Author: Maghakian Mike

ARMENIA WON’T SUFFER
A1+
[08:31 pm] 16 October, 2006
According to representative of Russian “Gasprom” Denis Ignatev,
Armenia will be supplied with gas regardless of the development of
the Russian-Georgian relations.
He informed radio station “Azatutyun” that “Gasprom” will keep all
the agreements with Georgia.
Ignatev also said that “Gasprom” and the RA Government continue
negotiations about different programs of gas supply.

HIS HOLINESS KAREKIN II RECEIVES JUSTICE MINISTERS OF THE MEMBER STATES OF THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
Panorama.am
13:14 17/10/06
On October 13, His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and
Catholicos of All Armenians, received 150 participants of the 27th
Conference of the Ministers of Justice of the Council of Europe, being
held in Yerevan. Among the participants were the Justice Ministers
of the 46 member states of the CE.
The delegation to Holy Etchmiadzin was led by Davit Harutyunian,
Minister of Justice of the Republic of Armenia.
The Catholicos of All Armenians welcomed the participants to Holy
Etchmiadzin and spoke of the theme of the conference – “Victims:
Status, Rights and Assistance”. His Holiness stated, “Today the
issue of assistance to and rights of victims is on the forefront of
your thoughts and actions. However, this issue has been troubling
mankind since biblical times and has accompanied the Church since its
inception, since the formation of the first Christian communities. Our
priests have dealt with such realities as they have brought their
consoling assistance and message of hope to individuals who have been
victimized, and as a result, we consider the work you are doing to be
highly beneficial to the healing process, as well as the reinforcement
of a healthy society.”
His Holiness further stressed the greater frequency of victimization
has become troubling, and that today, the Church considers her
social and spiritual mission to be of assistance to all who suffer,
especially with regards to the psychological and moral consequences
of this phenomenon.
Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, Information Services

PRESIDENT CHIRAC DID NOT APOLOGIZE TO TURKISH MP
By Hakob Chakrian
AZG Armenian Daily
18/10/2006
3 days ago after the French Parliament adopted a bill penalizing
denial of the Armenian Genocide and when anti-French hysteria was in
full swing in Turkey, president Jacques Chirac of France had a phone
conversation with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkey’s state-run public TV reported that the French president had
expressed regret over the passage of the bill, considered it needless
and promised to do everything to prevent the draft bill from turning
into a law. According to Turkish public TV, PM Erdogan criticized
Jacques Chirac for the latter’s statement during his Yerevan visit and
said “it’s impossible to accept your approach” meaning recognition of
the Genocide as a precondition for EU membership. The French president
displayed comprehension.
Turkish TV’s reporting was entitled “Chirac Regrets”.
Yet, during the phone conversation president Chirac did not regret
neither apologized for the passage of the bill. He simply repeated
what he had said about the Genocide in Armenia.
This information comes from Turkish Milliet newspaper.
Correspondent Sabetay Varol of the paper writes in October 16 issue:
“The staff of the French president did not confirm the information
disseminated by PM Erdogan according to which president Chirac
expressed regret on the phone and promised to do everything to
block the passage of the bill by the Senate. According to Agence
France-Presse, Chirac has emphasized on the phone the need for Turkey
to restore historic memory and said that the French Parliament’s bill
is needless in this context.”
Quoting AFP, Milliet points out that Chirac has repeated his statements
made in Yerevan. Associated Press confirms this information.

ARMENIAN FM OSKANIAN ASSERTS: OUR AIM IS NOT TO HUMILIATE TURKEY
Hurriyet, Turkey
Oct 16 2006
Emboldened by last week’s decision by France to approve a bill
penalizing those who would publicly deny the so-called Armenian
genocide, Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian has come forward
with a new allegation against Turkey: “The fact that Turkey has
not recognized the events of 1915-1917 as it should means that the
genocide is still occuring.”
Oskanian, who asserts that despite this Yerevan is anxious to normalize
relations with Ankara, went on to say “It is difficult to say that
things are going well just because France and Switerzerland have
accepted bills recognizing the Armenian genocide. Our real aim is
not to have other countries recognize this genocide. Also, we gain
nothing from humiliating Turkey. For Turkey to ask for a special
research commission to be formed while its borders with us remain
closed is not a very honest or genuine action.”
Oskanian’s comments came in the “NZZ am Sonntag” newspaper on Sunday
in Switzerland. He also said “The fact that Turkey has not accepted
or recognized the Armenian genocide up until now means that it is
still continuing. But, as this country’s foreign minister, my duty is
to look towards the future and to find a way to normalize relations
with Turkey.”

BUTCHERS OF BUSHLAND: IS THE PRICE WORTH IT?
By Luciana Bohne
Online Journal, FL
Oct 16 2006
There is no longer any doubt that Bush’s policy in Iraq is facilitating
genocide. The recent Lancet study makes that very clear.
Bush’s unprovoked attack on Iraq was a premeditated and documentable
conspiracy to subvert the peace — a crime for which the Nazi
elites were hanged. The war crimes Nuremberg Tribunal, Protocol,
and Principles would have no qualms calling the invasion of Iraq “the
supreme crime,” a crime from which all other war crimes have derived,
including genocide.
The war against Iraq was, as far as international law is concerned,
the mother of all crimes. It violated the Constitution two, three times
over, starting with violating the UN Charter, which is the “supreme
law of [our] land,” according to the Constitution, and encompasses
the principles of the Nuremberg Judgment. The occupation violated the
Geneva Conventions against mistreatment of prisoners. It violated
the Geneva and Hague Conventions on the occupier’s obligations 1)
by failing to provide Iraqis with security and basic services,
while at the same time disbanding the Iraqi army, 2) by failing to
safeguard the sites of their national patrimony (National Library,
museums, etc), 3) by attempting to sell off Iraqi assets, banks,
services to foreign bidders 4) by altering Iraq’s tax laws without
representation (Bremer’s “Orders”). Now comes evidence of national
dying on a genocidal scale from the Lancet study.
We live in a grotesque rogue state. Its disregard for law and human
life endangers the planet, yet the larger the crime grows the less
we are able to fathom it. A terrible numbness envelops us. We are
becoming one of “them” — the freaks at the helm. Or, are we hoping
that “elections” will deliver us from evil? We have to realize,
sooner rather than later, that the only thing that stands between
the horror and their victims is our willingness to oppose it. This
empire thing will not stop by electing the Democrats: they
have never opposed this war. They will send more troops; they will
expend more funds; they will tell more lies.
Unless they start to fear us.
We say we “support the troops.” Do we know what that means?
It means supporting the death and injury not only of nearly 3,000
US troops and 20,000 casualties but also the death of over 650,000
Iraqis, the detention, torture, and disappearance of an unknown number
of others, and the projected partition of the country.
It means supporting genocide by denying it. Five hundred Iraqis
per day have been dying since 19 March 2003, when Bush decided to
despoil, rape, plunder, poison, bomb, torture and steal Iraq from
Iraqis because they were oppressed by Saddam Hussein.
It means supporting George Bush, the humanoid predator in the White
House, who sneered at the Lancet’s study, referring to the results as
“whatever they guessed at” — and that was just before he added as an
afterthought that the “innocent” death of Iraqis concerned him greatly.
It means supporting the US bullets that directly killed about 150,000
Iraqi men, women, and children, or 31 percent of the Lancet’s total
estimated deaths. The Lancet study, based on cluster sampling, used
the standard methodology employed to estimate mortality in cases of
conflict and disasters.
Bush’s Operation Iraqi Freedom has liberated Iraq of 2.5 percent
of its population in three years. Is the world better off without
Saddam? I wouldn’t ask an Iraqi that question!
France has just passed a bill in the lower chamber, proposing to
make it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide of 1.5 million people
by the Turkish government in WWW I. The war in Iraq is half way to
that number, and the warmongers are saying they won’t pull out until
2010 or 2011 (though I wouldn’t hold my breath; the US has 60 nuclear
warheads in bases in South Korea, half a century after that war,
and a similar number on Italian bases; it never “leaves”). If one
adds 1.5 million Iraqis killed by the US sanction regime (1990-2003)
and now over half a million killed as a result of the US occupation
regime we’re way over the number of people who died in the Armenian
holocaust — and the fat lady has not sung yet!
It means supporting more than 50 percent unemployment and 100 percent
anarchy in crucial parts of Iraq.
It means war crimes such as the destruction of cities such as Falluja,
Ramadi, Tel-afar and others.
It means one Iraqi child in four suffering from malnutrition.
It means a cost of $500 billion for the US wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq thus far while US citizens have scant defenses against natural
disasters and catastrophic illness.
It means no end in sight.
It is time we ask the butchers in the White House a question the poet
W.H. Auden asked in verse about another war: “To save your world
you asked this man to die:/Would this man, could he see you now,
ask why?” (Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier)
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of
Pennsylvania. She can be reached at [email protected].
man/publish/article_1317.shtml

FINDING SOME PEACE ON THE FRONT LINE OF FAITH – BARONESS COX
by Nick Wyke
The Times (London)
October 14, 2006, Saturday
Baroness Cox talks to Nick Wyke about risking everything for the
Christian faith.
WHILE most lords and ladies of the Upper House were sunning themselves
somewhere safe during the August recess, Caroline Cox made her 61st
visit to Nagorno Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. She
went back again last month. In the past 15 years or so she has been to
war-torn Southern Sudan 28 times and at least 15 times to Burma, not
to mention countless visits to Nigeria, Indonesia and even North Korea.
A former deputy speaker of the House of Lords, Baroness Cox has
been sentenced in absentia to five years in prison in Sudan and
has had a price on her head in Azerbaijan. There are not many
69-year-old grandmothers who would put their life on the line to
visit “forgotten people in forgotten lands”. On her travels to
meet persecuted Christians, she has been shot down in a helicopter,
targeted by Jihad warriors and seen the sort of carnage most of us
will never see mediated through television let alone in the flesh.
For Lady Cox the media is an inadequate informer. She is one of those
rare people who likes to see things for herself, choosing to witness
not only the brutality of religiously motivated warfare but also its
“miracles of grace”.
It is this suffering and joy that she has recorded in Cox’s Book of
Modern Saints and Martyrs. The book, building on the tradition of
John Foxe’s accounts of Christian martyrs first published in 1563,
catalogues the stories of Christians prepared to risk all for their
faith gathered during her many travels to remote conflict zones around
the world.
It is not an easy read. We hear of walking 12 miles of scorched earth
littered with corpses of women and children in Sudan; of beheaded
teenage girls in Indonesia; and religious persecution in the shape
of rape, torture and murder elsewhere.
But we also hear the story of 15,000 people fleeing violence in East
Timor, who are fed for a week from one bag of rice by Sister Maria
Lourdes; and remarkable instances of courage, such as when Lady Cox sat
beside the Rev Rinaldy Damanik in an Indonesian court and heard him
choose the scaffold over renouncing his faith (he was later released
after serving a prison sentence, during which time he handed out to
injured Muslim inmates plasters that contained verses from the Bible).
“When I meet people who could be martyrs, who are living at that
front line of faith, I’m just so humbled and inspired because of their
amazing resilience and their joy in spite of their horrific suffering,”
says Lady Cox.
Her book poses perhaps the key question of our age, or of any age:
where can we find a peace which the troubles of this world cannot
destroy? And the answer it seems, paradoxically, is very often in
the middle of those troubles.
“All around us the search is on to fill the spiritual vacuum. The
real heroes in my book somehow find peace caught up in trial and
tribulation. God is, as the Psalmist said, a very present help in
trouble. We who are not at that stage of suffering and deprivation
and horror seem to find it much harder to experience,” says Lady Cox.
Does she not get scared amid such horrors? “I regularly have my fit
of faithless, fearful dread before a visit. In Nagorno Karabakh in
the early Nineties I was constantly under fire and told I was nearly
killed 22 times. It’s only natural to shrink from that prospect.
“But I’m not the sort of Christian who believes that if you pray
everything will be all right. You have to be prepared to pray the
Gethsemane prayer: ‘Lord I’d love to come home to my loved ones but
let not my will but your will be done’. You may not come back, but
the spiritual riches outweigh any risk that’s being taken.”
As she confesses, her hands-on approach is a little unorthodox -as is
her definition of a saint as someone who is willing to die for his or
her faith but while she remains blessed with good health she feels
compelled to act. “Faith without deeds…” is one of her favourite
lines from the Bible.
A Third Order Franciscan Anglican who will take Communion wherever
she can, Lady Cox gets very frustrated with aspects of church life
in the West. ” ‘Comfortable Christianity’ depresses and irritates
me immensely. Internal debates and distractions about sex and the
latest worship song are relatively trivial compared to someone on
the front line of faith who is going to make the ultimate sacrifice
and is looking for prayer and practical assistance.”
Shrugging off the suggestion that she is viewed by many as a heroine
herself, perhaps even a saint by her own definition, she says:
“I feel immensely privileged to have the opportunity to visit the
real heroes living the life. The way I can respond to their heroism
makes my spiritual stature feel microscopic. At least I can be their
voice and tell their stories to inspire others.”
She is keen, in particular, to influence young people and does a lot
of work with them through her own organisation, the Humanitarian Aid
Relief Trust. One of the book’s goals was to give them some role
models. “Many young people don’t find church in the West to be a
convincing, compelling witness. There’s nothing wrong with surfing
on Bondi Beach but if only they would find time to visit one or two
of these ‘saints’ and martyrs they would find it a life-changing
experience.”
Martyrdom, of course, has a particular relevance in the light of the
current climate of terrorism and proliferation of the suicide bomber.
Did writing this book shed light on their motivation? Lady Cox
is clear to draw a distinction between the martyrs in her book and
suicide bombers. “Christian martyrdom is all premised on transforming
love, never on hate, revenge or bitterness. These people don’t seek
martyrdom -but they have bravely persisted in their faith knowing
they may be martyred. So much of the rhetoric that accompanies the
suicide bombers is associated with real expressions of hatred.
Whether it’s a justified resentment is another question.”
So are Christians well placed to understand the ultimate sacrifice?
“Yes and no.
Christians can understand making the ultimate sacrifice for all they
believe in.
But there are two fundamental differences: the Christian martyr dies
in the hope that others may live, whereas the terrorist dies and
kills as many other people in the process as he or she can, at least
in recent cases.”
Cox’s Book of Modern Saints and Martyrs by Caroline Cox (Continuum,
£ 9.99) For more information about the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust
visit:
Slavery: This Immoral Trade by Baroness Caroline Cox and Dr John Marks
(Monarch, £ 8.99) is published in October.
–Boundary_(ID_Ej/ciOD6wLfN4OxZYFhZnA)–

GEORGIAN ARMENIANS PROTEST AT ARREST OF ACTIVIST IN YEREVAN
Regnum, Russia
Oct 14 2006
The democratic alliance United Javakhk [Georgia’s Armenian-populated
Samtskhe-Javakheti region] reports that a member of the alliance’s
board, Vaagn Chakhalyan, who on 10 October was subjected to a brutal
attack when entering Yerevan and received serious body injuries, was
arrested the next day by employees of the Armenian National Security
Service (NSC).
A statement issued by the alliance says: “Introducing themselves
as members of the police department, they tricked Vaagn Chakhalyan
into coming to the police station as a victim, but then took him to a
National Security Service isolation cell and arrested him. Ridiculous
charges were levelled against him about illegally crossing the Armenian
state border. On 13 October, with the same ridiculous charge, the
court of the first instance of the Yerevan communities of Tsentr and
Nork-Marash gave permission to sentence Vaagn Chakhalyan to two-months’
preventive detention.”
“It is especially outrageous that instead of investigating the violence
meted out against Vaagn Chakhalyan, members of his family and a member
of the alliance, Gurgen Shirinyan, fabricated accusations are being
made against the victim. This incident is clear testimony to a direct
link between the violence committed against Vaagn Chakhalyan and his
subsequent arrest, as well as the fact that certain forces issued an
order. The people of Javakhk are extremely angry about the news from
Yerevan. The United Javakhk is concerned that subsequent events could
lead to dangerous and unpredictable developments.
“Vaagn’s absence and further consistent attempts to disband the
alliance by brutal methods are a severe blow to the present system
which is ensuring stability in Javakhk, in which the United Javakhk,
thanks to the universal support of the population, is playing a
decisive role. Well-known forces and criminal channels are striving
to ensure a monopoly on demonstrations on behalf of the Armenians
of Javakhk, and by their irresponsible and provocative actions are
creating a serious threat to stability in the region.
“The alliance hopes that all interested forces, and the Armenian
authorities in particular, will adopt a more sensible decision
in relation to these forces who can lead to a destabilization
of the region and cause serious damage to Armenian-Georgian
interstate relations,” a statement of the political force from the
Armenian-populated region of Georgia, Samtskhe-Javakheti, says.

NIZAMI BEHMANOV: I DO NOT BELIEVE OSCE EXPERTS’ MONITORING RESULTS
Azeri Press Agency
Oct 12 2006
“I do not believe that the OSCE experts’ monitoring of the arsons
in occupied Azerbaijan territories will have any result. All events
concerning Nagorno Garabagh happened under observation of OSCE
since 1992. I have not seen their decisive position yet,” Nizami
Behmenov, the chief of Azerbaijani Community of Nagorno Garabagh told
journalists, APA reports.
He said OSCE will not give any explanation even if the reports on
the arson results will be prepared and send to UNO.
“It will be ineffective. Azerbaijan has video materials about
happenings in occupied regions. Material concerning arson has
been presented to Minsk group. I do not think separatist Nagorno
Garabagh Republic will let OSCE experts enter those areas, because
the territories are under their control. There are terror bases in
occupied Azerbaijan territories,” he said.

ARMENIAN PRESIDENT DECREES ROUTINE MILITARY CALL-UP
Mediamax News Agency, Armenia
11 Oct 06
Yerevan, 10 October: Armenian President Robert Kocharyan has signed
a decree on the autumn call-up campaign.
Under the decree, young men who have reached the age of 18 will
be called up for military service in October-December 2006, the
presidential press service told Mediamax today. The call-up has also
worried people who have lost the right to the deferment of military
service.
Conscripts who have served two years in the Armenian armed forces
will be discharged in October-December in 2006.

2007 DRAFT BUDGET PROJECTS SIZEABLE GROWTH OF SUBSIDIES TO HEALTH SECTOR
Armenpress
Oct 11 2006
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 11, ARMENPRESS: The draft government budget for 2007
unveiled late last month would substantially raise subsidies to health
sector from 39.5 billion drams this year to almost 47.6 billion drams.
Some 844 million drams of this sum are projected for management of
state-run health institutions and establishments and around 3 billion
would be released to hygienic and anti-epidemic services. Hospitals
and clinics will get next year 2 billion drams more, 16.8 billion
and 16.7 billion drams respectively.
The budget, if approved by parliament, will also lead to a sizable
rise in the monthly salaries of doctors and hospital personnel in
general. Thus a clinic doctor ‘s salary is projected to grow from
current 58,499 drams to 83,400 drams, a clinic nurse will get 53,400
drams instead of current 38,000.
By the way, the draft budget also plans to raise salaries of civil
servants by 20 percent to 105,000 drams ($276) in 2007. Fulltime
schoolteachers would earn the average of 74,000 drams, or 27 percent
more than they do now.