Author: Khondkarian Raffi

DESPITE THE CHORUS OF PIOUS HOPE, TURKEY IS NOT GOING TO JOIN THE EU
Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The Guardian , UK
Dec 18 2006

There will be no place at the table for Ankara in any foreseeable
future, and the most profound reason is geographical

Of all the temptations of journalism, prediction is the most
dangerous. Soothsayers in our trade are usually made to look foolish by
events. The best answer was given by the fabled correspondent in some
distant spot who, asked by an importunate foreign desk (in the days
of abbreviated cablese) to file "soonest,fullest,whatnext happens",
responded succinctly: "Myballs uncrystal."

After that, let me say something simply and confidently: Turkey is
not going to join the EU. "Not" does not mean "never" but in any
foreseeable future, although you wouldn’t know that from Tony Blair.

He visited Turkey last Friday at the beginning of his latest forlorn,
not to say fantastical, mission to bring peace to the Middle East,
intoning the words: "It is important that we continue the process of
accession with Turkey."

Nor would you know it from other exalted Euro-personages. Chancellor
Angela Merkel has just joined the Social Democrats, her German
coalition partners, in saying that full membership "would be
worthwhile", one fine day. Erkki Tuomioja, the Finnish foreign
minister, whose country’s EU presidency is just coming to an end,
says that "the door is still open", while Carl Bildt, the foreign
minister, continues ardently to favour Turkish membership.

All these pious hopes are expressed at the very moment negotiations
between Turkey and the EU have just hit one more pothole, with
Brussels suspending talks as a punishment for Ankara’s refusal to
open its ports and airports to Greek Cyprus. This suspension was a
"serious mistake", Blair says, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish
prime minister calls it "unacceptable".

By now the Turks should have learned that there is much they must
accept whether they like it or not, and they have come to feel, not
without reason, that when one obstacle is surmounted Europe will
always find another. Turkey became an associate member of the EEC
or Common Market as long ago as 1963, and in 1987 Ankara applied for
full membership of the EU.

During the lengthy interlude came the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in
1974 and in 1983 the creation of a Turkish Cypriot state, which no
one but Ankara recognises. Turkey has a much better case over Cyprus
than in other matters, and the despicable behaviour of the Greek
Cypriot government – and electorate, when they voted against the
reunification of the island once EU membership could not be revoked –
has made Cyprus the least loved member state of the EU.

More serious objections are the patchy Turkish record (to put it
mildly) on human rights. Turkey still does not enjoy what European
countries consider a true rule of law or freedom of speech, and has
not come to terms with its history, notably the fate of the Armenians.

Even then, the continual European hesitancy and changing of the tune
might suggest bad faith. But that is not really so, and a better way
of seeing it is as a kind of social embarrassment. Far from having
embarked on an elaborate deception, Europe said something with good
intentions but without really thinking it through, only to recognise
slowly how grave the practical difficulties are. As a result, Turkey
waits for church bells that never ring, while Europe, as one French
diplomat puts it, is like a man with a mistress he doesn’t want to
lose, but doesn’t want to marry, either. The trouble is that a moment
passes, after which it’s no longer easy or even possible to say this
thing can work without causing pain.

For their part, the worst mistake the Turks have made is invoking US
support. During yet another crisis between Ankara and Brussels a little
more than a year ago, Erdogan rang Condoleezza Rice and asked for her
help, to which the secretary of state duly responded by expressing yet
again Washington’s ardent support for Turkish admission to the EU –
and thereby further enraging the Europeans.

As usual Blair takes the American line, arguing for Turkish admission
on strategic grounds: it "has an importance not just in respect to
Turkey but with wider relationships between the west and the Muslim
world". Shutting the door will alienate Muslims everywhere, letting
Turkey in will build a bridge between the west and the Islamic world.

But another way of putting it is that Europe is being asked to make
a huge sacrifice to gratify American strategic interests. Whatever
Blair may think, this doesn’t meet with universal favour. As the
former European commissioner Chris Patten has sarcastically said,
it is very good of the Americans to keep offering Turkey admission
to the EU, but this is a question on which Europeans might want to
have some say themselves.

Neither Blair nor his American friends have noticed that there has
scarcely been a less propitious moment for Turkish admission in these
40 years. Turkish sensitivity about being excluded from a "Christian
club" is quite misplaced: Europe today isn’t a Christian anything, and
even fear of radical Islamism is not the main factor. More important
is the hangover from previous EU expansion – and the Turkish question
also illustrates the gulf between "the soi-disant elites", as that
contrarian French politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement calls them,
personified by Blair, Tuomioja and Bildt, and the actual peoples
of Europe.

In May 2004, eastern European countries that had been sundered from
their neighbours by 60 years of war and cold war were admitted to
"our common European home" and very moving it was. After the elation,
Europe woke up to realise that its 10 new member states now comprised
a quarter of its population while providing a 20th of its economic
product, and that’s before Romania and Bulgaria join in the new year,
let alone Turkey, with a per-capita income one-tenth of the British,
and a child mortality rate 10 times the French.

A year later, the French and Dutch referendums, which turned down the
new EU constitution, were a hostile response to that expansion, and
by implication to Turkish admission. For all Blair’s high-sounding
platitudes, that new mood has been caught by other European
politicians. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister who is
almost certain to be the conservative candidate – and favourite –
in May’s presidential elections, is an open opponent of Turkish
membership, and is "happy to see that these ideas are gaining
ground". As he might say, building bridges between the west and Islam,
and sapping the roots of terrorism, are doubtless worthy objectives,
but since when did they become the purpose of the EU?

In the end, the problem is less cultural or economic or religious than
simply geographical. This is something we have only slowly woken up
to, but it explains why Turkey will not join for a very long time,
if ever. Bildt says, solemnly and dubiously, that "there is no doubt
that Turkey is a part of Europe", but a French politician has put it
another way: can we really have a Europe that extends to the borders
of Iraq? Many ordinary Europeans seem to know the answer to that
better than their rulers.

–Boundary_(ID_AKVHL26DKxC+K4dzkPCO5A)–

Gazeta.KZ, Kazakhstan
Dec 15 2006

Kazakhstan opens embassies in Armenia, Qatar

Kazakhstan today

ASTANA. Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of Kazakhstan, has signed
orders on opening embassies of Kazakhstan in Armenia and Qatar and
reorganizing the diplomatic missions to Singapore and Netherlands,
Kazakhstan Today reports.

In particular, as per the presidential orders, the diplomatic
missions to Singapore and Netherlands will be transformed into
embassies of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

The embassy of Kazakhstan to Armenia will be opened in Yerevan. The
embassy of Kazakhstan to Qatar will be opened in Doha.

The new embassies will be opened "to strengthen the diplomatic
relationship", the documents say.

All four orders come into effect as from 1 January, 2007.

ARMENIAN FOREIGN MINISTER TO PAY ONE-DAY WORKING VISIT TO IRAN ON DECEMBER 17

Yerevan, December 16. ArmInfo. Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan
Oskanyan is to pay a one- day working visit to the Islamic Republic of
Iran on December 17.

The RA Foreign Ministry press-service told ArmInfo, the minister is
expected to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Foreign
Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Secretary of the Supreme National
Security Council Ali Larijani.

The parties will discuss the bilateral relations in the political and
trade-and-economic spheres, as well as the cooperation in the energy
sphere.

A1+

`VAHAN HOVHANNISYAN’S WORDS ARE NONSENSE’
[07:43 pm] 14 December, 2006

On December 13 a number of journalists tried to know the opinion of
Vahan Hovhannisyan, NA deputy Speaker and ARF Dashnaktsutyun member,
on the arrest of Zhirayr Sefilyan. The journalists also reminded Mr.
Hovhannisyan that it was Dashnaktsutyun that organized marches in
Yerevan during the years of the war.

The acting authorities claim that Sefilyan’s arrest was determined by
the fact that his steps jeopardized the statehood of Armenia.

The journalists wondered whether the rallies of complaint organized by
ARF Dashnaktsutyun didn’t put the statehood of Armenia into peril.

In answer to this question, Mr. Hovhannisyan said that in case they
hadn’t organized rallies, Armenia would have lost the war.

Mr. Hovhannisyan refrained from going into details and didn’t open the
brackets.

Today, Smbat Ayvazyan, member of Republican Party commented on Vahan
Hovhannisyan’s speech and said, `Mr. Hovhannisyan’s words are
nonsense. When they initiated marches in Yerevan there was no one to
fight on the frontier’.

Smbat Ayvazyan maintains that in case ARF Dashnaktsutyun attempts to
change its opinion on the Karabakh conflict settlement, namely on the
liberated territories, the party had better close down.

ARMENIA RECOGNIZED ONE OF LEADERS OF TRANSPARENCY OF TRADE-ECONOMIC SYSTEM IN WTO RATING

Arka News Agency, Armenia
Dec 11 2006

YEREVAN, December 11. /ARKA/. Armenia was recognized one of the
leaders of transparency of trade-economic system in rating of
WTO-member states.

The RA Ministry of Trade and Economic Development informed ARKA
News Agency, according to the research, carried out by the Geneva
Institute of International Studies, among the WTO-member countries
Armenia ranks the second, following Norway.

The rating was based on the quantity of notifications, received by
corresponding committees and commissions of the WTO.

LIVES STILL AFFECTED BY AZERI-ARMENIAN WAR
By Matthew Collin

St Petersburg Times, Russia, Russia
Dec 12 2006

I met Ashot in a village just outside the Armenian capital, Yerevan,
at the house of his father, Vladimir, a writer who fled the Azeri
capital, Baku, with his family in the early 1990s, amid the upsurge
of violence between Azeris and Armenians.

Vladimir was leafing through an album of old photographs decorated
with mementos of a lost life in cosmopolitan Baku, where his mother
sang show tunes during the lazy, lovingly remembered Brezhnev era.

All that is gone now. These days, Vladimir’s family members are
"internally displaced persons," although probably never to be
replaced. And Baku is no longer the city Vladimir remembers. Ethnic
Armenians haven’t been welcome for years. His family now lives in a
one-room cottage near a rusty automobile dump. They’re lucky. Some
of the war escapees in this village live in a disused prison.

Then Ashot walked in – 16 years old, hair meticulously gelled, bright
but bashful. He’s a singer too, he said, although it took a bit of
bullying by his father to coax a tune out of him. When it came, it was
unexpectedly in Azeri, a language he doesn’t even speak. It turned out
he had learned it by heart from his grandmother without knowing what
the words meant. So an Armenian boy whose family was driven out by
the Azeris was singing an old Azeri song in a refugee hovel in Armenia.

A few weeks later, I was in the oil boomtown of Baku, listening to
a very different tune: the call to prayer from a city-center mosque.

Standing next to me was Vahid, 20, who comes here every week for
Friday prayers. He said he was studying business and wanted to work
for BP, the key player in the Azeri black gold rush. But he feared he
wouldn’t have enough money to bribe his way through what he said was
a corrupt education system and to afford the private English lessons
he would need to get a job with an international company.

While I waited to speak to the imam, Vahid kept talking. His father
runs a plastics factory, which he managed to build up from nothing in
the few years since the family arrived in Baku. "Arrived from where?"

I asked. From Armenia in the 1990s, he said.

Although they traveled in opposite directions, both Vahid and Ashot
– along with nearly a million others – were displaced by the same
war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the continued absence of a
final peace agreement between the two countries, it’s a conflict that
continues to affect the lives and futures of both young men more than
a decade later – and the lives of many others too young to remember it.

Matthew Collin is a journalist based in Tbilisi.

EX-KARABAKH COMMANDER ‘FACING EVICTION FROM ARMENIA’
By Astghik Bedevian

Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Dec 12 2006

A prominent Lebanese-Armenian participant of the Nagorno-Karabakh
war who has campaigned against major concessions to Azerbaijan was
reportedly facing deportation from Armenia late Monday after being
arrested for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government.

Zhirayr Sefilian, who leads a hardline pressure group that considers
the Armenian government’s Karabakh policy "defeatist," and a large
group of his supporters were detained by law-enforcement bodies late
Saturday and early Sunday. All but one of the three dozen men making
up the newly formed Armenian Volunteer League (HKH) were released
shortly afterwards, following searches conducted in their apartments
by officers of the National Security Service (NSS).

The NSS said it has "irrefutable evidence" to assert that Sefilian set
up the group for mounting an armed uprising against the government
during next spring’s parliamentary elections. A written statement
released by the Armenian successor to the Soviet KGB said he also
sought to prod the country’s mainstream opposition into staging
violent anti-government protests.

The NSS also claimed that Sefilian and the other man held in custody,
opposition activist Vartan Malkhasian, presented HKH members with
a "plan of concrete actions" aimed at toppling President Robert
Kocharian during a December 2 confidential meeting in Yerevan. It was
conducting a criminal investigation under an article of the Armenian
Criminal Code dealing with public calls for a "violent change of
constitutional order."

Sefilian’s friends and associates told RFE/RL that the Lebanese
national, who commanded a battalion during the war with Azerbaijan
and has the lieutenant-colonel’s rank, will likely avoid trial and
be deported from Armenia. They expected him to be forcibly put on
a late-night flight to Aleppo, Syria. The NSS, spokesman, Artsvi
Baghramian, declined to confirm or deny this.

Meanwhile, leaders of a dozen opposition parties gathered for an
emergency meeting to condemn the decorated war veteran’s arrest. "The
authorities have committed yet another blunder," said Smbat Ayvazian
of the radical Hanrapetutyun party. "They want to create a society
of fear but they will get a society of hatred directed at themselves."

Aram Karapetian, the leader of the Nor Zhamanakner party, accused
the authorities of trying to forestall street protests against fresh
vote rigging and unpopular concessions to Azerbaijan such as the
return of Armenian-occupied lands surrounding Karabakh. He admitted
that Sefilian, a vocal opponent of any Armenian troop withdrawal,
was prepared for "radical actions."

BRANCHES OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING HOUSE AND BOOKSHOOP OPEN IN YEREVAN

Noyan Tapan
Dec 08 2006

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 8, NOYAN TAPAN. The Armenian branches of the Oxford
University’s publishing house and the bookshop of the same name opened
in Yerevan.

Tigran Lokmagyozian, director and representative of these two Armenian
branches of Oxford University, stated this at the opening of the
bookshop at 12 Kasian Street on December 8. In his words, this event
is of great importance for Armenia not only in terms of business but
also studying of English. Mr. Lokmagyozian said that the publishing
house is a branch of Oxford University and has promoted educational
and research activities at the university during its 5-century old
history. Being a leader of English teaching, it has its offices in
more than 60 countries. The operation of its branch in our country
will allow Armenian teachers to take part in seminars and training
courses both in Armenia and Great Britain organized by Oxford
University. T. Lokmagyozian noted that the first seminar will
be held in the spring of 2007, and its participants will receive
certificates. According to him, the bookshop now offers 700 titls
of Oxford literature – general, special and business – for experts
and English learners. Besides, there are books for improvement of
vocabulary and spelling, guides for teachers, as well as books on
applied linguistics.

FOUR BLAZE THEMSELVES IN ARMENIA

China Daily, China
AP
Dec 8 2006

YEREVAN, Armenia – Three teenagers and their grandmother set themselves
on fire in the Armenian capital Thursday to protest what they said was
authorities’ inaction on investigating a relative’s death, a family
member said. Two of them were injured.

Gyulizar Avdalian sets herself on fire during a protest outside the
president’s office in Yerevan, Armenia, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2006. [AP]

The protesters poured gasoline on themselves and set themselves on
fire in front of the president’s office in Yerevan, the teenagers’
great uncle Surian Avdalian told The Associated Press. The grandmother
and her 14-year-old grandson were injured and hospitalized with burns,
Avdalian said. The other two teens were unharmed.

The four were members of the small Yazidi community who were protesting
what they called official inaction in last month’s beating death of
the children’s father, Avdalian said. They argued that the case was
not being investigated because of discrimination against the Yazidi,
a Kurdish ethnic group. About 50,000 Yazidi live in Armenia.

Prosecutor General Agvan Grigorian later met with relatives of the
family and told them a man had been arrested the day after the father’s
death, according to spokeswoman Sonna Truzian.

She also said a criminal investigation had been opened into the
grandmother’s involvement in the protest, saying she herself allegedly
poured flammable liquids on her grandchildren.

ARMENIAN FORCES BROKE CEASE FIRE REGIME IN SEVERAL DIRECTIONS
Author: Sh. Jaliloghli

TREND Information, Azerbaijan
Dec 6 2006

During the visit of a delegation of Azerbaijani MPs to Aghdam,
units of Armenian Forces repeatedly broke the cease fire regime from
several directions. Trend Regional Correspondent reports that units
of Armenian Forces subjected opposite positions of Azerbaijani Army
to a gun fire, from the positions located on the occupied Azerbaijani
villages of Aghdam District of Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani village
of Abdulrahman of Fuzuli District of Azerbaijan.