Author: Khoyetsian Rose

OSMAN EMPIRE, ITS SUCCESSOR FULLY RESPONSIBLE FOR 1915 GENOCIDE
by Tigran Liloyan
ITAR-TASS News Agency
April 24, 2006 Monday 03:45 AM EST
The Osman Empire and its legal successor bear full responsibility for
the 1915 Armenian Genocide,” President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan
stated here on Monday. “The entire subsequent history of the Armenian
people, who had lived through the horrors of genocide, is scarred by
the grave consequences of the committed crime,” the leader of the
republic stressed in his address to the fellow-countrymen on the
occasion of the commemoration of the 1915 Genocide of Armenians in
the Osman Turkish Empire.
“We are even more pained by the fact that we have to strive for
the recognition and condemnation of this dark page of history,”
the president noted. “The Republic of Armenia, being as it is the
mouthpiece of the national interests of the Armenians, who are now
living in their native land or abroad, will continue these efforts,”
Kocharyan stressed.
The Armenian president expressed gratitude to the countries,
organisations and personalities, who sympathise with the Armenians.
In his opinion, “the realisation that this is a problem of the entire
humanity is growing from year to year”.
“The efforts of the Armenians have nothing to do with vengeance,”
Kocharyan stressed. “We are looking far ahead of us, knowing that
the best response to the non-recognition of the 1915 Genocide should
be our powerful statehood, prosperity and progress of Armenia,”
the president of the republic stressed.

AZERI PUNDIT URGES BAKU TO BE CAUTIOUS ON KARABAKH, IRAN ISSUES
Yeni Musavat, Baku
23 Apr 06
A prominent Azerbaijani political analyst has called on Baku to be
careful on the Nagornyy Karabakh issue and the escalating crisis
around Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In an interview with opposition
daily Yeni Musavat, former presidential advisor on foreign policy
issues Vafa Quluzada warned that Azerbaijan cannot start war with
Armenia now and must be in the anti-Iran coalition if war against
Iran starts. “Azerbaijan must protect itself and be very careful. It
is doomed to joining the anti-Iran coalition if war starts,” he was
quoted in the newspaper as saying. The following is an excerpt from
Zahid Safaroglu’s report by Azerbaijani newspaper Yeni Musavat on
23 April headlined “Azerbaijan may be provoked” and headlined “Vafa
Quluzada: There is no way left to resolve the Iranian issue in a
peaceable manner”; subheadings have been inserted editorially:
The South Caucasus smells of gunpowder again. But the main peculiarity
of the current situation is that the conflicting interests of the
global powers can be better seen in the region. This moment in the
geopolitical vector of the region is unlikely to pass without pain
because the historical moment of confrontation between the West, which
is growing stronger in the region, and Russia, which is getting weak
on the contrary, is inevitable. However, it does not seem logical
that Moscow will easily give up its ambitions and voluntarily yield
the Caucasus to the West. In any case, the experience of the near
past shows that the Kremlin has retreated from those regions where
it has vital interests by fighting and shedding blood.
[Passage omitted: Russia using local conflicts against newly
independent republics]
Victory unfeasible
We talked to the former state advisor [to Azerbaijani president on
foreign policy], political analyst Vafa Quluzada about the feelings
of war in the region. He first commented on the possible resumption
of hostilities in the Karabakh front. He said that Russia has a finger
in the war psycho more than the conflicting sides themselves.
The former advisor noted that the views saying that Azerbaijan will
resume war are not serious.
“This is actually a provocation because war would play into the hands
of Moscow. The matter is that all the steps of the occupying country
[Armenia] are controlled by Russia. Armenia cannot attack us because
it is already an aggressor and may face additional penalties. The
international community may also apply penalties against Russia.”
Since the hostilities deal a serious blow to the West’s interests in
the region and the Kremlin is interested in it, Russia will be the
object of criticism, Quluzada said.
“Russia knows about it. Therefore, it wishes not to be accused. It
wants to create the opinion that the sides themselves fight each
other. But it is impossible for Russia to stay aside because Yerevan
and Moscow have a military deal.”
Quluzada believes that Azerbaijan should be extremely careful under
these circumstances. “Russia may commit provocation against us. For
example, Moscow may pretend to be neutral. Even it may turn a blind
eye to Azerbaijan’s military successes in the first days of war. But
it will be bad for us later. The Kremlin may hit us with the hand of
the neighbouring country.”
The former state advisor recalled that it is impossible to rely on
Russia and Azerbaijan’s victory under the circumstances is unfeasible.
“That is why, we must be interested in preserving the cease-fire for
the time being. Azerbaijan’s time is approaching since Russia will
collapse in 10 years.”
Anti-Iran coalition: to join or not to join
As for the Iranian issue, which is directly related to the geopolitical
fate of the region, the expert believes that there is no way of
resolving the problem in a diplomatic manner.
“Tehran is a step away from acquiring nuclear weapons. Now experts
say that it may take several more years. But I say that it is possible
in a couple of months. That is why Iran will be hit now.
Moreover, the Tehran regime continues to threaten America and thus
expedites the developments.”
Vafa bay [form of address] did not conceal his confidence that the
USA aims to attack Iran and said that the White House also tries to
make use of the factors inside Iran.
“It is not ruled out that they will use our countrymen [ethnic
Azerbaijanis] in Iran, but military factors matter more to Washington
than the factors inside Iran.”
So, what position must Azerbaijan take in order to secure its own
interests?
Quluzada said: “Azerbaijan must protect itself and be very careful.
It is doomed to joining the anti-Iran coalition if war starts. We
are a small country and on the other hand it does not mean much
to Tehran if Azerbaijan is in the coalition.” Here, the talk is of
course about the possibility that our southern neighbour may target
US installations in Azerbaijan as a last resort.
Thus, it emerges that Azerbaijan’s place in our region, which resembles
a barrel of gunpowder, is very inconsistent and dangerous.
The situation of our country under cross influence (pressures) can
be complicated more because of the erroneous foreign policy of the
Aliyev administration, including wrong steps on the Karabakh issue.
This is as dangerous as the threat of the ruling dynastic regime to
our national interests.

PKK Models ASALA
By Sedat Gunec, Ankara
Zaman, Turkey
April 24 2006
The terror network, PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party), took the Armenian
terror network, ASALA, that martyred 34 Turkish diplomats as an
example for its operations. Turkish National Intelligence Organization
(MIT) uncovered a plot of the terror network against 131 foreign
representatives of Turkey.
Armenian terror network ASALA (The Armenian Secret Army for the
Liberation of Armenia) firstly martyred Turkey’s Ambassador to Vienna
Danis Tunaligil in 1975. The same organization martyred 34 Turkish
diplomats by 1984. Upon the action realized against Ankara Esenboga
Airport on 7 August 1982, Turkey had started wide scale operations
against ASALA with the instruction of the term’s President, Kenan
Evren.
Many terror experts say ASALA changed dimension and continues its
activities within PKK.
Several Armenians were caught in the operations against the terror
network.
The terror network PKK driven into a corner in Turkey with the spring
operation code named, “Suleyman Soydan 137,” launched by Turkish
Armed Forces by reinforcing troops in the region of 2nd Division now
aims at Turkey’s representatives abroad. In its action plan abroad,
the organization will use the methods of terror network ASALA.
The intelligence units say that the terror network plans various
actions on the ground that it will seek revenge for 15 people who
died in the incidents in 13 provinces, mainly in Diyarbakir.
MIT revealed the divisive organization is preparing for actions aiming
at Turkey’s 131 foreign representatives in this frame. The Turkish
Foreign Ministry taking action upon MIT’s warning warned Turkey’s
131 diplomatic representatives abroad against probable actions. In
this frame, top level security measures have been taken for Turkey’s
foreign representatives.
In the operations against the organization within the last five years,
hundreds of kilos of plastic explosives (C-3, C-4 and A-4) have been
seized by the police.

Armenian president, US mediator discuss Karabakh
Arminfo
20 Apr 06
Yerevan, 20 April: Armenian President Robert Kocharyan received the
US co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group, Steven Mann, in Yerevan today.
The sides discussed the status of the negotiating process on the
settlement of the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict, as well as prospects for
resolving the problem, the presidential press service has told Arminfo.

FRANCE. PLAINTE CONTRE LA PROFANATION DU MEMORIAL ARMENIEN
La Croix , France
19 avril 2006
L’association pour le Memorial lyonnais du genocide armenien (MLGA)
a porte plainte contre X hier, afin de connaître les auteurs de la
profanation du monument, a quelques jours de son inauguration, fixee
au 24 avril. Cinq stèles blanches sur 26 ont ete taguees au marqueur
noir d’inscriptions telles que “Il n’y a pas eu de genocide” ou “Il
est bon d’etre turc”. Des slogans identiques a ceux brandis lors de
la manifestation de nationalistes turcs organisee le 18 mars a Lyon,
contre la construction de ce memorial. Le monument doit etre inaugure
lundi, date du 91e anniversaire du genocide armenien perpetre par
les Turcs en 1915.
–Boundary_(ID_ebpiRqGBt17F+YwZSQw5tg)–

AS IT HAPPENED: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
The Advertiser (Australia)
April 19, 2006 Wednesday
State Edition
A guarantee of rape, murder or theft. This was reality for the Armenian
population in Turkey, left, during World War I – a horror that spanned
decades as the government tried to obliterate a belief system and,
with that, millions of innocent lives.

CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES TO HOST FIFTH ANNUAL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
by Angie Best, student newswriter
Baylor University, TX
April 19 2006
The Baylor University Center for Jewish Studies will host the fifth
annual Holocaust Memorial Tuesday, April 25, at various locations on
the Baylor campus.
The day’s events will start at 9:30 a.m. with a panel discussion
in Room 133 of the Marrs McLean Science Building. The discussion –
Religion and Genocide: Never Again? – will feature speakers Amie
Coomer, Dr. Chris Van Gorder and Dr. George W. Gawrych.
At 5 p.m. a music recital will be held in the Great Hall of Truett
Theological Seminary. The title of the concert is “Music for the
End of Time” and will feature “music from the death camps.” The
program will include songs such as “Quartet for the End of Time –
The Abyss of the Birds” by Olivier Messiaen and selections from “I
Never Saw Another Butterfly” with music by Lori Laitman and text by
“Children of the Holocaust.”
The memorial will conclude at 8 p.m. in Room 133 of the Marrs-McLean
Science Building with the showing of a film titled “The Armenian
Genocide.”
“The purpose of holding the event is to remember the Holocaust and
to remember the beauty of the lives of those who were affected –
not just the tragedy,” said Dr. Marc Ellis, director of the Center
for Jewish Studies. “People should come to inform themselves, to
remember and to confront our own sensibilities in the world today.”
All events are free and open to the public.

Traitors, martyrs or just brave men?
By Robert Fisk
Gulf Times, Qatar
April 19 2006
LONDON: More than 15 years ago, I travelled to the Belgian city of
Ypres with an Irish friend. She was from a good Fine Gael family which
nursed a healthy disrespect for the amount of romantic green blossom
draped around Padraig Pearse’s neck for the militarily hopeless but
politically explosive Dublin Easter Rising of 1916. But she displayed
an equally admirable suspicion of British – or “English” as she would
have put it – intentions towards Ireland, north and south. Her mother
once recalled for me a British military raid on their home in County
Carlow. “I was a little girl and one of the soldiers patted me on
the head and I told him: ‘You keep your hands off me.'”
But at Ypres one evening, beneath the great Menin Gate – upon which
are carved the names of 54,896 World War I British soldiers whose
bodies were never found – my Irish friend faced a real political
challenge. She had noted, among those thousands, the names of
hundreds of young Irishmen who had died in British uniform while their
countrymen at home were fighting and dying in battle against the same
British Army. She looked at one of the names. “Why in God’s name,”
she asked, “was a boy from the Station House, Tralee, dying here in
the mud of Flanders?” And it was at this point that an elderly man
approached us and asked my Irish friend to sign the visitors’ book.
She looked at the British Army’s insignia on the memorial volume
with distaste. There was the British crown glimmering in the evening
light. And the Belgian firemen who nightly play the Last Post beneath
the gate were already taking position. There was not much time. But
my friend remembered the young man from Tralee. She thought about
her own small Catholic nation and its centuries of suffering and
she realised that the boy from Tralee had gone to fight – or so
he thought – for little Catholic Belgium. She decided to inscribe
the British Army’s book in the Irish language. “Do thiortha beaga,”
she wrote. “For little countries.” All this happened years before an
economically powerful and self-confident Irish Republic would face
up to the sacrifice its pre-independence soldiers made in British
uniform; the estimated 35,000 Irishmen who died in the 1914-18 war
wildly outnumber the few hundred who fought in the Easter Rising. The
total of dead, wounded and missing among Irish Protestants in the 36th
(Ulster) Division on the Somme and at Ypres came to 32,180. The same
statistics among soldiers of the 10th and 16th Irish Divisions –
most of them Catholics – amounted to 37,761.
My own father was to fight alongside the Irish on the Somme in 1918
although – a fact I used to keep quiet about when I was The Times’s
correspondent in Belfast in the early 1970s – he was originally sent to
Ireland in the aftermath of the Rising. I have a faded photograph of
Bill Fisk, then in the Cheshire Regiment, kissing the Blarney Stone,
and some pictures he took of the front gate of Victoria Barracks –
now Collins Barracks – in Cork, its stonework plastered with appeals
to Irishmen to join the British Army and fight for Catholic Belgium
and France. It was only when I was invited to give the annual Bloody
Sunday memorial lecture in Derry – the first Brit to be asked to honour
the memory of the 14 Catholics who were killed by the 1st Battalion,
the Parachute Regiment in 1972 – that I talked about my Dad’s fight
against Sinn Fein (whom he always called the “Shinners”). If Padraig
Pearse had not raised the flag over the Dublin Post office in Easter
Week of 1916, I told my audience, Bill Fisk might have been sent to
die in the first Battle of the Somme three months later – and his son
Robert would not exist. So did I owe my life to Pearse? I can already
hear that most polemical, visceral, poignant, absolutely infuriating,
brilliant and doggedly insulting Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers
bursting into fits of sarcastic laughter and carefully aimed fury at
such a remark. Kevin was among the first to hammer away at Ireland’s
shameful refusal to acknowledge the vast sacrifice of its sons in
the 1914-18 cauldron. And Kevin it has been, while foolishly taking
the Turkish line of denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915, who has
repeatedly tried to hack down the reputations of martyrs Pearse and
James Connolly and John MacBride – and Eamon de Valera, who escaped
execution because of his American passport – and present the Rising as
not only a military disaster but an unnecessary sacrifice of civilian
life and the first example of “green fascism”.
I don’t like the way the “fascist” label gets stuck on anyone we
dislike. Lefties used to call policemen fascists. And now we have
“Islamofascism” which effectively binds Mussolini to one of the
world’s great religions. No wonder we could draw those outrageous
cartoons of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban.
But I’m still not at all sure how to regard the men of 1916. The
very best book on the Rising – George Dangerfield’s magnificent The
Damnable Question – proves that the “rebels” (as my father called
them) were very brave as well as very dismissive of their own and
others’ lives. They were not to know the deviant way in which their
“blood sacrifice” – which was not exactly the first in Irish history
– would be adopted by later armed groups who sought their mandate in
blood shed before those 1916 British execution parties.
Had they not been so cruelly shot down as punishment for their armed
assault on British power, would they have been so honoured in the long,
dark, stagnant Ireland of the 1920s and 30s and then in the terrible
and much later years of the civil conflict in Northern Ireland? Do
you have to be a martyr to have honour?
I was much struck by this thought five years ago when I was searching
through the British National Archives at Kew for details of the
execution of a young Australian soldier in the British Army whom
my father was ordered to shoot at the end of World War I. Bill Fisk
refused, so another officer performed the dirty deed. But there in the
documents of British military executions – routinely filed under 1916
– were the names of Pearse and Connolly and McBride. The exemplary
punishment accorded to them and their comrades in Dublin turned Irish
public scorn to sympathy and admiration. But to the Brits, it was just
another act of military law, the shooting by firing squad of traitors
to the Crown – in just the same way as deserters, army murderers and
cowards were shot at dawn behind the trenches of France. The martyrs
of the Easter Rising suffered Western Front punishment.
And now Ireland’s minister for defence tells us the military Easter
Rising pomp in Dublin last weekend symbolised the end of the war in
the North. Maybe. But who will remember the boy from the Station House,
Tralee? – The Independent.

45 CASES PRESENTED IN THE PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE
A1+
[05:02 pm] 18 April, 2006
The issues of shadow curtail in construction and mining industry
spheres, the quarter results as well as false customs clearance combat
were today’s roundtable discussion theme during the work meeting of RA
President Robert Kocharyan and Tax State Service Chief Felix Tsolakyan.
According to the Tax State Service Chief the budget tax entries were
equal to 43, 2 milliard AMD which outnumbers the index of the previous
year data with 8milliard AMD. A high percent was registered in income
tax and profit tax. There was also a significant increase in social
payments. 15.3 milliard AMD was collected in the first quarter which
outnumbers the previous year data by 2.4 milliard AMD.
While speaking of the future plans the Tax State Service Chief
mentioned that the Service has marked out the list of the organizations
the taxes and deals of which do not comply with their activities,
and they will take measures on this score.
As for the false customs clearance combat Felix Tsolakyan stated that
45 cases were presented in the Prosecutor’s Office and an action was
brought against 19 of them.
There was also a mention about the property and income registration
procedure. Robert Kocharyan focused on the necessity of improving it
legally and utilizing mechanisms of responsibility.

TURKS TAKE PBS TO TASK
By John Eggerton
Broadcasting & Cable, NY
April 18 2006
The Turkish ambassador is taking PBS to task for the program, The
Armenian Genocide, which aired Monday on many member stations.
Ambassador Nabi ªensoy complained Tuesday that the show was “blatantly
one-sided” and reflected “a self-serving political agenda by Armenian
American activists.” PBS has said that, while it agrees with most
historians that the genocide is estabished history, it also wanted
to explore questions surrounding the issue.
Although he praised PBS for holding a panel discussion about the
show immediately after its airing, he said the decision to hold the
panel was “in recognition of the strong bias inherent in “The Armenian
Genocide,” and said some stations did not air the panel, attibuting it
to “Armenian American partisans who embarked on a nationwide campaign
to prevent its airing by PBS affiliates.”
A PBS spokeswoman said that an “overwhelming predominance,” or more
than two thirds, of stations aired the panel, which she said is on
par with other optional shows. Stations also have a broadcast window
of a week or two in which to air PBS shows, so others could air it
later in the week.
“The reason for airing the panel,” said spokeswoman Lea Sloan,
“was to shed more light on a very complex issue. We also specifically
wanted to examine how historians have come to such radically diverging
conclusions about the alleged murder of 1.5 million Armenians by the
Turks in 1915.
6325671.html?display=Breaking+News
–Boundary_(ID _bN2heO4g6bHJmZs3vUdssw)–