Author: Nahapetian Boris

RA AND SINGAPORE FMS DISCUSSED BILATERAL RELATIONS

Pan Armenian
14.10.2005 18:48 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian met
yesterday with the Foreign Minister of Singapore Mr. George Yeo,
RA MFA press center reported. During the meeting Vartan Oskanian
presented the situation in Armenia and the prospects of regional
development. The parties exchanged views on a number of matters
of mutual concern including the possibility of development of
bilateral ties via consultations between the Foreign Ministers
of both states and formation of contractual-legal field. Highly
appreciating the experience of cooperation within international
structures the parties expressed readiness to strengthen this
cooperation. Besides, Vartan Oskanian and George Yoe discussed the
ways of settling conflicts available in the world. In this contexts
the RA FM presented the current stage of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict
settlement process. During the visit Vartan Oskanian also met with
representatives of the local Armenian community. Besides the RA FA
held a meeting with State Minister of Singapore Mr Zainul Abidin
Rasheed. October 13 Vartan Oskanian returned to Yerevan.

OSCE MONITORING OF CONTACT LINE BETWEEN KARABAKH AND AZERI ARMED FORCES REGISTERED NO EXCESS

Pan Armenian
11.10.2005 23:17 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ On October 11, in compliance with a agreement
achieved with the NKR authorities beforehand, the OSCE mission held a
planned monitoring of the Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan armed forces’
contact-line in the Agdam direction, in the area of the settlement of
Yusifjanly, reported the Press Service of the NKR MFA. At the positions
of the NKR Defense Army, the monitoring mission was led by Personal
Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office (PR of CiO), Ambassador
Andrzej Kasprzyk (Poland). The group comprised Field Assistants of
the PR of the OSCE CiO Olexandr Samarsky (Ukraine) and Harry Eronen
(Finland) and head of the OSCE High Level Planning Group Colonel Tomaso
Strgar (Slovenia). The monitoring passed in compliance with the planned
schedule, no violations of the cease-fire regime were registered. From
the Karabakh party, representatives of the NKR Ministries of Foreign
Affairs and Defense accompanied the OSCE monitoring mission.

FIELDWORK UNDER FIRE
By Orin Starn

The Chronicle of Higher Education
October 14, 2005, Friday

Where, exactly, is Armenia?

I have to admit that I couldn’t have pointed it out on a map for you
until a few months ago.

That changed in a hurry last summer. Almost overnight, it seemed,
I found myself on an Austrian Airlines flight into Armenia’s capital,
Yerevan. A student of mine, Yektan Turkyilmaz, was about to be put on
trial there. The secret police had arrested Yektan two months before
just as he was leaving Armenia, having finished his anthropology
dissertation research on the early 20th-century history of the
region. A kind, passionate, and brilliant young scholar, Yektan had
been held in a miserable basement dungeon. He shared a cell – and the
jars of Nutella a friend brought now and then – with two Armenian
prisoners locked up for petty crimes. Many nights Yektan and his
cellmates could hear the screams of other men being tortured upstairs.

Yektan’s crime? Trying to smuggle old books out of Armenia, according
to the government. The real reason was a poisonous brew of politics,
corruption, and paranoia. Yektan is Turkish, albeit of Kurdish
descent. Even today, many Armenians hate Turks for 1915, when more
than a million Armenians were rounded up for slaughter in the 20th
century’s first genocide. That a Turk, Duke University student or not,
would come to Yerevan to study the period’s fraught history had made
him an object of speculation and suspicion from the very start.

The great irony is that Yektan is one of a few brave Turkish scholars
now calling for Turkey to face up to its responsibility for the
Armenian genocide. Speaking about 1915 has been mostly taboo in Turkey,
with absurd denial and countercharges of Armenian duplicity instead
the order of the day. That Yektan was committed to real understanding
of Eastern Anatolia’s tragic history had won him research permission
from the director of the Armenian National Archive. He was the first
Turkish scholar ever allowed to work there.

None of this mattered to the secret police. Although renamed the
National Security Service, everyone in Yerevan just calls them the
KGB, an unhappy legacy of Armenia’s long cold-war decades as part
of the Soviet Union. Closely tied to President Robert Kocharian,
a former Communist Party official, the secret police are a shadow
state. They harass and brass-knuckle opponents, control plum jobs,
and extort money in bribes and kickbacks in the topsy-turvy gangster
capitalism of these new post-Soviet times.

Over his several months in Yerevan, Yektan had bought about 100 used
books from secondhand booksellers, all related to his research about
Armenian culture, politics, and history. The secret police had probably
been following Yektan, and, just after boarding his flight home, he was
dragged off the plane and taken to KGB headquarters. An obscure law
restricting the export from Armenia of any book older than 50 years
provided the pretext for keeping Yektan prisoner. His interrogators
were convinced that they had captured a major book smuggler, or,
more likely, a Turkish spy.

Then came rafts of letters demanding Yektan’s release from the likes
of Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke; Craig Calhoun, president of
the Social Science Research Council; Rep. David E. Price, Democrat of
North Carolina; and Bob Dole, the former Kansas senator and a longtime
friend of Armenia. At that point, Yektan recalls, the secret police
began to interrogate him about a third possibilitynamely, that he
was an American spy. How else to explain such concern from halfway
around the world? “Mean and stupid,” one Armenian I met in Yerevan
snickered privately about the KGB.

The tale of Yektan’s arrest might appear like some bizarre outlier,
a freak episode of the Keystone Kops and Gulag Archipelago rolled
into one. I think, however, that the story points to larger changes in
the field of anthropology. In the hoary old days of the pith helmet,
native porters, and steamer-trunk expeditions to Samoa and Congo,
anthropologists noted the minutiae of kinship structures and tribal
ritual down to the last cowrie shell. Those old-time anthropologists
tended to shy away from writing about the less comfortable realities
of poverty, war, disease, racism, and colonial oppression in the
third-world societies that they studied.

It’s little wonder that anthropologists back then seldom got into
trouble. No one besides a small universe of other scholars back in
Oxford and New Haven cared about the exact explanation for why some
New Guinea hill tribes liked to chew betel nut at male-initiation
ceremonies and others did not.

Everything has changed over the last few decades. The turbulence of
the Vietnam War years brought loud calls for, as the title of one
influential anthology had it, “reinventing anthropology” in a more
activist, politically engaged image. Then, too, the changing trade
winds of feminist, Marxist, and later postmodern and postcolonial
theory began to propel questions about social protest and nationalism,
violence and memory, and power and politics to the center of the field.

You can see the results now. At Duke alone we have students doing
dissertations about Mexico’s Zapatista rebels and anti-globalization
activism; everyday life and women’s rights in Castro’s Cuba; and
Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon, among many other charged
topics. It’s a long way from the age of anthropologists with lordly
names like E.E. Evans-Pritchard and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, and heated
hallway debate about the particulars of Crow kinship reckoning.

A degree of risk accompanies the new, more politically minded
anthropology. A recent Ph.D. from our Duke program, Daniel Hoffman,
had to be evacuated by helicopter from Sierra Leone a few years ago.

Hoffman was near death with cerebral malaria he had contracted in the
backcountry while investigating the kamajor militia movement and their
tough, violent world. Myrna Mack, a Guatemalan anthropologist, was
stabbed to death by an army death squad in retaliation for her research
into the slaughter of Mayan Indians in military counterinsurgency
campaigns. Last summer Kregg Hetherington, a graduate student at
the University of California at Davis studying Paraguayan agrarian
activism, was with peasant protestors when they were attacked by
landlord goons, who shot and killed two village friends standing
close by him. Fieldwork under fire is by no means uncommon these days.

It’s always wise to be wary about coming down too hard on
one’s disciplinary ancestors. Whatever their failings, those
early-20th-century anthropologists believed in human equality and
the value of other cultures in an age when the hateful ideology about
white superiority to the “savages” and “primitives” of “lesser races”
was so prevalent. We shouldn’t be too complacent about our own era’s
failures either, since the field is hardly a model of democracy and
political righteousness. Our many shortcomings include a tiresome
addiction to ugly, pretentious, jargon-laden prose that makes far
too much of what we write unintelligible to anyone who doesn’t have
one of those secret postmodern jargon decoder rings.

I do think it’s good that we’ve moved to a more direct engagement
with the world’s social problems. Surely these times demand more than
ever the effort to understand the power of xenophobia and nationalist
hatred, the tensions of wealth and want in the global economy, the
limits and possibilities of social movements, and a long list of
other pressing issues. If not in grace of prose, anthropologists
have the advantage over journalists in the deeper, more intimate
view gained by months and often years of fieldwork. We can play at
least a modest role in expanding awareness, critical understanding,
and a stronger sense of mutual accountability and responsibility in
this irreversibly interconnected world.

But what, then, of Yektan? I watched him being led into the courtroom
in handcuffs surrounded by five policemen as if he were some dangerous
murderer. All the booksellers from whom Yektan had bought books
testified that they had never told him about any law limiting their
export, or in some cases not even known about it themselves.

The smug, overfed, theatrical prosecutor appeared to have watched
too many old Perry Mason reruns. He punctuated his incoherent closing
statement with plenty of pregnant pauses, accusatory stares, and the
dark suggestion that Yektan was not really a student at all. Then he
drove off without even bothering to stick around for the verdict.

Everyone knew, after all, that higher powers had almost certainly
decided the outcome beforehand in the archetypal Stalinist show-trial
tradition. Two years in jail, the judge announced, but with a
suspended sentence, meaning no more prison time. The verdict allowed
the government to pretend that Yektan’s arrest had been justified
while ceding to the heavy international pressure for his freedom.

With a few Armenian friends who’d stood with him through his ordeal,
Yektan walked out of the courthouse into the sweltering August
afternoon. He blinked and squinted, unaccustomed to the sun after
two months in a prison cell.

Now Yektan is back at Duke. He lost 20 pounds in prison, and his eyes
still dart nervously as if someone may be following him, but he says he
went to Armenia knowing it could be risky for him there. What Yektan
learned in his research will help him fill in the story of political
ambition, disputed borders, and nationalism gone awry that led to
the genocide of 1915. Does he have advice for other anthropologists
working in dangerous places? “Just be careful.” His own concerns are
turning to more prosaic matters familiar to any graduate student.

“I want,” he says, “to finish my dissertation and get on with my life.”

Orin Starn is a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke
University. He is the author of Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s
Last “Wild” Indian, published last year by W.W. Norton.

Anti-nuclear campaigners tipped for Nobel Prize

By Alister Doyle

OSLO, Oct 6 (Reuters) – The 2005 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday is likely
to honour work to contain nuclear weapons 60 years after the
U.S. bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Norway’s NRK television said on Thursday.

The U.N.’s nuclear watchdog and its head, Mohamed ElBaradei,
U.S. senator Richard Lugar and former Senator Sam Nunn and a
ban-the-bomb group representing Japanese survivors of the 1945
U.S. bombings seemed the frontrunners, it said.

The five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce its choice at
0900 GMT on Friday in Oslo from a secret list of 199 candidates.

NRK’s veteran correspondent Geir Helljesen, who has often correctly
tipped the winner of the annual prize, said on the main evening news
that the committee was likely to find “the fight against nuclear
weapons both central and topical.”

Worries about the nuclear programmes of North Korea and Iran and fears
that weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of
terrorists were likely to guide the choice.

Last year, Helljesen pointed to Kenyan environmentalist Wangari
Maathai as a likely winner of the award, set up in the 1895 will of
Swedish philanthropist Alfred Nobel. The prize is worth 10 million
Swedish crowns ($1.29 million).

Helljesen mentioned the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) and ElBaradei, Lugar and Nunn for their work to dismantle
ageing nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and Japan’s Nihon
Hidankyo, which represents atom bomb victims.

NO GELDOF, BONO

Helljesen dismissed speculation that Irish rock star Bob Geldof might
win the prize for campaigning against poverty in Africa, saying that
he was not even among nominees. He said that Irish rocker Bono had
been nominated but would not win.

An anti-nuclear prize in 2005 would seem to confirm a trend on major
anniversaries of Hiroshima.

In 1995, British ban-the-bomb scientist Joseph Rotblat won with his
Pugwash organisation. In 1985, the award went to a U.S.-Soviet group
of doctors, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear
War.

Centrebet, an Australian Web site which was first to accept bets for
the prize in 2003, rates the IAEA favourite at 3-1 with both Nihon
Hidankyo and the Nunn-Lugar team among the top four.

Helljesen merely noted that Centrebet had also suggested Finnish
President Martti Ahtisaari, the bookmaker’s second favourite for his
work to broker a peace deal between Indonesia and Aceh rebels.

The Norwegian Nobel Institute says that it has cracked down on leaks
and notes that Helljesen is sometimes wrong, like in 1995 when he
failed to predict Rotblat’s prize.

Some peace researchers say the IAEA has done too little to merit the
prize amid standoffs with Iran and North Korea. Others say a prize to
the IAEA could encourage limits on the spread of nuclear arms after
the end of the Cold War.

Helljesen mentioned Hidankyo but not its co-chair Senji Yamaguchi,
also tipped for the prize. Yamaguchi was 14 when the bomb fell on
Nagasaki.

“I saw many children die, and when I fled to the mountains that day I
saw bodies with … internal organs coming out and faces split in
half. I saw many such bodies,” Yamaguchi told Reuters in an interview
at a Nagasaki home for the elderly.

“That is why I want to somehow eliminate nuclear weapons — for me
that is everything,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Takanori Isshiki in Nagasaki)

10/06/05 18:33 ET

IcelandReview, Iceland
Oct 7 2005
X-Sender: Asbed Bedrossian <[email protected]>
X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.1 — ListProcessor(tm) by CREN

Iceland and Lebanon…Together at Last

Last night over dinner, I finally convinced a couple of friends to
sign on to a shamelessly geeky scheme called, for lack of something
more creative, Country of the Month. The idea sprung from a
conversation about the Russian Revolution – or watching BBC food. Not
sure. Either way, something made me think it was high time to do
something about the gaping holes in my understanding of world
history. The rough idea is to take a country and study its food,
literature, art, and history for a month with a few friends. (I’m
getting embarrassed, so I’m not going to go on.) Needless to say, it
was not met with much initial enthusiasm.

Iceland and Lebanon – I’m getting there. Last night, my plan gained
legitimacy when we chose two countries: Turkey and Armenia. Given
that Turkey will likely be one of the next countries to be welcomed
into the ever growing fold of the EU, the neighbors were a natural
choice. Let the Turkish coffee flow.

Meanwhile, Iceland remains unconvinced. And, as it turns out, so does
Lebanon. Lebanon has recently been wooed by the EU, which has pledged
its support for the small nation’s recent political and economic
reforms along with 10 million Euros. Much like Turkey, Lebanon is
probably seen as gateway into the Muslim world for Western countries,
including the United States.

But like Iceland, Lebanon is not jumping up and down to join. So this
week, academics from the two countries met at a university in Beirut
to talk about what a small nation on the edge of a growing political
alliance is to do. The difference, as Lebanon’s Daily Star points
out, is that Iceland has economic reasons for not joining, while
Lebabnon is divided on whether it thinks of itself as part of the
European world, or part of the Arab one.

Anyway, interesting to see a how growing political force forms
alliances between smaller ones. Maybe Lebanon should be next on my
list.

;ew_0_a_id=159539

FORUM 18 NEWS SERVICE, Oslo, Norway

The right to believe, to worship and witness
The right to change one’s belief or religion
The right to join together and express one’s belief

================================================
Friday 7 October 2005
ROMANIA: TOO MUCH POWER FOR THE STATE AND RECOGNIZED COMMUNITIES?

Romanian religious minorities have told Forum 18 News Service of their
concerns about the undefined powers given to the state by the draft
religion law, due to passed by the end of 2005, and the privileges the law
gives the highest status religious communities. Amongst areas of concern
Forum 18 has been told of are legal protection being given only to members
of 18 state-recognized “religious denominations,” and the undefined powers
the state is given to decide which communities will be so classified in
future. Some have suggested to Forum 18 that the law breaks the Romanian
Constitution, and concerns have also been expressed about the lack of
legal personality of unrecognized groups, preventing them from buying
property, building churches or having paid staff or ministers.

ROMANIA: TOO MUCH POWER FOR THE STATE AND RECOGNIZED COMMUNITIES?

By Felix Corley, Forum 18 News Service

Romania’s draft religion law, discussion of which in parliamentary
committees is set to resume next week, is intended to become law by the
end of 2005. As well as being concerned about the law’s three-tier system
of state recognition (see F18News 6 October 2005
<;), religious minorities
have told Forum 18 News Service of their concerns about the undefined
powers which the law gives the state and the privileges the law gives the
highest status religious communities.

Under the new law, all 18 faiths recognised by the government as
“religious denominations” will receive the highest level of status. They
are: the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Serbian Orthodox diocese, the Roman
Catholic Church, the Greek Catholic Church, the Old Rite Christian
(Orthodox) Church, the Reformed (Protestant) Church, the Christian
Evangelical Church, the Romanian Evangelical Church, the Evangelical
Augustinian Church, the Lutheran Evangelical Church-Synod Presbyterian,
the Unitarian Church, the Baptist Church, the Pentecostal Church, the
Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, Judaism,
Islam, and Jehovah’s Witnesses (whose status as a denomination was
confirmed after long legal battles in May 2003).

Under the draft law, only “recognised religious denominations” or “cults”
have the right to provide religious education in public schools, establish
their own religious schools, or receive financial support from the state.
Article 13 paragraph 3 of the draft Article 13 paragraph 3 prescribes
punishment only for those who obstruct the religious practice of members
of the recognised denominations. Unrecognised communities enjoy no such
protection.

In a bizarre proposal, only religious denominations and the lesser
category of religious associations will be allowed to call themselves
“church”. “In our culture it is important to have the title ‘church’,”
pastor Lucian Chis, head of the Federation of Autonomous Christian
Churches, told Forum 18 from Timisoara. “If you don’t, you’re treated not
as a church but as a ‘sect’. This is a problem, as lots of churches don’t
have 300 members.” But Agafatei of the State Secretariat insists any group
can call itself a church, although not in law without legal status.

The River of Revival Pentecostal church thinks that dividing religious
communities up in this way “does not respect the Romanian Constitution,
which guarantees absolute equality between people, regardless of
religion.”

The state has great but undefined powers in deciding which religious
communities should gain this status. Article 5 states that religious
associations can only gain the status of denomination if they guarantee
“durability and stability.” The Jehovah’s Witnesses are concerned that
such undefined criteria are open to the “whimsical excesses of the state”
and could lead to “discriminatory interpretation.” Baptists are among the
religious communities which oppose the time limit of 12 years before a
community can start to apply for recognition.

River of Revival Pentecostal church also notes that the new law would not
allow religious communities with fewer than 300 members to gain legal
status. Such newly-founded communities, it complained to Forum 18 News
Service, “cannot promote their identity, having no right to purchase
property, to build churches or to have paid staff or ministers”. The
church added that the registration system with different categories of
religious communities with differing rights “may lead to discrimination
and persecution”.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses agree with this, stating that “it is
unconstitutional that citizens who share a certain religious creed and
wish to manifest their religious freedom collectively should be obligated
to go through an intermediary stage of ‘religious association’, which
provides few rights and then become a ‘religious denomination’ after a
certain period of time,” they told Forum 18.

The River of Revival church has further concerns about the procedure for
approval to become a religious association. “In the court the government
is represented by a prosecutor and an inspector from the State Secretariat
of the Romanian government. We do not consider this to be appropriate.”
Mihai Agafatei of the State Secretariat for Religious Denominations says
that under the law on juridical entities, which also covers religious
associations, prosecutors attend all such court sessions, so religious
associations are being treated no differently.

The church is asking for a number of changes, including the right for as
few as 21 people to begin a religious association and use the name
“church” with their group. Such an association, the church stated, should
be allowed to have the same rights and freedoms as any religious
community.

Agafatei of the State Secretariat defended the three-tier registration
system, claiming that the 18 recognised religious denominations themselves
want this and that the European experts and the Council of Europe Venice
Commission also recommended this. Asked by Forum 18 on 7 October why
religious communities which already have the top-level legal status should
be allowed to set such a high threshold that other religious communities
will be unable to meet he had no answer. (Religious denominations also
have to be consulted over any future changes to the religion law.)

Some faiths, including the Baha’is, Reform Adventists and Old Believers,
have failed to gain state recognition in recent years. “We have 7,000
members, more than four or five of the denominations currently
recognised,” Wargha Enayati of the Baha’i community told Forum 18 from
Bucharest on 6 October. “We’ve been here in Romania since 1926, but it’s
impossible – under the old law and the new – for us to be recognised as a
religious denomination. This is not fair.” He believes that if a
distinction is made between religious communities on the basis of size, it
should be set at the lowest membership level among current recognised
denominations. The Armenian Apostolic Church is the lowest, with only
about 700 members.

In a lengthy analysis signed by its president, Pastor Paul Negrut, the
Baptist Union complained that nowhere in the draft is the separation of
the state and religious communities explicitly mentioned, a concern shared
by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Agafatei of the State Secretariat told Forum 18
such a declaration was unnecessary, as the country’s Constitution already
specifies that religious communities are autonomous.

Although the Baptist Union welcomed the earlier removal from the draft
that the recognised religious denominations were “public property”, it
regretted that no recognition was inserted that they are “private
property”. The Baptist Union fears this lack could lead to eventual
government attempts to influence religious communities. “The eventual use
of such power and influence cannot be accepted by the church since it is
contrary to its purpose and its calling,” it declared.

The Baptist Union also complains that the draft law continues the practice
of state payment of the wages for religious personnel and the upkeep of
places of worship, something the Baptists believe “consolidates government
control over the denominations”. The Baptists have not accepted such
financial support although they are currently a recognised denomination.
“We believe that the financial support of each denomination ought to come
from individuals as well as commercial entities that can decide to support
the denomination of their own choosing by receiving from the government a
tax deduction in the amount of their donation,” it proposes, pointing out
that no donations to non-profit entities are currently tax-deductible.

Agafatei of the State Secretariat defended this as a Romanian “tradition”.
“The state doesn’t oblige religious communities to take the money it
offers,” he told Forum 18.

Religious education in schools is another controversial area. The Baptist
Union is worried about Article 39 paragraph 4 of the draft, which appears
to require schools set up by religious denominations for their own
communities to offer religious education to pupils of another faith who
voluntarily choose to attend the school. Another concern was expressed by
the Enayati of the Baha’is, who told Forum 18 that without religious
denomination status the Baha’is, who he says do not engage in proselytism,
cannot even be invited into schools during comparative religion classes to
explain what they believe.

Cemeteries are also controversial in a country where the dominant Orthodox
Church often allows burials in their cemeteries only under Orthodox rites.
Many minorities and human rights activists welcome the requirement in
Article 29 paragraph 2 that local authorities provide secular graveyards
for all citizens, but fear that without an enforcement mechanism local
officials may never provide such facilities.

The Baptists are also worried that religious freedom can be restricted on
“national security,” grounds, replacing the “public safety” grounds
specified in Article 8 (2) of the European Convention on Human Rights
(ECHR). Article 5 paragraph 3 and Article 49 paragraph 3 of the religion
law replaces the ECHR phrase “public safety” with “national security”.

“Keeping in mind the different understanding of the two phrases – the two
of them never to be interchangeably used – and in light of past practices
where a truly totalitarian state under the pretext of ‘national security’
persecuted Christians from our denominations for having fellowship with
believers in other nations, we believe the texts of the two articles must
be modified to respect the text of the European Convention on Human
Rights.”

Agafatei of the State Secretariat conceded that the use of the term
“national security” was a mistake and that this should be “public safety”.
He said this will be corrected.

Some remain concerned that the draft law does not spell out the role of
the State Secretariat for Religious Denominations, part of the Ministry of
Culture and Religion. Minorities already complain that the State
Secretariat is staffed by Orthodox believers who believe their role is to
defend the rights of their Church. “The current staff is anything but
professional or neutral,” one human rights activist who has been involved
in this area told Forum 18. “Without operational enforcement of the law’s
provisions and without professional staff, we will be stuck with the
Romanian dilemma: reform implemented by dinosaurs.”

“You have to look not only at what the law says, but how it will be
enacted in its social context,” Dorina Nastase of the Bucharest-based
think tank the Romanian Centre for Global Studies told Forum 18 on 6
October. “The consensus in the Bucharest elite is that Romania should
protect its identity by protecting the Romanian Orthodox Church.”

A printer-friendly map of Romania is available at
<;Rootmap=romani>
(END)

© Forum 18 News Service. All rights reserved. ISSN 1504-2855
You may reproduce or quote this article provided that credit is given to
F18News

Past and current Forum 18 information can be found at

PRESS RELEASE
Armenian Center for National and International Studies
75 Yerznkian Street
Yerevan 375033, Armenia
Tel: (+374 – 1) 52.87.80 or 27.48.18
Fax: (+374 – 1) 52.48.46
E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]
Website:

October 5, 2005

ACNIS Turns Eleven: Raffi Hovannisian’s Public Address

Yerevan–Today the Armenian Center for National and International Studies
(ACNIS) celebrated its 11th anniversary of public service, creative
inspiration, and analytical research. On the occasion and in the presence of
professional staff and media representatives, ACNIS founder and Heritage
Party chairman Raffi K. Hovannisian delivered his annual address.

Underscoring the most serious challenges for Armenia in the new era, Raffi
Hovannisian pinpointed the adverse phenomena still plaguing Armenian
domestic and foreign policy, and in particular the perils of endemic
corruption, the rule of caprice and lawlessness, growing poverty, and the
predictable consequence of emigration. “In this quickly-changing world, when
the governed expect of their leaders a flexible mind, a consensus-building
capacity, and a profound worldview, we simply do not have the right to
entrust our nation’s destiny to those who have appropriated its foreign
policy in the same way as they have done with the country’s economy, turning
one and the other into a shadow structure driven by personal gain.”
According to Hovannisian, this mode of operation has made a mockery of the
national interest, has alienated the country’s citizens from their
authorities, and has weakened the foundations of our once-national
solidarity. From the standard-bearer of democracy and liberty in the region,
Armenia is now retreating to the backwaters of cynical authoritarian
dominion.

A striking reflection of the public’s shaken trust toward its governors,
Raffi Hovannisian continued, is the current package of constitutional
amendments which is likewise being used by the powers that be for cheap
propaganda purposes. “These proffered improvements will remain a mere word
game as long as the most basic and universal precept–the separation of
executive, legislative, and judicial authority–has not become a reality.”
And this, in Hovannisian’s words, can be secured only by an administration
that has received a broad public mandate through free and fair elections.
Until that day comes to pass, the constitutional changes will simply be
reminiscent of an unsuccessful attempt quickly to hide the cracks of an old
and run-down building by means of “European-style remodeling.”

The wide-ranging speech of Armenia’s first Minister of Foreign Affairs
focused also on major flaws in diplomacy and external policy which have
resulted from the situational activity of hypocritical officials who have
little in common with national interests, guiding principles, and public
confidence. Raffi Hovannisian scored the myopic and reactive nature of the
Armenian presidency not only in terms of the watershed divide in the
Armenia-Turkey relationship, but also in the context of European Union
integration. “It is foreseeable that in its best-case scenario Turkey can
only become an EU member in synchronization with Armenia, and in the process
it will have to undergo serious and irreversible reforms, confront its
history, reject any imperial ambitions, and so forge a comprehensive
resolution of all outstanding matters with Armenia.” Pursuant to the
precedents set by a number of civilized countries, Hovannisian sounded the
imperative to work for the historic opportunity to turn enmity into
partnership.

The extensive work of quality carried out by ACNIS in the past eleven years
demonstrates that, odds notwithstanding, Armenia is capable of claiming its
place of desert and dignity among the family of nations, provided of course
that it rediscovers itself as a civilizational contributor to the world and
strives to unite the tremendous political, economic, cultural, and
intellectual potential of all Armenians across the globe. Finally becoming a
real Homeland for the entire Armenian nation, Raffi Hovannisian concluded,
is the best way for Armenia to overcome the complex impasse it currently
faces.

Founded in 1994 by Armenia’s first Minister of Foreign Affairs Raffi K.
Hovannisian and supported by a global network of contributors, ACNIS serves
as a link between innovative scholarship and the public policy challenges
facing Armenia and the Armenian people in the post-Soviet world. It also
aspires to be a catalyst for creative, strategic thinking and a wider
understanding of the new global environment. In 2005, the Center focuses
primarily on civic education, conflict resolution, and applied research on
critical domestic and foreign policy issues for the state and the nation.

For further information on the Center, call (37410) 52-87-80 or 27-48-18;
fax (37410) 52-48-46; e-mail [email protected] or [email protected]; or visit

ARMENIAN DEFENSE MINISTER MET HIS GREEK COUNTERPART

Pa Armenian
05.10.2005 11:32

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Today Secretary of the Security Council at the
RA President, Defense Minister Serge Sargsyan met with his Greek
counterpart Spilios Spiliotopoulos, RA MOD Spokesman, Col. Seyran
Shahsuvaryan told PanARMENIAN.Net reporter. “We have the possibility
and wish to strengthen the military and technical cooperation”, the
Greek Defense Minister stated during the meeting. He also expressed
satisfaction with the professionalism of the Armenian peacekeepers
performing their mission within a Greek battalion in Kosovo. In
his turn Serge Sargsyan highly assessing the activities of the
Greek peacekeepers presented the programs to be implemented in the
field. Upon completion of the meeting the parties exchanged views on
military reforms to be carried out in both countries.

RA NA SPEAKER: INCLUDING OF ISSUE OF “FROZEN DEPOSITS” OF ARMSAVINGSBANK ON AGENDA OF PARLIAMENT HAS UTMOST IMPORTANCE

ARKA News Network, Armenia
Oct 4 2005

YEREVAN, October 4. /ARKA/. The fact that an issue of “frozen deposits”
of the Armsavingsbank was included on the agenda of the current 4-day
parliamentary session has utmost importance, Speaker of the Armenian
Parliament Arthur Baghdassaryan told journalists. He said that it is
the result of the “exclusive political consensus of all political
forces and independent parliamentarians”. He said that there were
attempts to compromise him and the party “Orinats Yerkir” headed
by him, but political consensus resulted in including this issue on
the agenda, as “this issue relates to 2.2mln people”. He said that
the atmosphere of solidarity and tolerance should be preserved for
final resolution of this issue. He also said that no one political
force tries to privatize this issue and it should be solved to avoid
future speculations.

He expressed confidence that the Republican Party of Armenia
will follow the agreements achieved, as they are clear, public and
indisputable. Baghdassaryan also pointed out that all necessary funds
will be provided by the state budget. A.A. -0–

TURKEY GOT OVER EUROPE

A1+
| 14:44:40 | 04-10-2005 | Politics |

As result of efforts exerted in the course of 40 years the EU-Turkey
negotiations on full membership have opened.

After long and intense discussion EU FMs came to accord in
Luxembourg. Thus, the stalemate situation was overcome: Austria
renounced its proposal on “privileged partnership” to Turkey. On
the night of October 4 the talks on Turkey’s accession to the EU
opened officially.

Before departing for LuxembourgTurkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
words, the agreement fits Turkey’s interests fully. “This is
a really historical day for Europe and the whole international
community,” stated the Premier of the UK, which presides at the EU
at present. There is a long way ahead still, he added.