Author: Khoyetsian Rose

PanARMENIAN.Net

European Commission to issue initial South Caucasus country reports in 2008
20.10.2007 15:21 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ `Both sides of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict should
be encouraged and the EU has the tools,’ EU Special Representatives
Peter Semneby said.

The European Union could assist in resolution of the Nagorno Karabakh
conflict by initiating trust-building measures, according to him.

`We have enough experience in such issues. But first of all, consent
of the sides essential. And, of course, it will be just assistance to
the OSCE and Minsk Group endeavors.

When asked about rates of European integration of South Caucasus
states, Peter Semneby said, `Each state shoots forward in this or that
field. I can’t give an assessment to the situation on the whole. But I
suppose that things will clear up when the European Commission issues
its initial reports on the South Caucasus states’ fulfillment of
commitments undertaken within the Action Plan,’ Day.az reports.

MAIN REASON OF NOT GOING TO DOCTOR IN ARMENIA REMAINS LACK OF FUNDS

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 19, NOYAN TAPAN. The probability of emergence of need
of medical aid among people aged 20 and above within one year in
Armenia made 30.8%. 74.9% of them applied for receiving professional
medical aid. The main reason of not going to doctor for receiving
medical aid remain financial problems (41.7%), as well as
self-treatment (36.2%). These data are presented in the national report
under the title "Efficiency of Health System’s Activity in Armenia,"
the presentation of which took place on October 19.

As Vladimir Davidian, the Director of the Information-Analytical Center
of the RA National Institute of Health, mentioned, population’s
payments on hand in the hospital link exceed the expenditures being
done by the Ministry almost 3-fold. According to him, in the recent
three years cases of death in hospitals made 1.6%. Cases of death from
vessel diseases of cerebrum and infarct of cardiac muscle are the most
frequent ones.

PanARMENIAN.Net

Israeli Armenians to protest Israel’s policy towards Armenian Genocide
recognition
19.10.2007 18:07 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The Armenian Community of Israel will launch a
protest on Monday, October 22, in front of the Foreign Ministry of
Israel.

As a source told PanARMENIAN.Net, the protest is aimed at Israel’s
policy towards the recognition of Armenian Genocide, which the
government has yet to recognize, and also Israel’s lobbying, on
Turkey’s behalf, in the U.S. Congress, on the issue of the Genocide.

U.S. LAWMAKERS DEFECT FROM GENOCIDE RESOLUTION

NPR
Oct 17 2007

All Things Considered, October 17, 2007 · Turkey continues to voice
its opposition to a resolution circulating through the U.S. House.

The resolution would recognize the 1915 mass killing of more than a
million Armenians as genocide.

Now that the Turkish government has threatened to curtail military
ties with the U.S., nearly a dozen lawmakers have withdrawn their
support of the controversial resolution.

U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, talks with Melissa
Block about why he changed his mind.

& A: But Was It Genocide?

by Corey Flintoff

Enlarge The bodies of dead Armenians lie in a grove of trees in
eastern Turkey. The deaths are a result of what is now being called
genocide. Bettmann/CORBIS

What Is Genocide?

The term – from Greek and Latin roots meaning "the massacre of a
family, tribe or race" -was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish
legal scholar from Poland. In the 1930s, Lemkin sought unsuccessfully
to get the League of Nations to recognize such killings as an
international crime. As examples, he cited the massacre of Armenians
during World War I and the slaughter of Assyrians in Iraq in 1933.

After World War II, Lemkin’s idea of genocide as an international
crime became one of the legal bases for the Nuremberg trials of Nazi
war criminals.

In 1948, the United Nations adopted the modern definition of genocide,
listing "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Those acts included:

~U killing or causing serious physical or mental harm to members of
the group,

~U forcing the group to live in conditions calculated to bring about
its physical destruction

~U Forcibly preventing births among the group, or forcibly sending
its children to be reared by members of another group.

The U.N. convention on genocide didn’t become law until 1951, after
20 U.N. members had signed it. The United States was the last of
the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to sign it –
in 1988 – and it didn’t begin to be enforced until the 1990s, with
prosecutions for genocide in Kosovo and Rwanda.

German Fuhrer and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler during a speech. Hulton
Archive/Getty Images

Political Figures Speak About Genocide

"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations,
they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they
understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made
no particular attempt to conceal the fact…"

– Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire,
in a 1919 memoir.

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

– Adolph Hitler in 1939, before the invasion of Poland. He was
defending his order to massacre Poles.

"The United States has a compelling historical and moral reason to
recognize the Armenian Genocide, which cost a million and a half people
their lives, but we also have a powerful contemporary reason as well:
How can we take effective action against the genocide in Darfur if
we lack the will to condemn genocide whenever and wherever it occurs?"

– Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), during the 2007 debate on the Armenian
genocide resolution.

NPR.org, October 11, 2007 · Some say it was the first genocide of
the 20th century – tens of thousands of Armenian men, women and
children killed by Turkish troops, and hundreds of thousands more
dead of starvation or exposure to the weather on forced marches and
in concentration camps.

Turkey and its supporters say the Armenians were killed in battle or
by harsh conditions that both sides suffered equally.

The controversy revived as the House Foreign Relations Committee
approved a measure that would officially declare the deaths to be
genocide. Here are some of the key questions on the issue:

How many people died?

No one denies that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in
the Ottoman Turkish Empire from 1914 to 1917. The modern Turkish
government says about 300,000 Armenians died – mostly, it says,
in fighting that was part of World War I. Armenians says the number
reached as high as 1.5 million, as part of a deliberate, systematic
effort to destroy the Armenian population.

How did it start?

Animosity between Turks and Armenians stretches back over centuries.

A key factor is religion: Armenians are mostly Christian, Turks
mostly Muslim. During the Ottoman Empire, Christians were treated as
second-class citizens, and when the empire began to crumble in the
19th century, an Armenian resistance movement took hold in what is
now eastern Turkey. Armenian nationalists sided with Christian Russia
during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 and later formed separatist
groups.

Turkish accounts of the situation sound eerily like U.S. military
accounts of the insurgency in Iraq. They say the resistance was
incited by outsiders, Armenians from the Russian side of the border
who wanted to undermine the Ottomans by stirring up unrest.

When Turkey and Russia faced off again during World War I, many Turks
saw the Armenians as terrorists and traitors. Turkish accounts of the
run-up to the war claim that Armenian guerrillas, armed by Russia,
attacked Muslim villages and massacred their inhabitants.

In 1915, the Turkish government passed a law allowing it to deport
Armenians from eastern Turkey as a national security risk. Turkish
troops killed resisters and herded tens of thousands of Armenians on
forced marches to camps in northern Syria and Iraq. Accounts by U.S.

and British diplomats of the time say the Turkish troops and
paramilitaries robbed, raped and murdered deportees along the way,
leaving the survivors to die without food or shelter in the desert.

Turks counter that these allegations were wartime propaganda by the
countries arrayed against Turkey and its World War I allies, Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria.

What determines whether an act can be called genocide?

In the eyes of some scholars, the question of genocide comes down
not to how many Armenians died, but whether the Turkish government
actually set out to annihilate them because of their ethnicity.

Bernard Lewis, an emeritus professor of Near Eastern Studies at
Princeton, says it may well be likely that a million Armenians died,
but he asserts that there’s no evidence that the Turkish government
made a "deliberate preconceived decision" to carry out massacres. In
an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, Lewis instead called
the deaths a "brutal byproduct of war."

A French court later found Lewis guilty of denying the Armenian
genocide and fined him a symbolic one franc.

Turks and others who deny that genocide occurred have also used the
courts to make symbolic gestures. In 2005, Turkish novelist Orhan
Pamuk was charged with "insulting Turkishness" for complaining in
an interview that "a million Armenians were killed in these lands
and nobody dares to talk about it." The case against the Nobel Prize
winner provoked an international outcry from free-speech advocates,
and the charges were eventually dropped.

Why is Congress taking this issue up now?

Congressional committees have voted repeatedly on similar resolutions
in the past (the last time, in 2005, the vote was 40-to-7 in favor).

The reason it’s gotten so much attention this time is that the new
Democratic leadership in the House promised to bring it to a floor
vote if it passed in committee. That’s something the former speaker,
Republican Dennis Hastert, had refused to do, in order to spare the
Bush administration from the awkward position of having to oppose it
for the sake of maintaining good relations with Turkey.

What’s next?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will determine whether the Foreign Affairs
Committee resolution comes to a vote on the House floor. She comes
from California, a state with a large Armenian population, and she’s
on record as favoring the resolution.

President Bush is strongly opposed to the idea of the U.S.

proclaiming that there was an Armenian genocide, saying it would hurt
U.S. relations with Turkey, and possibly reduce Turkey’s cooperation
in the war in Iraq. More than 20 countries have officially declared
that genocide was practiced against the Armenians, including France,
Greece and Russia, which have significant ethnic Armenian populations.

tory.php?storyId=15377305

–Boundary_(ID_ouLy7gQ2 He+2wS9A9fwgWw)–

AGRICULTURAL CONFERENCE IN MATENADARAN
By Ara Martirosian

AZG Armenian Daily
19/10/2007

On October 17, an agricultural international conference titled "Paths
of food; let’s discover the capacity of green Armenia" was held in
Matenadaran on the initiative of "Fruitful Armenia". Director of
"Fruitful Armenia" Anna-Christina Shirinian delivered the welcome
speech.

According to her, the conference is a gathering that is of a great
interest to agriculture, and where the specialists discuss the ways
of development of that sphere.

Anna-Christina Shirinian announced that 13 main reports were
anticipated during the conference and the discussions would be held
on those reports.

Director of Matenadaran Hrachya Tamrazian and the representative of UN
office of Yerevan Consuelo Vidal welcomed the guests, representatives
and specialists of agricultural sphere.

Minister of Agriculture Davit Lokian mentioned in his speech, "The
conference will discover the new possibilities of the development of
Armenian agriculture that will be brought into use."

As a confirmation, the Minister reminded about the first conference
devoted to organic agriculture, which was followed by the adoption
of corresponding law and several steps by the government in benefit
of development of that branch.

WHAT DOES THE FIRST POLL TESTIFY TO?
Armen Tsaturyan

Hayots Ashkharh Daily, Armenia
Oct 17 2007

The nearer the presidential elections draw, the interest towards the
political figures intending to run for 2008 presidential elections
increases.

To scrutinize the election moods of the electorate, from October
2-8 Armenian Sociological Association conducted a poll among 1000 RA
citizens, which we introduce to our readers.

1. Which political party do you like the most?

"National Unity" – 5,4%
" Bargavach Hayastan" – 15,8%
ARFD – 7,0%
RPA – 20,4%
Armenian Pan National Movement – 1,3%
People’s Party – 2,4
"Heritage" – 7,1%
"Orinats Yerkir" – 7,5%
Communist Party – 1,1
Others – 3,1%
None – 27%
Hesitating – 1,9%
Total 100,0

2. As you know presidential elections are in store for Armenia in
February 2008. Are you going to vote during the presidential elections?

Definitely "yes" – 60,0%
Probably "yes" – 23,1%
Probably "no" – 6,2%
Definitely "no" – 6,3%
Hesitating – 4,4%
Total 100,0

3. Which candidate would have you voted for, had the presidential
elections been hold on coming Sunday?

Arthur Baghdasaryan – 11,2%
Artashes Geghamyan – 10,5%
Armen Rustamyan – 0,8%
Gagik Tsarukyan – 12,0%
Levon Ter-Petrosyan – 3,8%
Serge Sargsyan – 31,8%
Vazgen Manukyan – 3,9%
Vahan Hovhannisyan – 3,2%
Vardan Oskanyan – 3,5%
Tigran Karapetyan – 3,2%
Raffi Hovhannisyan – 12,3%
Aram Karapetyan – 0,7%
Robert Kocharyan – 2,9%
Others – 1,2%
Total 100,0

4. Do you believe the opposition will manage to appear with a united
candidate?

"Yes" – 18,4%
"No" – 66,1%
Hesitating – 15,5%
Total – 100,0

5. If you are going to vote for the pro-opposition candidate, whom
would you like to see as a united opposition candidate?

Arthur Baghdasaryan – 6,4%
Artashes Geghamyan – 6,9%
Levon Ter-Petrosyan – 1,8%
Vazgen Manukyan – 3,7%
Tigran Karapetyan – 2,1%
Raffi Hovhannisyan – 5,6%
Aram Karapetyan – 1,6 %
Stepan Demirchyan – 1,9%
Others – 5,6%
None – 7,9%
Hesitating – 56,5%
Total 100,0

Permanent and Repeated Regularities

The noteworthy fact is that at the beginning of the poll Armenian
Sociological Association tried to clarify the present rating of
the main political powers, because most of them except Armenian
Pan National Movement ran for May 12 Parliamentary elections. The
interesting thing is, the parties that overcame the 5% barrier of the
May 12 elections have maintained their high rating. As for Armenian
Pan National Movement, with its 1,3% rating it falls only behind the
Communist Party.

As compared to the results of May 12 elections RPA rating (20’4%)
is also a bit lower, but there is a regularity in this fact as well,
and to reveal it we can simply compare the present rating of the
party with that of the party leader Serge Sargsyan.

60% of the polled are going to participate in 2008 presidential
elections, and 23,1% answered "probably "yes. For October month it is a
rather active participation for the voters. But we shouldn’t overlook
the fact that ‘going to participate" is an indefinite statement,
because it can change at the last moment.

The most noteworthy part of the poll conducted by Armenian Sociological
Association is of course their attempt to clarify the attitude of
the electorate towards the individual candidate for presidency. Had
the elections been hold next Sunday, that is to say in the middle
of October, then 31,8% of the polled will vote for Prime Minister
Serge Sargsyan, 12,3% – for Raffi Hovhannisyan, 12,0% – for Gagik
Tsarukyan, 11,2% – for Arthur Baghdasaryan, 3,9% – Vazgen Manukyan,
3,8% – L. Ter-Petrosyan, and 2,9% – for the current President Robert
Kocharyan.

The noteworthy thing is that RPA leader Serge Sargsyan exceeds the
party with his rating. This testifies to the fact that the high
rating RPA has recorded during May 12 elections hasn’t changed. They
have simply developed into two components – the combination of party
rating and that of the leader.

The 2,9% rating of the current President is explained by the fact
that the voters are well aware that the President’s second term of
office is coming to its close. So, in our view, the inclusion of the
name of the current President in the poll was a formality, because
the fact of the constitutional barriers doesn’t give the chance to
reveal the real rating of this political figure.

We can disclose other interesting regularities when we try to clarify
the growth of the rating of the main candidates pretending to run for
presidency. Thus Gagik Tsarukyan who has engaged the second place in
this poll and his "Bargavach Hayastan" party have already announced
their readiness to support Serge Sargsyan during the presidential
elections. This means if we assemble the ratings of only these two
political figures and if we consider the natural tendencies of joining
the leading candidates, we can claim that the prime Minister has all
the chances to obtain 50% votes at the first stage of the elections.

Arthur Baghdasaryan who tops the opposition camp and Artashes Geghamyan
recorded rather modest results – 11,2 and 10,5%. And former President
L. Ter-Petrosyan who recently manifested tendencies of activeness,
with his 3,8% revealed his modest "starting opportunities".

66,1% of the polled doesn’t hope that opposition will manage to appear
with a united candidate. Moreover Armenian sociological Association
failed to find the "personage" for the united candidate.

56,5% of the polled failed to find a united pro-opposition candidate
and only those who have extremely bright imagination gave certain
names, from which Artashes Geghamyan, have obtained only 6,9% votes
of the polled.

Thus the poll conducted by Armenian Sociological Association on the
first half of October, over again revealed the permanent regularity
recorded during the recent elections that have been formed in Armenia’s
political arena.

To think that the obvious rating of the main political powers and their
leader will abruptly fall in February 2008 is simply not serious. Like
in nature, in politics as well, nothing can be created in some months
and immediately disappear with the same speed.

FOR ALL TURKS AND ARMENIANS: AN ANALYSIS AND MANIFESTO
Barin Kayaoglu
JTW Columnist

Journal of Turkish Weekly
Oct 17 2007

This op-ed aims to do two things: Give a balanced rendering of the
Turkish-Armenian dispute and call upon Turks and Armenians to get
out of their straight-jackets and reach an understanding.

The Analysis

Last week, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of
Representatives passed Resolution 106, titled "Affirmation of the
United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution." Introduced
by Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), H. Res. 106 calls "upon the
President [of the United States] to ensure that the foreign policy of
the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity
concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and
genocide documented in the United States record relating to the
Armenian Genocide, and for other purposes."[1] It is expected that
the resolution will be approved by the full House in mid-November.

While Armenians around the world rejoiced at the decision, Turkish
officials have pointed out that if the House accepts the resolution,
nationalist reaction in Turkey will damage Turkish-American and
Turkish-Armenian relations beyond repair.

For decades, a lot has been said on the tragedy that befell Ottoman
Armenians during World War I. The argument is over whether the
events can be described as genocide (defined by the "UN Convention on
Genocide" as the deliberate "intent to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group") or not.[2]

Those who make a case for genocide argue that from April 1915 until
late 1917, the Ottoman government used the military losses on the
Caucasian front at the hands of Russia and the terrorism by Armenian
nationalist revolutionaries to implement a genocide against Armenian
civilians. For this school, the Ottoman government’s decision to
relocate/deport the Armenians was a smoke-screen.[3]

Those who argue that the events did not constitute genocide point
out that Istanbul’s order to temporarily deport Ottoman Armenians
intended to do strictly that – to relocate Armenian civilians to
areas away from the troubles. Their destination was other Ottoman
provinces. Incompetent administrators, pressed by terrorism, poor
logistics, and an inadequate infrastructure, failed to cope with
the situation. All of this resulted in the tragic deaths of the
Armenians. At any rate, this school argues, Armenian terrorists also
killed many Muslims; the killings went both ways.[4]

These stances can be scrutinized in different ways. A strict
application of the UN Convention’s definition of the term "genocide"
may disqualify the Armenian example. Those who make the case against
genocide maintain that the government in Istanbul did not intend
to exterminate the Armenians. Those arguing for genocide claim the
opposite and point out to the secret telegrams sent from Istanbul to
the eastern front ordering the mass killings.

Some of those Ottoman officials who were guilty of premeditated murder
actually confessed to their crimes in military tribunals following
World War I. The records of the tribunals, coupled with some of the
hand-written copies of telegrams sent from Istanbul to the front,
demonstrate that it took a little more than berserk troops on the
ground to carry out the genocidal killings.

But the claim that Istanbul ordered the annihilation of Armenians
is also weakened by certain factors. The authenticity of certain
documents tarnishes the case for genocide. The secret telegrams,
for example, are almost exclusively available at the archives of the
Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem. Not a terribly neutral venue.

Specifically, take the "Naim-Andonian telegrams." In 1920, Aram
Andonian, an Armenian journalist who had worked for the Young Turk
government earlier in the war, published the memoirs of a certain
Naim Bey. According to Andonian, Naim Bey was a Turkish official who
served as the chief secretary of the deportation committee in Aleppo
during the war. Upon the conclusion of the war, Naim handed Andonian
the telegrams originating from Istanbul with the orders to massacre
Armenian civilians. The problem is that those telegrams are labeled
as forgeries by some historians because Andonian never produced the
originals. In fact, some scholars have even gone far as to suggest
that Andonian simply wrote what he thought about the massacres by
using Naim as a mouthpiece.[5]

Documents comparable to the minutes of the Nazis’ Wannsee Conference of
January 1942 (where they came up with their infamous "final solution
to the Jewish question") in brevity, scope, and authenticity cannot
easily be mustered that in the Armenian case and that is a problem.

None of these points, however, eclipse one glaring fact: Hundreds
of thousands of Ottoman Armenians died between 1915 and 1917 (the
estimates range from 600,000 to 1.5 million, depending on one’s
position). Turkish and Kurdish civilians also suffered horrendously
at the hands of Armenian bands, both in the Russian-occupied parts
of Eastern Anatolia and the territory controlled by the Ottoman state.

It is true that some of the Armenians died of disease, cold, and
malnutrition. On the other hand, it must be conceded that probably
a lot Armenians died at the hands of Turkish soldiers and Kurdish
tribesmen as well.

The Manifesto

Looking at the sheer numbers of dead civilians, we have to understand
the futility of the "genocide – not genocide" discussion. How can
anyone limit one’s conscience to a single word? No person in his right
mind would do such a thing. And neither should Turks and Armenians.

This tragedy that befell us was much more sinister than a genocide.

If the Istanbul government implemented a genocide, why did most of our
ancestors not stand up for their neighbors? When Armenian terrorists
rounded up fellow Muslim villagers, why did most of our grandparents
not do anything to stop them? Forget about stopping the massacres, some
of them – Armenian and Muslim – happily did their part in the killings!

What is tragic is that since 1915, we have only emulated their
mistakes. The deaths of Turkish diplomats in the 1970s and 1980s,
incessant bickering between Turks and Armenians, and lately, the tragic
murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007,
attest to the fact that we have to change our attitude.

That change of attitude should start by recognizing the fact that we
Turks and Armenians killed each other on an industrial scale. That many
more Armenians died than Turks is irrelevant. The important thing is
that innocent civilians perished – babies, mothers, fathers, sisters,
brothers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

If you cannot comprehend the gravity of such a loss, just imagine
yourself at a family gathering: You are surrounded by all the people
you love – your mother, father, siblings, spouse, children, nieces,
nephews. And all of a sudden imagine that these people – every single
one of them – are killed before your eyes by people with whom you
lived as good neighbors for nearly a millennium. After the deaths of
your loved ones, hundreds, thousands, and millions would mean very
little for you because you do not have a reason to exist anymore.

So I call upon all Turks and Armenians: Come to your senses!

We have lost too much and suffered long enough. Let us regain what
we once had – our friendship, peaceful coexistence, and respect for
each other. Let the Armenians convince Turks, rather than American
politicians, about their sufferings. Let the Turks make the Armenians
see their point of view. As Hrant Dink said in an interview not
long before he was slain, "Armenians are the doctors of Turks and
Turks are the doctors of Armenians." Only by talking to each other
rather than through each other can we resolve our differences and
ease our suffering.

Esteemed members of the U.S. House of Representatives: The
biggest favor that Western nations can possibly do to Turkish and
Armenian people is to mind their own business and let them come to an
understanding on their own. Your resolution is only going to exacerbate
enmities. To expect that H. Res. 106 will facilitate a reconciliation
between Turks and Armenians is as sensible as extinguishing fire with
dynamite. We implore you not to do it.

Finally, those who owe their petty existence to the perpetuation of
this dispute: Hate-mongers! Appear as you may as Turks or Armenians,
you are all on the same side. Yes, you hate-mongers are on the
same side!

You extremists do not strive for the happiness of your peoples; you
look around for enemies to satiate your neurosis. Stirring up trouble
is only a convenience for you. You live by seeing enemies everywhere.

If you cannot find enemies, you create them, just as you did nearly a
hundred years ago. You, murderers of Hrant Dink, Mehmet Baydar, Artin
Penik, Necla Kuneralp and hundreds of thousands of others, are all on
the same side. We – real Turks and Armenians – are on the other side.

Leave us alone!

Barýn Kayaoðlu is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia and a regular contributor to
the Journal of Turkish Weekly.

–Boundary_(ID_jQJ0kiIJ4QfF3IvREbgRzQ)–

EXECUTIVE PREFERS TO HAVE INDIRECT ELECTIONS FOR MAYOR

Panorama.am
16:31 18/10/2007

Yerevan mayor will be elected in indirect elections.

There will be only proportional system in those elections. The
candidate that will collect 40 percent of votes of 55 members of elders
will become the mayor. The mayor is going to have more powers. He or
she will have the right to set local taxes and dues…. These other
the suggestions included in the draft law "On Yerevan city local
self-government and territorial management" that has been approved
in the executive session today.

Justice Minister Gevorg Danielyan told reporters today that, during
the discussion of the draft, serious arguments came about, as a result
of which, the draft will be put under interagency discussion for one
more week, after which, a meeting will be held at the prime minister.

The European experience has been studied for the election of the mayor
and the German model has been taken as an example. "There will be
no majority system in the elections. Each party will represent its
own candidate," Danielyan said, also saying that candidate may also
be non-partisan.

The bill also envisages naming the communities into administrative
areas. It also suggests uniting Nubarashen with Erebuni and Norq-Marash
with Avan. At this moment, the draft sets the maximum number of
territorial units as 12 and the least number as 8. The number of
elders in the territorial unit will be conditioned by the number
of the population. Since the territorial units will no longer be
local-self government bodies, their leaders will not be elected
but appointed by the mayor. "They, in fact, will be employees,"
the justice minister said.

The constitutional reforms of 2005 required amendments in the law since
Yerevan was defined a community instead of a local-self government
body. This bill must be submitted to the discussion of the National
Assembly.

GEORGIAN FRONTIER GUARDS ARREST AN ARMENIAN CITIZEN

ArmRadio – Public Radio, Armenia
Oct 15 2007

Georgian frontier guards arrested an Armenian citizen when passing
passport control at "Poti-port" Migration Control Department.

Press service of the Georgian Frontier Police informed that it came out
that the Armenian citizen had earlier entered the Georgian territory
bypassing passport control at Adler checkpoint. An investigation on
the case is underway.

Armenian debacle

Washingtom Times
October 16, 2007

By Tulin Daloglu – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she believes that
"the biggest ethical challenge facing our country is the war in Iraq."
Therefore, she must believe that passing a resolution declaring the
mass killings of Armenians at the end of World War I a genocide will
restore America’s moral authority. Rep. Tom Lantos, California
Democrat, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, "I
feel that I have a tremendous opportunity as a survivor of the
Holocaust to bring a moral dimension to our foreign policy." The
resolution passed last week by a 27"21 vote.

However, while Mr. Lantos speaks so forcefully about the resolution
now, he has opposed similar measures in the past, arguing that what
happened to Armenians is not technically a genocide. In fact, he
argued this right up until Turkey refused to give the United States a
northern front to invade Iraq in 2003. According to congressional
sources, Mrs. Pelosi urged Mr. Lantos to support the resolution, or
else risk his chairmanship. In addition, Mr. Lantos was seriously
troubled when the Turkish government invited the newly elected Hamas
leadership of the Palestinian Authority to Ankara, and by what appears
to be Turkey’s strengthening relationship with Iran.

A delegation of Turkish Parliament members visiting Washington was
disappointed by the vote. "What bothered me was that those [U.S.
representatives] who supported the Turkish side, 21 of them said loud
and clear that the events of 1915 amounted to genocide," said Gunduz
Aktan, a former ambassador and member of the Turkish Parliament from
the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). "Despite this, because of
Turkey’s strategic importance, because of the national interest of the
U.S., they are voting no. This was unbearable." Turks share Mr.
Aktan’s opinion. But they should also know who lobbies on Turkey’s
behalf. Former House Minority leader Richard Gephardt, hired by the
Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to lobby for Turkey,
actively worked in support of such resolutions in the past. When a
last-minute intervention by President Bill Clinton stopped a similar
resolution before a vote in 2000, Mr. Gephardt wrote to the then-House
Speaker Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican, to tell him that he was
"committed to obtaining official U.S. government recognition of the
Armenian genocide."

Although Egemen Bagis, one of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
chief foreign policy advisers, said that Turkey has done everything in
its power to avert the resolution’s passage, it also made many
mistakes. Not only did the Turkish government hire Mr. Gephardt, but
it also placed too much stock in the perception that Turkey’s
geographically strategic position would ensure such a measure’s
defeat.

Evidently, President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
Defense Secretary Robert Gates did all they could to try to defeat the
bill in committee. Now Turkey must face this failure – it lost the
propaganda war on this issue long ago. In fact, not only did the
Turkish government fail, but Turkish Americans who did not take this
issue as seriously as the Armenian Americans failed as well.

Mrs. Pelosi may think that a House resolution will finally close the
issue. But Turks are convinced that it will begin a new chapter and
spur reparations claims. U.S. officials advise Turkey to deal with the
issue as plain historical fact. That’s easily said. But Turks wonder
what the connection is – and why the United States has done nothing to
prevent the Kurdish separatist PKK from gaining strength in northern
Iraq and increasing its attacks on Turkey. They are convinced that
America wants to enforce the Treaty of Sevres which would allow Kurds
and Armenians to lay claim to Turkish land.

Many in the United States believe the Kurds have a legitimate right to
their own state. Recently the Senate passed a resolution calling the
partition of Iraq into three self-governing regions for Shiites,
Sunnis and Kurds. Turks are worried that such a plan will lead some of
its Kurdish citizens to seek independence as well. However, Sevres did
not promise Kurds an independent state; it promised "the formation of
an autonomous region which would have the right to elect for complete
independence one year after the formation of the autonomous area."

David McDowell, in "A Modern History of the Kurds, " explains that
"[t]he terms were flawed"by the failure to demarcate Kurdistan’s
boundary with Armenia. This was foreseeably bound to outrage either
the Kurds or the Armenians, as President Wilson’s pro-Armenian
proposed boundary accompanying the treaty clearly showed." Wilson set
the Armenian borders to include Kurdish areas of Turkey, but he was
unable to finalize them.

Turks look at their history and wonder why the president refuses to
act against a Kurdish terrorist organization attacking them from
northern Iraq, and why a Democratic Congress is considering an act
that happened nearly 100 years ago. Ultimately, what everyone needs to
do is move on – but the war in Iraq and the possibility of its breakup
seem to haunt the present.

Tulin Daloglu is a freelance writer.

Source: ITORIAL/110160008