park, they realized something
different was afoot. A group of Shiite Muslim militiamen with rifles,
pistols, thick wire cables and sticks had charged into crowds of
hundreds at a college picnic. They fired shots, beat students and
hauled some of them away in pickup trucks. The transgressions: men
dancing and singing, music playing and couples mixing.

That melee on March 15 and its fallout have redrawn the debate that
has shadowed Iraq’s second-largest city since the U.S. invasion in
2003: What is the role of Islam in daily life? In once-libertine
Basra, a battered port in southern Iraq near the Persian Gulf, the
question dominates everything these days, from the political parties
in power to the style of dress in the streets.

In the days that followed the melee, hundreds of students, angry
about the injuries and arrests, marched on the school administration
building and then the governor’s office, demanding an apology and,
more important, the dissolution of the dreaded campus morality
police. The militiamen who attacked the picnickers at first boasted
of stamping out debauchery, even distributing videos of the event.
But, gauging the popular revulsion, they later admitted to what they
termed mistakes. The governor, himself an Islamic activist, urged
dialogue to calm a roiled city and deemed the case closed, even as
students insisted they remained unsatisfied.

To many in Basra the students managed what no local party or
politician had yet done: They interrupted, if briefly, a tide of
religious conservatism that has shuttered liquor stores in a city
that once had dozens, meted out arbitrary justice and encouraged
women to wear a veil and dress in a way considered modest.

“The students broke through the barriers of fear,” said Ali Abbas
Khafif, a 55-year-old writer and union organizer jailed for 23 years
under former president Saddam Hussein. “This was the first mass
response to religious power.”

The victory may be fleeting in a city where Islamic activism and guns
often go hand in hand. Even in their moment of triumph, many secular
students acknowledge they are fighting a losing battle; some suggest
it is already lost.

“We have felt both our weakness and our strength,” said Saif Emad,
24.

The day began with eight yellow school buses lined up by 10 a.m. at
one of the two campuses of Basra University, a sprawling expanse
where pink bougainvillea interrupts a dreary landscape. Hundreds of
students from the university’s engineering college piled into the
buses. They were joined at Andalus Park by hundreds more on foot and
in their own cars. By 10:30 a.m., there were from 500 to 750 students
and guests at a picnic the university had approved.

Young men started playing soccer. Others went to buy ice cream. The
more boisterous began dancing to a song, “He Went to Basra and Forgot
Me,” by Ali Hatem, an Iraqi singer. A few grew exuberant, thrusting
tape players along with red-and-white scarves into the air. Most of
the women were veiled, although a handful, including some Christians,
went bareheaded.

“All of a sudden, students started running,” recalled Garabet, 21, a
civil engineering student.

At that moment, from 20 to 40 militiamen loyal to the militant young
Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr and his Mahdi Army charged into the
two-acre park of overgrown grass, concrete picnic tables and paths of
colored tiles. Some of them wore checkered headscarves over their
faces, others black balaclavas. They carried sticks, cable, pistols
and rifles, a few with a weapon in each hand. They were accompanied
by two clerics in robes and turbans: Abdullah Menshadawi and Abdullah
Zaydi.

Garabet, an unveiled woman from an Armenian Christian family, never
saw her assailant. He struck her twice in the back of the head with
his fist. “I was afraid to turn around,” she said.

She stumbled, then headed with others toward the black steel gate.
Militiamen were shouting “Infidels!”

“It was chaos,” she said. “Everyone was yelling.”

As she walked out the gate, a second blow to the back of her head
almost knocked her unconscious. Two weeks later, she is still wearing
a neck brace, and her vision is blurred. She has numbness in one hand
and suffers severe headaches.

At about that time, students said, a militiamen struck an unveiled
21-year-old, Zeinab Faruq, with a stick. Another accosted a couple,
they recalled. The militiaman fired two shots at the legs of
22-year-old Muhsin Walid; another shot grazed Walid’s hand.

Sinan Saeed, 24, a husky mechanical engineering student, described
seeing one girl run toward the exit, then seeing a man stumble over
her. Both were beaten with sticks and cables as they lay on the
ground. Some surged through the gate; others tried to clamber over
the chain-link fence, Saeed said. At the exit, militiamen slapped
students with one hand, gripping their pistols in the other.

Students accused the men of stealing cell phones, cameras, gold
jewelry and tape players as the students left.

“They focused on the women,” said Saeed’s friend, Osama Adnan. “They
were beating them viciously.”

“Without any discrimination,” Saeed added.

Within half an hour, the fracas had ended. University officials said
15 students were seriously injured. The militiamen detained about 10
students, who were taken to the local office of the Sadr movement
before being released that evening. By all accounts, police were
present in force but did not intervene. The students insist that the
police were cowed by Menshadawi, one of the two clerics.

One student, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalled Menshadawi
shouting, “There is no secular government! There is only the
government of the Mahdi Army!” as he stood on some park steps
brandishing a stick and a pistol.

In the Sadr movement’s office, Heidar Jabari acknowledged excesses
but defended the action. “There was a mistake in our execution, but
we had the right to intervene,” he said.

Tall, with a friendly demeanor, Jabari said he had warned students
two days before the incident that the picnic was inappropriate.
Shiites were still observing the sacred month of Muharram, he said,
and a suicide bomb had recently killed 125 people in the southern
city of Hilla. “The blood from there was still fresh,” he said. “No
one listened to us.”

Jabari conceded that students were hurt and the beatings “went beyond
what was legitimate.” But, he added, “They say freedom means they can
do what they want. This is not freedom. Freedom does not mean you can
transgress traditions.” He spoke calmly but with clerical sternness.
“There are traditions and rules in an Eastern society that are
different from a Western society. Every Iraqi has a right to act
against these transgressions.”

To bolster their case, the movement, one of Basra’s most powerful,
released a video of footage it had gathered of the picnic. It
distributed it to local stores, which in turn sold it for about $1.

The images were relatively tame, even by Basra’s conservative
standards. Men are shown dancing. In the most exuberant moment, one
dancer ties a scarf around his waist and swivels his hips. A man
pushes a woman on a swing.

“At a wedding party, they do a lot more than that,” said Saleh Najim,
the dean of the engineering college.

The night of the confrontation, word of a protest went out, and the
following morning about 150 students gathered at the engineering
college, itself divided between secular and religious students. Their
numbers swelling as they went, they made their way to the president’s
office and issued their demands: no work for the Islamic groups on
campus, an official apology, punishment of the militiamen, return of
stolen property, disbandment of the much-feared security committees
that act as morality police in each university department and their
replacement with Iraqi army troops.

Students vowed to remain on strike until the demands were met.
Classes were canceled.

The next day, the students convened again. This time, they said, they
planned to head to the governor’s office. Police tried to block their
path, firing shots into the air at the gate, but they managed to
leave through another exit in 15 school buses. Once at the governor’s
office, they found hundreds of students from smaller colleges and a
few high schools already gathered. Inside, the governor met with
members of the city council and the Sadr movement, student
representatives and school officials.

Two hours later, students recalled, Mohammed Abadi, the president of
the city council, emerged. The students’ demands would be met, he
declared. He read a text from a microphone mounted on a police car
outside the office, going over each demand.

“We will compensate what was lost,” students recalled Abadi saying.

“What was stolen!” someone shouted from the crowd, correcting Abadi.

Following Abadi’s statement, city officials and Sadr’s movement
treated the matter as closed.

“The issue is settled,” said Mohammed Musabah, who took over as
governor of Basra the day of the melee. He acknowledged that police
had not arrested anyone, as students had demanded. But, he said in an
interview, “We spoke with them in a stern tone. Both sides wanted to
resolve it by way of dialogue.”

Few students this week said they were thinking about dialogue. Nor
did they seem to believe their demands had been met.

Saeed said that as he passed out leaflets during the protests, a
student sympathetic to Moqtada Sadr tapped his shoulder. “Be
careful,” he said he was told menacingly. On the wall at the campus
gate, scrawled in black, graffiti reads, “Basra remains Moqtada’s
Basra.”

“For a moment, we felt the strength of our voices,” Saeed said. “We
were making up our own minds.”

But, he added, “You can see on campus that students are still scared
to speak.”

A bang-up business: Robert Zildjian used an old formula to start a new
company

Financial Post – Canada
Mar 28, 2005

While some age-old family recipes call for a dash of basil or a pinch
of garlic, Robert Zildjian’s family blend is a secret combination of
copper and tin that has been used to make cymbals since 1623.

The name Zildjian has been synonymous with cymbal manufacturing since
17th-century Constantiople, when Sultan Osman II gave the name
(meaning “son of cymbal maker”) to an Armenian alchemist named Avedis.

Mr. Zildjian, 81, is the 13th generation of cymbal makers to inherit
Avedis’ coveted family recipe. He has also developed a few recipes of
his own, including one for a successful startup.

In 1981, Mr. Zildjian started Sabian Cymbals Ltd. in Meductic,
N.B. The founding of Sabian formalized a break from the centuries’ old
family business — Boston, Mass.-based Avedis Zildjian Co., where
Mr. Zildjian worked until 1979. A legal battle turned family feud saw
Mr. Zildjian split from the company. He took his recipe and his
business saavy to the sleepy eastern town of Meductic and has watched
Sabian grow ever since.

In little more than two decades, Sabian has become a major player in
the global cymbal market, quickly gulping up market share previously
held by its major rivals, Zildjian Co. and Paiste Co. — both more
than a century old.

Sabian has grown to a workforce of 130 employees worldwide and now
manufactures more than 900,000 cymbals a year — the most in the
industry, according to Mr. Zildjian.

About 97% of Sabian cymbals are exported outside Canada. Sabian was
responsible for 36% of total cymbal sales in the United States last
year and estimates it has captured about 35% of the European
market. It is also making inroads into the Middle East and Asia.

The Sabian logo adorns the cymbals of some of the biggest names in pop
music — from Neil Peart, drummer for Rush, to Chris Wilson of Good
Charlotte, Incubus’s Jose Pasillas, and Chad Smith of the Red Hot
Chili Peppers. It is remarkable growth for a company that had to
establish itself under the shadow of industry giants, but Mr. Zildjian
says the formula for success in the up-start market is pretty
straightforward.

“You have to have good people around you,” he says. “In small
business, you have to be tough, you have to have good financial
backing, and you have to have inspiration. But, in the end, it’s the
people around you that matter most.”

One of the people Mr. Zildjian credits with Sabian’s success is the
company’s president, Daniel Bar-ker. Mr. Barker joined Sabian as
vice-president in 1985, when it was still quite small. With his
extensive background in the music industry — including 12 years at
Zildjian Co. and a stint as an entrepreneur — Mr. Barker successfully
steered Sabian through the problems that are virtually universal for
entrepreneurs.

“Like any startup company, we had a great deal of difficulty at
first,” Mr. Barker says. “In the first few years, people didn’t come
running to the door. It wasn’t until 1987 that we started using black
ink. But by 1991, we were doing fairly well, and we’ve been growing
ever since.”

Sabian’s growth has been staggering by industry standards. For all but
two years since its inception, Sabian has experienced double-digit
increases and is rumoured to have grossed as much as $35-million last
year.

“We feel that, if we are number two in revenue (in the industry),
we’re so close to being number one we can taste it,” Mr. Barker says.

Success required one part financing and two parts persistence, he
says.

“Bob (Zildjian) and his family had a passion for this. They couldn’t
see failure. They were going to make this work one way or the
other. There was just no middle ground,” he says. “And to the family’s
credit, they put the money right back in the business to make it
grow. They did not take money out of the business. That helped finance
a lot internally. I can’t think of too many cases where I’ve ever seen
that.”

A solid relationship with the banks and other financiers is also
vital. “Many entrepreneurs go on a dream or have a good idea,”
Mr. Barker says. “They might get the startup money from investors or
by working with banks, but they don’t know how to turn that around —
they don’t know how to use it properly. Entrepreneurs who are looking
for fast growth need to establish good credit with the banks, get
their interest rates down, and then turn their money over and invest
in capital projects or inventory.”

A good relationship with the bank, he says, is based on a few simple
rules: Always pay your bills on time, and know where you are headed.

“A solid business plan is a key here, but a business plan has to be
followed up.”

Mr. Barker recommends entrepreneurs raise double the capital they
originally planned because unexpected expenses will always find their
way on to the balance sheet. And anyone not familiar with a balance
sheet should take some courses.

“It’s not enough to have a passion for it. Not everyone who goes into
business has that MBA background and sometimes some of the simplest
things — such as the tax implications — could be fundamental in a
startup.”

Finally, Mr. Barker warns prospective entrepreneurs not to get swept
away in small, inital successes.

“People figure if they invent the next best mouse trap, everything’s
golden,” he says. “So they get investors involved and raise a bunch of
capital and then go out and buy a $1,000 copying machine when a $250
one would suffice. It’s almost an ego thing — they just don’t make
the proper investments. With every purchase you should be asking
yourself, how will this help me grow?”

LIVE LEOPARD IN THE WILD PHOTOGRAPHED FOR FIRST TIME IN ARMENIA

YEREVAN, MARCH 24, NOYAN TAPAN. A live leopard was photographed
in its natural surroundings for the first time in Armenia. “This
photo proves once again the fact that not the panther, as the
locals often claim, but the Persian leopard is found in Armenia,”
Karen Malkhasian, director of the Wild World Fund’s (WWF) Caucasus
Program Office in Armenia, told NT correspondent. According to him,
this is the third case in the international practice that a leopard
has been photographed in the wild, and the picture’s authors – a WWF
expert Alexsander Malkhasian, the head of the Endangered Species Fund
Project Igor Khorozian and a member of the atipoaching brigade Mukuch
Boyajian are already accepting their colleagues’ congratulations. For
this unique type of leopard, the south of Armenia in particular the
Meghri mountain range is a natural environment, which extends as far
as the Azerbaijani and Iranian borders. Since 1999, various programs
on protection and studying of the leopard have been implemented in
Armenia. After examining the traces left such as remains of a hunt,
excrements, the hunting spots found, etc, the experts came to the
conclusion there are currently 5-7 leopards in the territory of
Armenia. “This means the leopard population is in a crisis situation
in Armenia, and the animal is vitually on the verge of extinction,”
A. Malkhasian believes. The photo of a live leopard was taken during
the latest expedition in March, 2005. “We have obtained an evidence
that the leopard started to lead a sedentary life in the territory
of Armenia,” K. Malkhasian pointed out. He expressed concern at the
fact that all efforts to protect the leopard might be futile. The fact
is that the construction of a 10-km wide alternative road is planned
through the Meghri mountaing range. According to the information in the
WWF’s possession, no ecological examination required in such cases has
been conducted, although the construction may lead to the destruction
of unique ecosystems and consequently to the loss of the leopard
population. “We are hopeful that those planning this construction
will realize how important it is to preserve the integrity of that
area, and the rare plant and animal species found there, which are of
universal value ,” K. Malkhasian said. As regards the construction of
strategically important communications, the WWF is ready to provide
all the necessary information so that the construction work will be
done with minimal damage to nature.

New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
March 28 2005

Who rules NZ: Top judge and judicial activist

Dame Sian Elias, New Zealand’s first woman Chief Justice, likes to
push the boundaries. Picture / Mark Mitchell

28.03.05

As a young woman in the 1960s, Sian Elias was determined not to be
ordinary or, as one friend recalls her saying, not to be “an Austin
1100, suburban housewife”.

And she got her wish. She has had an eventful legal career, capped by
her appointment as New Zealand’s first woman Chief Justice.

And naturally she has the services of a Crown limousine. But Sian
Elias is no judicial show-pony.

Beyond her graciousness and charm, she has been the lightning rod for
trouble in the past two years between the Government and the
judiciary.

There have been occasional mutterings in the Beehive about why she
doesn’t stand for Parliament if she wants to get political.

And occasional nervousness. As Chief Justice, Elias becomes
“administrator” in the Governor-General’s absence, acting proxy head
of state with the ultimate power to dissolve Parliament.

The nervousness is over the possibility that some day she might
actually do it, although she probably never would.

Less facetious is a subtle change in attitude by the Government to
legislation as a result of a more suspicious relationship between the
judiciary and the Executive.

At the peak of disgruntlement about Elias last year, senior
Government members were heard to talk of the need to “Sian-proof”
legislation.

That means leaving as few ambiguities and loose ends in legislation
before Parliament as possible in order to leave no room for later
judicial activism, the usually pejorative term to describe
development of new principles of law by judges to justify their
decisions.

Or as those deemed “activists” see it, the term given to judges by
people who don’t like their decisions.

The relationship appears to be in a cautious phase at present, with
the players determined to give no cause for complaint after
ill-judged outbursts by both Elias and State Services Minister Trevor
Mallard last year.

If the relationship was perceived as hostile, it’s not a description
that can be pinned to Elias in any personal sense. Quite the
contrary.

If there were one trait no one who knows her would argue with, it is
that she is gracious in all things, even under fire.

Act MP Stephen Franks knows from experience. He was pilloried for
suggesting in Parliament that Elias left open an appearance of bias
by sitting on the foreshore and seabed case because of a case she had
argued before the Waitangi Tribunal over control of the Manukau
Harbour and seabed.

A short time later he was at a function on the legal cocktail circuit
at which two High Court judges abused him, one calling him a disgrace
to his profession for his criticism.

Elias was at the same function and made a beeline for him, not to
castigate him but to engage him in discussion about what he had said.

Elias did not figure largely on the radar of this Government until
two years into its first term, when it discovered she had disciplined
a senior Auckland judge 18 months earlier for accessing soft porn on
his High Court computer. The fact that she had not told the
Attorney-General of this was as great a sin in the Government’s eyes
as the judge’s actions and seen as protecting “the boys’ club”.

For its part, the judiciary and many in the legal profession were
disturbed at the public flogging by the Government and the none too
subtle pressure to get Justice Robert Fisher to resign.

Elias’ leadership was undoubtedly appreciated then by her brethren on
the Bench, but that was likely shaken last year when she raised the
possibility that judges could be swayed by financial considerations.

It was an argument in favour of a better remuneration package and in
the worthy promotion of judicial independence, but it failed
spectacularly to enhance the standing of judges.

The recent tension between the Executive and the judiciary has
centred around two things: opposing views on the notion of “the
sovereignty of Parliament”, and the way Elias has gone about
criticising the Government for what she perceives is ignorance over
the importance of judicial independence – bleating about it to
overseas audiences and declaring the Prime Minister to have “a
profound lack of understanding” of judicial independence.

But the undercurrent has been the Government’s horror at the Court of
Appeal’s foreshore and seabed judgment, led by Elias.

It could be said that the landmark case was one she had been in
training for throughout her legal career.

The decision of June 2003 allowed for the possibility that the Maori
Land Court could issue freehold title over the foreshore and seabed.

Addressing the consequent legal uncertainties and upheavals in
Maoridom dominated the political agenda for the next 18 months.

Elias is a heroic figure among those whose passion is Maori justice,
and a key figure in what is so disparagingly termed the treaty
industry. She has a reputation for compassion and humanity.

So did her father, the son of Armenian refugees, who practised as a
GP for many years in West Auckland.

Elias arrived in New Zealand with her father and Welsh mother as a
toddler from London. She was raised in Titirangi and went to the
private Anglican school Diocesan School for Girls in Epsom.

Skipping the upper sixth form after getting University Entrance, she
started at Auckland University’s law school in 1966, one of only half
a dozen girls, including former Attorney-General Margaret Wilson, in
a class of well over 100 boys.

But while the young Wilson was resolute in all things and a political
creature, it was not clear at the time that the cultured young Westie
would earn a name synonymous for championing legal justice issues for
Maori.

That evolved through her career, rather than existing as a driving
force from the outset.

At university she was part of the Dio set, stylish, fun without being
flamboyant.

She studied hard but was not among the scholarly elite of her cohort.
She was part of a generation that wanted to change the world but she
was a strong advocate of the legitimacy of change from within the
system.

She preferred to observe demonstrations from the independence of the
footpath, where good law students should be, rather than join the
melee.

Elias joined the Auckland aristocracy and the Fletcher dynasty when
she married Hugh Fletcher in 1970. The pair studied further at
Stanford University in California, where she gained a masters in law.

The couple have two grown sons.

Elias has been one of New Zealand’s most notable models of
affirmative action for women.

She and close friend Lowell Goddard were chosen to become the first
women Queen’s Counsel in 1988, and in 1995 Elias was appointed a High
Court judge.

She has New Zealand’s first woman Prime Minister, Jenny Shipley, to
thank for her job as the country’s first woman Chief Justice – a
position commonly appointed not only from the other gender but from
outside the judiciary.

Elias’ appointment may have been a surprise to the legal profession,
but it was no surprise to the Cabinet colleagues of Shipley, who made
no secret of the fact that she was determined to appoint a woman.

Elias beat present Court of Appeal Judge John McGrath, then
Solicitor- General, to the job.

She is a successful model of affirmative action. No one in the legal
profession the Herald spoke to disputes that she is up to the job of
Chief Justice, even her critics.

One of her most notable judgments as a High Court judge directly
affected politicians in the David Lange vs Joe Atkinson defamation
case.

The final outcome on appeal was to give the news media a stronger
defence against defamation actions by politicians.

As a lawyer, she specialised in company law and was leading counsel
for the plaintiff in the long-running Equiticorp case.

But it is her association with Treaty of Waitangi law for which she
attracted headlines.

With two small boys in 1979, Elias was working part-time at the Grey
Lynn neighbourhood law office when she worked for some Maori and
Pacific Island defendants accused of attacking a haka party of
Auckland University engineering students.

In 1984, she helped Nganeko Minhinnick’s Manukau Harbour claim to the
Waitangi Tribunal, a case that opened up a new world to her.

It also led to work on other treaty cases, including a claim to
prevent the Government selling radio frequencies, and the case
challenging the 1994 Maori electoral option.

The work has given her an appreciation of Maori custom and
aspirations that she fosters today among the judiciary and in her
private life.

Every Waitangi Day she makes a pilgrimage as a private citizen to
Waitangi, something Shipley does as well.

When she was appointed Chief Justice, Elias told the Herald: “One of
the reasons I’m so optimistic about the future is because what
happened at Waitangi [the signing in 1840] is so consciously founded
on an expectation that justice will be achieved through law.”

Her first words last year at the first sitting of the new indigenous
Supreme Court were to acknowledge the presence in the public gallery
of an unassuming Maori couple, invited for the occasion to represent
the tangata whenua, Te Atiawa.

Elias was made Chief Justice at the young age of 50. The compulsory
retirement age of 68 means that over 18 years she has the potential
to leave an imprint on the law in New Zealand. But it is unlikely she
will stay that long.

Five years into the job, she is half- way through her term as New
Zealand’s top judge, saying when she was appointed that she saw it as
a 10-year position.

But she may have changed her mind given the way her job has changed.
The position of Chief Justice carries more weight and is more
powerful today than it was five years ago. Elias now assumes the
mantle of pre-eminent jurist as head of the Supreme Court.

Before the Supreme Court was established last year, the Chief Justice
was more of an administrative role, with the right to sit on any
case.

The president of the Court of Appeal was regarded as the pre-eminent
jurist, and no more so than under the tenure of Sir Robin Cooke,
later Lord Cooke of Thorndon.

He made a deep imprint on not just the law but on the continuing
debate over the sovereignty of Parliament and, undoubtedly, on the
development of Elias’ career.

One of his earliest challenges to the sovereignty of Parliament still
cited by his acolytes was contained in a 1984 judgment involving, of
all things, the Poultry Board, when he said “some common law rights
presumably lie so deep that even Parliament could not override them”,
which is tantamount to saying that in extreme circumstance, the
courts can overrule the will of Parliament.

It is a good guess that Elias is one of his admirers – she did not
consent to an interview – and if she wasn’t in Cooke’s early days,
she certainly would have been after 1987.

That was when he handed down his Court of Appeal ruling in the case
of the Maori Council vs the Attorney-General, establishing a key
principle of the Treaty of Waitangi as “partnership”.

It was a stunning judgment and a victory for the Maori Council and
its team of lawyers – David Baragwanath, now a High Court judge, the
late Martin Dawson and one Sian Elias.

Its significance, however, was adjudged through the passage of time
with its “partnership” principle being fostered by successive
Governments in many areas of state.

The suspicion with which the judiciary and Elias is regarded in some
parliamentary quarters is not over a simple academic argument about
the sovereignty of Parliament but because of a belief that those who
would dismiss it are often activist and more likely to deliver
decisions of the foreshore ilk – with a devil-may-care attitude to
its consequences.

Cooke is still going strong. In his most recent speech, he described
the sovereignty of Parliament as a “catchphrase beloved by some
sections of the media and some politicians” which “does not survive
in-depth analysis”.

Elias has picked up Cooke’s baton.

She began her run in a speech in Melbourne in 2003 about
parliamentary sovereignty, describing it as a merry-go-round.

“We have assumed the application of the doctrine of parliamentary
sovereignty in New Zealand. Why is not clear,” she said.

“Parliamentary sovereignty is an inadequate theory of our
constitutions. An untrammelled freedom of Parliament does not exist
.. We should get off the merry-go-round.” .

The words of a woman who has found a confidence in her role as Chief
Justice – and no doubt of a woman determined not to be an ordinary
Chief Justice.

The Chief Justice

* Heads the judiciary.

* Presides over the Supreme Court.

* Stands in for the Governor-General if necessary.

* Manages the relationship between courts and other branches of
Government.

* Advises the Attorney-General on judicial appointments.

Azer Tag, Azerbaijan
March 26, 2005

STATEMENT OF THE CENTER OF PUBLIC RELATIONS OF THE MINISTRY OF NATIONAL
SECURITY
[March 25, 2005, 20:50:37]

On March 28, employees of the Ministry of National Security will
mark their professional holiday, 86th anniversary of establishment
of security bodies. Before this date, with a view of increase of
the efficiency of public relations and more full informing of the
society on bodies of national security, there has been created official
website of the Ministry of National Security – .

The Internet-site of the Ministry is provided with catalogues
on the corresponding areas, useful information resources and
links. On the site with use of arguments is widely covered the
history of establishment of the security bodies of Azerbaijan and the
autobiographical data concerning various directions of their activity,
and also the persons supervised the security bodies, the legislative
base making ground for activity of bodies of special service, the steps
undertaken in the field of combat against international terrorism and
various displays of the organized crime, the international cooperation
in this sphere, the selflessness shown by employees of the Ministry
of National Security in fights for independence and territorial
integrity of Azerbaijan, its history, legal aspects, consequences of
the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the political
line pursued at the present stage on the way of settlement of the
conflict, essence of the policy carried out by Armenia against our
country and the Armenian state terrorism. Users can familiarize with
the information interesting them in the following sections: public
relations, library, Academy of MNS, a museum, a picture album. Besides,
for maintenance of efficiency of public relations on official site
of MNS, are stipulated special addresses of contacts.

Since March 28, of this year users of the official website of the
Ministry of National Security can receive the objective and unbiased
information on activity of the Ministry from the primary source.