Author: Nahapetian Samvel

The Times, UK
Jan 30 2005

Biography: Harold Nicolson by Norman Rose
REVIEWED BY JOHN CAREY

HAROLD NICOLSON
by Norman Rose

Cape £20 pp400

Harold Nicolson often wondered why he had not been more successful.
He had shown promise as a diplomat until his wife, Vita
Sackville-West, insisted he gave it up. But after that he drifted,
making little impact as an author and none as a politician. Was it,
he pondered, because he lacked some vital spark? To readers of Norman
Rose’s biography, the question of what was wrong with Harold will
seem less of a mystery. He was a rabid snob and a squirming snake-pit
of prejudice, without even the intelligence to realise that other
people were as human as himself.

Rose blames his upbringing. A Victorian diplomat’s son, Harold grew
up in palatial embassies abroad where liveried servants bowed as one
passed. At Oxford he developed a `marked distaste’ for students who
had not been to public school. Their `strange accents’ distressed
him, as did the presence of female undergraduates. His attitude to
the lower classes, which crystallised at this time, was
straightforward: `I hate them. I do not want them to become like me.’
>From university he proceeded to the Foreign Office, a bastion of
aristocratic privilege, where his allocated sphere of interest was
the Balkans. Foreigners, he soon found, were far from satisfactory.
The Turks were `servile and inglorious’, the Bulgarians contemptible,
the Italians cheats and liars. As a classical scholar (he had secured
a third in Greats at Oxford) he had a soft spot for the Greeks, and
encouraged their ambitions in Asia Minor, a policy that led to the
slaughter of 30,000 Greek and Armenian Christians by Ataturk in
Smyrna (`Poor darlings,’ sighed Harold). Travelling in later life
allowed him to extend the range of his xenophobia. The Japanese, he
found, were `ugly and loathsome’; the Americans `a most unfortunate
mistake’.

As for non-whites, they were completely beyond the pale. An early
Foreign Office job was to meet two delegates from the Haitian
Republic, whom he characterised as `beastly niggers’. The `dark
races’, he explained, were `born to occupy an inferior station in
life’. They were inartistic, dirty and too numerous. These
convictions never waned, and they went with an equally poisonous and
permanent anti-semitism. He habitually described Jews as `oily’, and
favoured the creation of a national homeland in Palestine only
because it would collect all the world’s Jews together `as Butlin’s
collects all the noisy holiday-makers’. Even the Holocaust did not
shame him into repentance. Discussing a mutual Jewish acquaintance
with his son after the war, he declared `he arouses my sympathy for
Eichmann’ (the Nazi responsible for administering the extermination
of European Jewry, who was hanged by the Israelis in 1962).

In Vita, Harold found one of the few women in England who could outdo
him in snobbery. Glorying in her lineage, and in the ancestral pile
at Knole, she despised everyone who was not a Sackville-West, and
openly classified her husband’s parents and family as `bedint’ –
Sackville-West slang for `common’. Harold, masochistic by
temperament, rather agreed. He had always hated his `plebeian’
surname, he confessed. Their semi-detached marriage, and the gardens
they created at Long Barn and Sissinghurst, have been written about
quite enough already, and Rose wisely fast-forwards through these
areas, as he does through their large and shifting seraglios of
same-sex partners. Vita’s famously included Virginia Woolf, who
scorned her lover’s writing skills (`a pen of brass’) and appearance
(`florid, moustached, parakeet-coloured’), but was lured to her bed
by her sheer aristocratic glamour, like any fluff-brained deb.

Both Harold and Vita viewed the rise of socialism with horror and
dismay. Harold feared that a tide of `venom’ would engulf
civilisation, which he equated with the class advantages he and Vita
enjoyed. He often complained that, what with punitive taxation, they
subsisted just above the breadline, but this merely illustrated his
failure to notice how other people lived. Besides Sissinghurst, with
its 400 acres and its staff of six plus three gardeners, he and Vita
had a London house and a yacht. All of this was acquired and
maintained with Sackville-West money, since their joint earnings were
quite inadequate for such a lifestyle. That did not prevent Vita from
protesting, when the welfare state was first mooted in the early
1940s, that it was wrong to give people `everything for nothing’
because it discouraged `thrift and effort’. It had been a mistake, in
her view, to educate the lower orders, since it encouraged them to
rise above their `rightful place’. The populace should be well fed
and well housed, like dairy cows, but nothing more. Despite her
misgivings, Harold, to his credit, expressed sympathy with the 1942
Beveridge Report, the welfare-state blueprint, and even, according to
Rose, put the idea of a national health service into Beveridge’s
head.

Making excuses for Harold is not Rose’s remit, but anyone inclined to
do so might well point first to his homosexuality. Throughout his
life, homosexual acts were illegal in Britain. Simply by being true
to his sexual nature, he risked public shame and possible
imprisonment. Blackmail was also a persistent threat. He must have
lived, as Rose observes, on a knife edge. It does not take much
imagination to see that finding himself sexually separate and
different could have both reinforced and been alleviated by a sense
of social and racial superiority. Even if this explanation is
misguided, it has to be granted that when his son Ben confided his
own homosexuality to his father, Harold managed the situation well.
It was, he advised, not a thing to be ashamed of or proud about –
just a natural preference, `as if you liked oysters done in sherry’.
Ben later married and had a daughter.

Harold’s homosexuality, and the dangers it incurred, clearly
instilled in him a habit of watchfulness. His writing hits off
mannerisms, clothes and gestures unerringly. It was this that made
Some People, his first and most enjoyable book, so annoying to
colleagues at the Foreign Office who appeared in it. It was also what
made him an outstanding diarist. Describing Marcel Proust, whom he
met in Paris (`white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced’), or James Joyce
(`a very nervous and refined animal, a gazelle in a drawing room’),
or the future Edward VIII’s `sandy eyelashes’ and `furtive giggling’,
he continually feeds the eye and ear. His account of the German
delegates signing the 1919 peace treaty in the Galerie des Glaces at
Versailles – one of the best pieces of reportage in the language –
mobilises the same skills.

Rose is a professor of international relations at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, so he is able to put Harold’s foreign policy
skills into context more thoroughly than has been done before. There
were some misjudgments. In 1930, Harold, on a posting in Berlin,
announced that Hitler’s political career was finished. In 1945, he
assured the House of Commons that Stalin was `the most reliable man
in Europe’. But by and large, Rose judges, his reading of the
international scene was creditable. Just as well, given the other
characteristics that emerge from this frank and alert book.

Available at the Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165
8585 and

New York Times Book Review
January 30, 2005

‘Imperial Reckoning’ and ‘Histories of the Hanged’: White Man’s Bungle
By DANIEL BERGNER

IN a war-ravaged town in Sierra Leone a few years ago, I listened as five
men debated the idea of recolonization, which many of their countrymen
favored. They sat in a derelict shed, the office of a building contractor
who’d lost all his equipment to rampaging soldiers. He was lucky to be alive
and unmutilated; factions in the civil war had cut off the hands of
civilians, then let them live as the ultimate message of terror. Amid the
ruin of their nation, only one of the five men objected to the idea. ”We
had segregation, right over there,” he said, pointing toward the desolate
grounds of a secondary school, his voice rising in outrage. ”We couldn’t go
to that school!” To which the contractor, white-haired and old enough to
have spent his childhood under British rule, said, ”At least there was
school for Africans.”

The men spoke during extreme times in their country; their desperation had
reached this pitch after 10 years of anarchy. But despair pervades the
continent. ”The average African,” Moeletsi Mbeki, deputy chairman of the
South African Institute of International Affairs and brother of South
Africa’s president, declared recently, ”is poorer than during the age of
colonialism.” Yet for anyone tempted, even fleetingly, to look to the past
for solutions to Africa’s problems, two new books, ”Imperial Reckoning,”
by Caroline Elkins, and ”Histories of the Hanged,” by David Anderson, give
warning.

Focusing on the final decade of British rule in Kenya (ending in 1963), both
writers evoke a period when, especially in Elkins’s view, the colonial
pretense of civilizing the dark continent gave way to the savagery of
imperial self-preservation. Some 40,000 whites lived in Kenya by the early
1950’s, drawn by promises of long leases on fertile land and native labor at
low wages. ”Whatever his background,” Anderson, a lecturer in African
Studies at Oxford, writes, ”every white man who disembarked from the boat
at Mombasa became an instant aristocrat.” But by midcentury, many of the
natives, particularly those of the Kikuyu tribe, refused to play their
assigned role. The Kikuyu had been put off their most arable land by white
farmers. They, like other Kenyan tribes, had been banished to ethnic
reserves too small to sustain them. They were forced to carry passbooks as
they searched for work from the governing race. In 1952, stirred partly by
their displacement and partly by British efforts to prohibit traditional
Kikuyu customs, a Kikuyu secret society, the Mau Mau, launched a rebellion,
attacking white-owned farms and brutally killing perhaps a hundred whites
and 1,800 of their African supporters. In retaliation, the British carried
out a campaign that, Elkins suggests, amounted to genocide.

Anderson’s book, meant as a kind of requiem for the ”as yet unacknowledged
martyrs of the rebel cause: the 1,090 men who went to the gallows as
convicted Mau Mau terrorists,” never manages to render a vivid martyr.
Examples of colonial judicial corruption and hypocrisy are thoroughly
explored, but little room is left for character. Elkins, a history professor
at Harvard, also neglects individual portraits, but she develops an
unforgettable catalog of atrocities and mass killing perpetrated by the
British. ”Imperial Reckoning” is an important and excruciating record; it
will shock even those who think they have assumed the worst about Europe’s
era of control in Africa. Nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million
was, by Elkins’s calculation, herded by the British into various gulags.
Elkins, who assembled her indictment through archives, letters and
interviews with survivors and colonists, tells of a settler who would burn
the skin off Mau Mau suspects or force them to eat their own testicles as
methods of interrogation. She quotes a survivor recalling a torment
evocative of Abu Ghraib: lines of Kikuyu detainees ordered to strip naked
and embrace each other randomly, and a woman committing suicide after being
forced into the arms of her son-in-law. She quotes an anonymous settler
telling her, ”Never knew a Kuke had so many brains until we cracked open a
few heads.” Her method is relentless; page after page, chapter after
chapter, the horrors accumulate.

Yet for all its power, ”Imperial Reckoning” is not as compelling as it
should be. With so much evidence of atrocity, Elkins often forgoes
complexity and careful analysis. Not only are the colonists barbaric in
their treatment of the Kikuyu, but, as she has it, they are basically
barbarous in private as well, maintaining ”an absolutely hedonistic
lifestyle, filled with sex, drugs, drink and dance.” More important, there
is the case that Elkins apparently wishes to make — for genocide. ”Mau
Mau,” she writes, ”became for many whites in Kenya, and for many Kikuyu
loyalists as well, what the Armenians had been to the Turks . . . and the
Jews to the Nazis. As with any incipient genocide, the logic was all too
easy to follow.” According to the official statistics, the British killed
11,503 Mau Mau adherents. By contrast, Elkins estimates that ”somewhere
between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for.” She reaches her
figures by reviewing colonial censuses taken in 1948 and 1962; she compares
the increase in the Kikuyu population to the larger increases in three other
Kenyan tribes. It’s a fragile means to support her case, partly because
we’re left wondering whether the other tribes also grew more swiftly than
the Kikuyu during earlier periods.

Unfortunately, Elkins’s prosecutorial zeal in a sense precludes a true
”imperial reckoning.” For British rule brought crucial benefits that
persist — among them modern education and a degree of infrastructure — as
well as violent oppression to its subjects. A thorough reckoning would
provide, by way of paradox, not only a more deeply insightful but a more
deeply wrenching work of imperial history.

Daniel Bergner’s ”In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black
in West Africa” won an Overseas Press Club Award and a Lettre Ulysses Award
for the art of reportage.

The Messenger, Georgia
Jan 28 2005

“Armenia’s authority received what it deserved”

Armenian newspaper Aravot (Morning) reports that chair of the
Democratic Party of Armenia, Aram Sarkisian, commented on the recent
statement made by the assistant of the U.S. State Department
Secretary Elizabeth Jones regarding Karabakh and other separatists
regions in the former Soviet Union.
Last week she told reporters that “it is in Russia’s interest for
these areas, for Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia,
Nagorno-Karabakh, for these areas to be stable, for corruption to end
there, for the criminal secessionists who rule there to be removed.”
According to Sarkisian, the leadership of the United States proved
for one more time its steady standpoint regarding several issues. The
United States made it clear through this statement what importance
they attach to the fight against corruption and the establishment of
democracy, while the aspiration of the Armenian authority to please
the United States by sending their troops to Iraq means nothing for
them.
“Armenia’s leadership received what it deserved,” Sarkisian said. “I
think that the Karabakh process is clearly failed,” he said, adding
that first of all, the attempt of the Yerevan government to soften
the U.S. position on the Karabakh problem by sending Armenian troops
to Iraq has been unsuccessful.

Azer Tag, Azerbaijan
Jan 26 2005

PACE RESOLUTION IN SPOTLIGHT OF TURKISH MEDIA
[January 26, 2005, 20:05:07]

On January 25, in Strasbourg, at the winter session of Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe, passed discussions around the
report prepared by the British rapporteur of this Organization,
deputy David Atkinson in connection with the Armenia-Azerbaijan,
Nagorny Karabakh conflict, and was adopted relevant resolution that
is widely covered by the Turkish mass media. All news agencies and
newspapers of the friendly and brotherly country, informing the
readers about the PACE resolution, regard this event as a historic
step and success of the Azerbaijan diplomacy.

The Turkish journalists and political analysts have especially
emphasized that the European politics for the first time have named
Armenia a state-aggressor, and the Armenian community of Nagorny
Karabakh – separatist forces. Deputies of PACE have unequivocally
regarded occupation of one of the member-countries of this
international organization, territories of other country as an
inadmissible fact, have demanded from Armenia to withdraw the armed
forces from the occupied Azerbaijani lands, have called the OSCE
Minsk Group for greater activity.

In opinion of political analysts of Turkey, this resolution will play
a positive role in peace settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan,
Nagorny Karabakh conflict.

ATKINSON’S REPORT BECOMES FORMULA

Azg/arm
27 Jan 05

The report of David Atkinson, British parliamentarian, on Nagorno
Karabakh issue was heard and adopted at the PACE session, on January
25. The Armenian side suggested three corrections. Only one of them
was adopted. In fact, the report prepared by Terry Davis, former
reporter on Nagorno Karabakh issue and current Secretary General of
European Parliament, became a formula that hasno legal force, but it
is very important from the viewpoints of politics and propaganda.

According to Regnum agency, all the formulae that are not favorable
for the Armenians remained unchanged in the report. In particular, the
Nagorno Karabakh authorities were characterized as “separatist forces,
the Armenian forces still keep the major part of Azerbaijan in
occupation,” or “the separatist forces still control the region of
Nagorno Karabakh”. Armenia is obviously condemned in annexing a
territory of another country that caused “ethic exile.”

BBC reminds that Atkinson is the life chairman of the World-Wide
Concordance of the Christians organization, while the baroness
Caroline Cox, member of the House of Lords, is its head. Baroness
Caroline Cox is known for rendering help to the Armenians.

Let’s see, what kind of mistakes were made in the report. We have the
impression that the members of the Armenian delegation at PACE
hasnâ=80=99t read this document or didn’t understand that or they are
not aware of elementary information about Karabakh.

The third point of “Explanatory Notes of the Reporter” says the
following: “The conflict includes the territory of the former NKAR, as
well the eight neighboring regions of Azerbaijan partly or fully”. If
our parliamentariansknew that seven and not eight regions are under
the control of Karabakh forces, they would show in their speeches that
Davis and Atkinson are not only pro-Azeri but also unaware of the
situation.

The formula is entitled “The Conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh Region
Dealt by the OSCE Minsk Group”. It’s worth mentioning that the Minsk
Congress was to be held in the spring of 1992, but it wasn’t. The
working Minsk group was shaped, instead. So, Davis and Atkinson showed
that they are totally unaware of the Nagorno Karabakh negotiation
process. We don’t even speak of our delegation.

The authors of the report suggest thanking Minsk group co-chairs and
the personal representative of the OSCE chairman “for their efforts
made in achieving ceasefire on May 12, 1994.” This sentence is another
proof of their ignorance, as in 1994 neither Minsk group
co-chairmanship was formed, nor the position of the personal
representative of the OSCE Chairman. The ceasefire was achieved by the
mediation of Russia.

Those who read the report of Davis and Atkinson and are aware of the
Nagorno Karabakh conflict’s chronology can find dozens of small and
big violations of facts. As for the mental, lingual, diplomatic and
lobbyist abilities of the Armenian delegation at PACE, daily Azg will
touch them on in a separate article.

By Tatoul Hakobian

MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARMENIA
PRESS AND INFORMATION DEPARTMENT
375010 Telephone: +3741. 544041 ext 202
Fax: +3741. .562543
Email: [email protected]:

PRESS RELEASE

January 26, 2005

Deputy Minister Ruben Shugarian received EU Special Representative for the
South Caucasus Ambassador Heikki Talvitie

On 25 January, Deputy Minister Ruben Shugarian received European Union’s
Special Representative for the South Caucasus, Ambassador Heikki Talvitie
who is in Armenia in the framework of a regional visit.

The parties discussed EU’s New Neighborhood policy for the South Caucasus
and Action plan to be prepared under this new framework.

EU Ambassador expressed confidence that Armenia – EU Action plan would be
finally drafted in 2005 and adopted by both sides in 2006. The parties
agreed that along with the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement between
Armenia and European Union, this Action plan would become a useful tool for
Armenia’s further European integration.

Ambassador Talvitie suggested that Armenia benefits from opportunities
offered by the New Neighborhood policy by proposing various regional
cooperation initiatives. In the initial stage, such programs could cover
Armenia and Georgia and if successfully implemented, would establish a new
momentum of regional cooperation.

The parties also explored the current status and prospects of Nagorno
Karabagh conflict regulation and exchanged views on other issues of regional
significance.

The above issues were also discussed at a round table with EU Ambassador,
hosted by the Ministry on the same day.

Knight Ridder Newspapers
Jan 25 2005

16 years after earthquake devastated Armenia, international aid
continues

By Mark McDonald

SPITAK, Armenia – When rescuers began pulling victims from the rubble
of the sugar factory here in 1988, the corpses seemed like ghastly,
crimson ghosts: The bodies were covered with an awful goo, a
coagulating mixture of blood and powdered sugar.

The earthquake that crushed the sugar plant also destroyed every
other factory in this mountainous patch of northern Armenia. The
6.9-magnitude quake flattened schools, churches, homes and hospitals.
More than 25,000 people died. Half a million were left homeless.

The 1988 disaster was hardly on the scale of last month’s Asian
tsunami, but the grief and horror were the same. So was the
international response – massive, immediate, global and heartfelt.

But despite the huge donations and numerous successes,
post-earthquake Armenia could serve as a cautionary tale for the
tsunami region: Even the most heavily financed and best-intentioned
relief missions can be derailed by the aftershocks of economic
crises, corruption, politics and war.

“The people in the tsunami, their pain is our pain,” said Asya
Khakchikyan, 70, who lost her husband, daughter and granddaughter in
the Spitak quake. “When I see the faces of those poor people in Asia,
I see the faces of the ones I lost.”

Other disaster zones have had bitter experiences with relief efforts
that dwindled or disappeared almost as soon as they started. When the
news media move on, aid missions often do the same.

That didn’t happen here, government officials, diplomats, aid workers
and survivors agree. After 16 years, international relief efforts
continue, many of them generous and effective.

A housing program under the U.S. Agency for International Development
ended only last month in the shattered city of Gyumri. The Peace
Corps has 85 volunteers in Armenia, several U.N. programs remain
active and dozens of international agencies and private foundations
continue to work in the region.

“We haven’t recovered yet, but at least say we’re no longer dying,”
said Albert Papoyan, the mayor of the hardscrabble village of
Shirmakoot, the epicenter of the quake. “We’re finally starting to
breathe.”

An estimated 20,000 people across the quake zone still occupy the
metal shipping containers known here as “domiks.” The containers once
held emergency provisions that came from abroad. Now people live in
them.

Only one of Spitak’s factories is back in business, and it employs
only a small fraction of the people it did before.

Some aid workers complain that some people still expect handouts.

Spitak lost 5,003 people to the earthquake, nearly a fourth of its
population. The quake struck Dec. 7, just before noon, when children
were in school and most adults were working at the sugar plant, the
elevator factory, the leather tannery or the sewing collective.

Spitak Mayor Vanik Asatryan said every house and apartment building
in his city collapsed – all 5,635 of them. Other towns and villages
also were reduced to rubble.

“Everyone,” he said, “was homeless.”

Asatryan and others praised the quick response of the Soviet
government – Armenia was part of the Soviet Union in 1988 – although
communist construction teams inexplicably began putting up row upon
row of low-quality, concrete apartment blocks, exactly like the ones
that had just collapsed.

International aid also poured in. The grand total after 16 years is
difficult to estimate, although government officials suggest it could
be close to $2 billion, half of what’s been pledged for tsunami
relief.

“The whole world helped Spitak,” Asatryan said.

Today, Spitak’s new neighborhoods – built to exacting new codes – are
known as the French, Italian and Uzbek districts, commemorating the
countries that financed them.

The immediate U.S. response was a planeload of search-and-rescue dogs
and rescue teams from Fairfax County, Va. The plane took off without
a flight plan, and U.S. officials weren’t sure it would be allowed to
land in Soviet territory or that the rescuers, who had no visas,
would be allowed to get off.

American tents, heaters, food and medicine soon followed. Trauma
counselors also arrived, along with some teachers of transcendental
meditation.

Today, Armenia is one of the largest per-capita recipients of U.S.
government aid in the world, reportedly second only to Israel. A
large and influential immigrant population in the United States helps
drive those government appropriations.

Armenian-American businesspeople also donate heavily. The Lincy
Foundation, underwritten by the billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, has been
particularly effective in building housing, roads and tunnels in the
quake zone.

Aid workers grumble that the deluge of assistance created a caste of
“professional victims” hooked on handouts. One former Red Cross
worker said residents would become enraged when he was a day or two
late delivering free medicine.

“They think all the world owes them everything,” said Yulia Antonyan,
a program officer at the Eurasia Foundation. “People will sit around
a table saying this country gave us too little or the Uzbeks build
bad buildings.”

The cash-strapped Armenian government has been hard-pressed to create
housing, jobs and development programs on its own.

Tens of thousands of former factory workers, for example, now rely on
small subsistence plots of potatoes and cabbage. The soil is thin,
the winters are brutal and freak summer hailstorms wrecked the wheat
harvest for two years running.

The hollow shells of ruined factories add a ghostly gloom to the
area, and only one of the Soviet-era enterprises has managed to
reopen: Asatryan, Spitak’s mayor, got a World Bank loan to
resuscitate the sewing collective, and he has 250 employees stitching
military uniforms for the Dutch, British and Americans.

Before the quake, however, the sewing factory had 5,000 employees.
Two-thirds of local adults are still unemployed, and the average
salary is about $2.50 a day.

“I feel completely abandoned by the government,” said the widow
Khachikyan, who subsists on a $13 monthly pension, half of which she
spends on an asthma inhaler. She picks wormy apples from a nearby
park and lives in a metal trailer left behind by the Italians.

“I’ve been in this domik for 15 years. They keep saying they’ll give
me an apartment, but they never do.”

She managed a shrug and a wheezing laugh, and said, “I guess they’ll
give me an apartment when I die.”

BBC News, UK
Jan 21 2005

Analysis: Belarus defies West
By Leonid Ragozin
BBCRussian.com

Prominent political rivals of Mr Lukashenko have disappeared
President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus has long been a
target of US criticism – and the Bush administration clearly has it
on its radar.

The new US “outposts of tyranny” list presented by the incoming US
Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, mentions just one European
country – Belarus.

President Lukashenko, who maintains an iron Soviet-style grip on
Belarus, hit back on Friday, saying “some might not want this sort of
freedom which reeks of oil and is splattered with blood”.

The strength of “people power” in neighbouring Ukraine has fuelled
speculation that Belarus might go the same way.

But some experts are sceptical about such a scenario.

“Lukashenko obviously rigged the last (October 2004) referendum, but
nevertheless, according to independent observers, he received almost
48% of the votes, which amounts to colossal support,” says Russian
political analyst Andrey Piontkovsky.

Crackdown on dissent

Mr Lukashenko has used his security forces against non-governmental
organisations and the independent media. Demonstrations are often
broken up brutally.

Several prominent politicians have disappeared.

Mr Lukashenko, in power since 1994, also disbanded an elected
parliament, installing a hand-picked group of loyal deputies.

Belarus country profile

Angered by such authoritarian practices, the White House adopted the
Belarus Democracy Act last year.

It provides for sanctions against Belarus and the promotion of
democracy by helping non-governmental organisations and fostering an
independent media.

It also bans US federal agencies from giving any financial aid to the
country.

Radek Sikorski of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington
think-tank, says “small amounts of money could go a long way” to
promote democracy in Belarus.

He advocates “Cold War-style activity” to effect change in Belarus,
such as “broadcasting real information into the country, supporting
underground newspapers”.

Instead of visa restrictions, Belarussian officials accused of
involvement in “disappearing” dissidents should be encouraged to
visit the West and then arrested, he told the BBC News website.

Shunned by EU

Mr Lukashenko, often dubbed “Europe’s last dictator”, is also a major
headache for the European Union, two of whose members – Poland and
Lithuania – share borders with it. I can’t see a figure around
which such a revolution could possibly develop

Jim Dingley
UK expert on Belarus

Four key members of Mr Lukashenko’s administration are banned from
visiting EU countries over their alleged role in the disappearances.

According to Mr Sikorski, the EU “has much stronger instruments than
the US” to influence Belarus, “for example, the promise of a European
path for the country”.

“If people can travel to the West, see the EU and democracy working,
eventually a new generation will demand the same rights,” he said.

He did not rule out a Ukraine-style popular revolt.

But according to Andrey Piontkovsky, Mr Lukashenko “remains popular,
unlike the completely bankrupt regimes of Slobodan Milosevic in
Yugoslavia, Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia or Leonid Kuchma in
Ukraine” – all of which succumbed to “people power”.

Jim Dingley, a British expert on Belarus, describes the prospects for
such an uprising in Belarus as “highly unlikely”.

“I can’t see a figure around which such a revolution could possibly
develop.”

Nationalism weak

Moreover, Belarus does not have much national identity around which a
protest movement could coalesce, he says.

World War II largely destroyed the country’s ethnic mix and
nationalism was suppressed by the Soviet authorities.

Its once large Jewish population was largely exterminated by the
Nazis, many Poles were deported by Stalin or fled and Belarussian
identity was diluted by an influx of settlers from Russia.

In the long-term “a core of businessmen who are quite dissatisfied
with the limitations imposed on the free development of private
enterprise” could spearhead a revolt, Mr Dingley says.

But Mr Piontkovsky agrees that the prospects for a “velvet
revolution” in the near future in Belarus “are not too rosy”.

Russian influence

But Russia, which maintains close ties with Belarus, could play a
significant role, analysts agree.

The US “can and should use President [Vladimir] Putin to put pressure
on Lukashenko,” says Mr Sikorski. “The regime couldn’t survive a few
weeks without Russian support.”

Russia has been increasingly angered by Mr Lukashenko.

Russian newspapers speculated that he was aiming to become leader of
a united state of Russia and Belarus – a country which has existed on
paper since 1996.

But the leaderships disagree on key economic issues and relations
with the West.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in February 2004 that “the Belarus
president is responsible for systematic mistakes in domestic and
foreign policy, which hamper economic development and lead to the
international isolation of Belarus”.

But other former Soviet republics might be more ripe for regime
change in the near future, analysts say.

“Kyrgyzstan and Moldova are the first candidates, followed by
Armenia,” says Mr Piontkovsky.

He also believes that Russia’s President Putin is now on shakier
ground than Mr Lukashenko.

And Ms Rice did not include in the “outposts of tyranny” list the
Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan.

Opposition demonstrations do sometimes take place in Belarus – but
not even that limited dissent is tolerated in Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan, where human rights abuses are widespread.

PACKAGE AND STAGE BY STAGE SETTLEMENT

Azat Artsakh – Nagorno Karabakh Republic (NKR)
18 Jan 05

In Azerbaijan the year 2005 was declared the year of Karabakh, and
official Baku again stated through their president Ilham Aliev that if
necessary they will settle the Karabakh problem through military
force. In Azerbaijan it was also announced that Armenia allegedly
agreed to the stage by stage settlement of the conflict. Besides,
statements were made according to which during the January 11, 2005
meeting of the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijanin Prague
Armenia would at last accept the stage by stage settlement of the
conflict.

Naturally, NKR reacted to these statements. However, it is necessary
to remain coolheaded and not to behave emotionally. The statements of
Ilham Aliev, as well as of other official and analytical circles in
Azerbaijan on the settlement of the conflict according to the
Azerbaijani scenario are directed at the home `consumer’ only.

A vivid illustration to this is the fact that even if Armenia agrees
to the stage by stage settlement, Baku will do everything to keep this
in secret before the official publication of the fact. Whereas Baku
announces this openly being sure that after that the Armenian
diplomacy will not take such a step avoiding the fury of people.
Thus, the standpoint of Baku pursues only home political aims, let
alone that NKR and not Armenia will make the choice.

Now, let us try to discuss the so-called package and stage by stage
settlements. Karabakh is for the package settlement. This settlement
supposes achievement of an agreement in all the questions within the
framework of one agreement including the status of Nagorni Karabakh,
territories, borders, refugees, military, economic and ecological
security problems, maintenance of confidence, economic cooperation,
etc.

Azerbaijan stresses the stage by stage settlement. Baku demands
returning the territories liberated by Karabakh and now forming the
security area of NKR, as well as return refugees to these territories.
And only then will Azerbaijan consider the question of status.For
already 10 years now the negotiation process has been turning around
the mechanism of settlement of the conflict parties because of
fundamental controversies.

Strange though it may sound, there are no fundamental differences
between two settlements. The settlement of the Karabakh conflict can
be achieved through a complex approach, which means that the solution
can be achieved on the basis of a package, whereas it can be fulfilled
only stage by stage. Hereby the sides reach a comprehensive settlement
during the talks where all the problems are solved, including the
status, territories, refugees, security, etc. And fulfillment goes on
stage by stage, on the basis of compromise. Similar confrontations can
be solved only in this way (except for capitulation when the defeated
side surrenders to the winner).

The same mechanism was implemented in the case of the agreement of
Dayton on Herzegovina, the project of the secretary general of the UN
on Cyprus. All the problems were considered in these projects and
their implementation was carried out according to the schedule worked
out beforehand. Whereas Baku, emphasizing the returning of territories
and refugees (what is more, Baku speaks only about the Azerbaijani
refugees `forgetting’ that as a ratio to the Armenian refugees forced
out of the territories controlled by Azerbaijan NKR exceeds Azerbaijan
significantly).

In fact, Baku’s standpoint is an attempt to eliminate the negative
impact of the conflict for Azerbaijan without eliminating the reasons
that caused this impact. Naturally, this is not possible, especially
if we take into account that this kind of approach changes the
military and political situation in the Karabakh-Azerbaijani conflict
area and creates a lure for Azerbaijan to settle the conflict through
military force. Even in the present situation when Azerbaijan is
unable to solve the Karabakh conflict through force, it does not
disguise its anti-Armenian policy. In this context I would like to
quote Ilham Aliev’s speech at the April 2004 meeting of the editorial
board of the National Encyclopedia. `In my study I have the volumes of
the `Soviet Encyclopedia of Azerbaijan’. I studied them and found out
that the names of a number of scientists, politicians of our republic
are not present in them. Instead there are names of many Armenians. I
am surprised how the names Harutiunov, Harutiunian, Gevorgian,
Martiros Sarian, David of Sasun – appeared in those books. What
does this mean? Is it the basis for preparation of our National
Encyclopedia? I am terrified – Azerbaijanis were left out of our
encyclopedia and Armenians were not?’ And the advisor to the former
president of Azerbaijan Heidar Aliev on foreign policy Vafa Guluzadeh
said, `I used to say that any form of sovereignty granted to Nagorni
Karabakh will mean independence. In my addresses I always argued that
Nagorni Karabakh could not be granted sovereignty in Azerbaijan. That
is to say, it is not right to settle the problem of Karabakh through
granting a status to the Armenians. I want all of us to remember that
granting citizenship of Azerbaijan to Armenians is a crime. You know
that all our enterprises were full of Armenians. Today there are no
more. But as soon as they receive the right for citizenship and
status, they will not stay in Nagorni Karabakh. They will come to
Baku, gain rights, shares, and if we violate their rights, they will
protest. Arzu Abdulaeva protects the rights of Armenians in
Azerbaijan. If we cannot make a woman silent now, what will be our
state then?’ And if the statesmen considered pro-westerns and
democrats in this country speak this way, what then can be expected
from nationalist forces?

The discriminatory policy of the Azerbaijani government is not
confined to anti-Armenian propaganda only. It is applied to other
nationalities as well. Thus, the permanent representative of
Azerbaijan in the UN, Geneva I. Vahabzadeh explains the numerous
problems of official Baku by the fact that national diplomacy in
Azerbaijan is not carried out by pure-blooded Azerbaijanis. In his
official message to the speaker of the Azerbaijani parliament Murtuz
Aleskerov in 2001 Vahabzadeh wrote that among Azerbaijani diplomats
there are many who are not pure Azerbaijanis. According to him, it is
impermissible that those diplomats whose mothers are Armenian, or
Jewish (let alone small peoples) cannot serve Azerbaijan duly.

It is natural that the international community cannot overlook these
actualities and assist to a state that is loyal to the democratic
principles in its words only and therefore is an unreliable and
unforeseeable partner. In Azerbaijan there are people who recognize
this. Famous Azerbaijani political scientist Hikmet Hajizadeh thinks
that even if Azerbaijan is three times stronger than Armenia, the
world will not allow a government suppressing its citizens’ right to
rule the Armenian national minority (as in the case when the world did
not allow Serbia to maintain dictatorial rule over Bosnia and
Kosovo). Thus, it becomes evident that no official settlement can be
the reason for the non-constructive standpoint of Baku. The reason is
much more profound. It is in the consciousness of the Azerbaijani
people, the deep controversies existing in that country.

DAVIT BABAYAN.
18-01-2005

FACTBOX-Military forces in Iraq

LONDON, Jan 17 (Reuters) – Some 400 British troops have begun arriving
in Iraq to help maintain security as insurgents step up attacks two
weeks before Iraqis go to the polls, Britain’s Ministry of Defence
said on Monday.

Romania also said it would send 100 more troops to Iraq to help
protect United Nations staff during the election.

Here is a table by country of military forces in Iraq. Some countries
have sent combat troops, others take up non-combat support roles such
as logistics and reconstruction. Some have said they wish to pull
troops out because of growing danger.

In Iraq+ En route or Withdrawn

alerted+ or intend to pull

out++

United States 150,000

Britain 8,930

OTHER COUNTRIES:

Albania 73

Armenia 50

Australia 850 30

Azerbaijan 150

Bulgaria 430

Czech Rep. 92

Denmark 525

Dominican Rep. 300

El Salvador 380

Estonia 55

Georgia 300 550

Honduras 370

Hungary 300 (By end-3/2005)

Italy 3,160

Japan 550 450

Kazakhstan 30

Latvia 120

Lithuania 105

Macedonia 28

Moldova 25

Mongolia 180

Netherlands 1,350 (By March 2005)

New Zealand 60

Nicaragua 115

Norway 10 140

Philippines 51

Poland 2,400 700##

Portugal 120

Romania 730 100

Singapore 200

Slovakia 105

South Korea 3,600

Spain 1,400

Thailand 460

Tonga 44

Ukraine 1,600 (First half 2005)

NOTE: Many figures are rounded or estimated.

As of Nov 2004

No date set or confirmed.

Precise figure not known.

Poland announced that it will have 1,700 troops in Iraq as of mid-February
2005.

Sources: Reuters news reports/GlobalSecurity.org.

01/17/05 14:11 ET