Author: Nahapetian Samvel

Azeri paper questions OSCE fact-finding mission itinerary change
Ekspress, Baku
2 Feb 05

An Azerbaijani newspaper has quoted Armenian sources as saying that
the US and French co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group would leave an
international mission investigating Azerbaijani allegations of illegal
Armenian settlement in occupied areas of Azerbaijan before its task
was complete. Ekspress daily also said the itinerary of the OSCE
mission had been changed and speculated that either the Armenians had
refused to allow it into the occupied district of Lacin or the mission
experts were not taking their responsibilities seriously . The
following is the text of Alakbar Raufoglu report by Azerbaijani
newspaper Ekspress on 2 February headlined “‘A stroll’ in the occupied
area” and subheaded “Why didn’t ‘the fact-finders’ visit Lacin?” and
“The US and French co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group are leaving the
investigating mission”; subheadings are as published.
The US and French co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group, Steven Mann and
Bernard Fassier, will not remain to the end with an international
mission investigating illegal settlements in Azerbaijan’s occupied
territories, Armenian sources quoted an expert of the fact-finding
mission as telling a meeting of Armenians in Kalbacar [District].
Mann’s early withdrawal from the mission is explained by the fact that
he has been invited to an international event in Georgia. The
co-chairman will be in Tbilisi on 3-6 February and will travel to
Yerevan and then to Baku to join the mission. French diplomat Fassier,
for his part, prefers watching the fact-finding mission “more from the
side”. The co-chairman attributes his position to the fact that he is
just “starting to know the region”. Thus, unlike other mediators
Fassier is not fully familiar with “the conflict and the peculiarities
of the region where it has occurred”. That is why he wants to hold
“familiarization meetings” outside the fact-finding mission and
independent investigation.
Baku does not have any information about the plans of the
co-chairman. “We have not been informed that any of the members of the
OSCE Minsk Group will withdraw from the investigation in the occupied
territories ahead of time. None of the co-chairmen said in Baku that
they would leave the fact-finding mission at a particular stage,” the
head of the press service of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, Matin
Mirza, told Ekspress yesterday evening [1 February]. The reports that
the US and French co-chairmen will not complete their work in the
occupied districts “are contradictory” and should be investigated, he
said.
At the same time, Baku does not believe that it is a “big deal” if the
mediators leave the fact-finding mission at any stage, because “the
report to be prepared is important to us”.
Some sources say that Mann knew that he would take part in the
international event in Tbilisi, but it was scheduled for 4 February,
the day when the mission was to investigate in Fuzuli [District]. This
district is the last on the list of cases of illegal settlements
compiled by the Azerbaijani side according to the “scoping document”.
Why was the itinerary changed?
Contrary to expectations, the mission continued its investigations
yesterday not in Lacin [District], but in Fuzuli and Cabrayil. Under
the itinerary agreed during the mission’s briefing discussions in
Baku, Lacin was to be visited before those two districts. Moreover,
the documents presented to the co-chairmen indicate cases of
settlement in places between Kalbacar and Lacin.
It is very interesting to see that the mission covered a long distance
(roughly the Lacin-Qubadli-Zangilan-Cabrayil-Fuzuli route) to appear
in Fuzuli and Cabrayil after Kalbacar.
Armenian sources provide no information about the reasons for this
“tactical” change in the itinerary of the experts. It is just reported
that the mission investigated only the parts of both districts (Fuzuli
and Cabrayil) bordering Iran yesterday. There is no information about
the results so far.
Some reports say that the Armenians have been predominantly settled in
Lacin. It seems that either the Armenians did not want to let the
mission into that district because they did not manage to cover the
traces or, to put it mildly, the “fact-finders” are taking a stroll in
the region.
“Our investigations are being accompanied by interesting
events. Although the mission could not fully clarify the information
it has, we have plenty of facts here,” the head of the “fact-finders”,
German expert Emily Margarethe Haber, told journalists yesterday
morning before leaving Kalbacar. She said that the mission met many
Armenians settled in that district during the investigation. The
Armenian community said that they used to live in various Azerbaijani
cities and districts.
“We asked them how they got there, if they live in the region
permanently, what they do and what their citizenship is,” Ms Haber
said. But she did not comment on the observations of the mission. “We
are compiling what we see, comparing and sharing.”
At the same time, the OSCE expert said that it was “striking” that “so
many” Armenians were able to live in the occupied districts, as living
conditions in that region are inadequate.
Settlement initiators
“It is normal that Armenian citizens live temporarily or permanently
in the occupied territories. But I did not see any conditions or
grounds for permanent settlement,” the Russian co-chairman of the OSCE
Minsk Group, Yuriy Merzlyakov, said in Kalbacar.
The main issue for the mission is the initiators of settlement, he
said. “It should simply be understood if people come here of their own
accord and live in these conditions.”
“We will visit Fuzuli and other districts, too. The situation may be
different there. These peculiarities are in the information provided
to us. I think settlement is a broad issue and can be approached from
the viewpoint of the specific conditions of the occupied districts,” a
Swedish expert said.
The mission needs “enough” time to fully investigate the information
it has in Baku, the expert said.
Azerbaijan has provided the international experts with video and audio
materials as well as maps confirming illegal settlements in the
occupied districts. Baku has reported the settlement of 23,000
people.
Armenians do not leave “fact-finders” alone
Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani side is investigating whether the
fact-finding mission is visiting the occupied districts with a
representative of the Karabakh separatists.
“This is not accurate information yet and we are trying to clarify
it,” Deputy Foreign Minister Araz Azimov told journalists yesterday.
Armenian sources reported that the “so-called deputy foreign minister”
of the separatists, Masis Mailyan, is accompanying the visit of the
OSCE experts. Under the official mandate of the mission, the personal
envoy of the OSCE chairman, Andrzej Kaspizyk, and his assistants
should have guided the mission.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry has said that if the OSCE experts are
found to have violated the terms, they will be required to provide an
official explanation.
“These reports could also be disruptive,” Matin Mirza told
Ekspress. The list of those who accompany the mission was broadly
discussed in Baku last week and the final mandate was achieved “with
the consent and assurance of the co-chairmen as well”, he noted.
The mission’s investigation is expected to end late this week. A
factual report will be prepared at the end of the visit and forwarded
to Vienna.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
Jan 31 2005
Azeri officer to stand trial February 8
BAKU
The trial of senior lieutenant Ramil Safarov, an officer in the
Azerbaijan Army, charged with murdering the Armenian serviceman
Gurgen Markarian in Budapest, Hungary, will be held on February 8.
The Azerbaijani officer will be provided with the second attorney
from Hungary to better defend his rights, lawyer Adil Ismayilov said.
Talks on the issue are underway and the Hungarian lawyer will be
named within the next two days, he said.
Safarov, who comes from Jabrayil District, Azerbaijan’s region
occupied by Armenia, murdered the Armenian officer for humiliating
his honor and dignity.*

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.”

EurasiaNet Organization
Jan 24 2005
PROMISES STILL POWER GEORGIA’S ELECTRICITY SYSTEM
Molly Corso 1/24/05
A EusrasiaNet Photo Essay
This New Year’s, the television was on at Imzari Chartishvili’s home
in the West Georgian village of Lesa. Although no one watched it most
of the time, its presence was a comfort. The broadcasts came as a
special holiday gift from the Georgian government: a 24-hour supply
of electricity.
After years of inadequate or non-existent maintenance following the
breakup of the Soviet Union, the problems of Georgia’s electricity
system are legion – and legendary. But with expectations of a cash
windfall from the current privatization campaign, the government is
promising that the situation might – after 13 years – finally change.
A December 23 statement by Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania set the tone.
In it, Zhvania pledged that $70 million out of an expected $200
million from state property sales would go to “securing electricity
supplies” by autumn 2005. Energy Minister Nika Gilauri later went one
step further and even named a concrete date: October 1, 2005.
But whether that amount will be enough to turn the lights on is open
to debate. Dana Kenney, senior energy advisor at the US Agency for
International Development’s Office of Energy and Environment in
Tbilisi, stated that the figures touted by the government will fall
far short of solving Georgia’s energy woes. Pervasive corruption and
problems with bill collection also plague the energy sector. Though
breaking the system up into separate generation, transmission and
distribution units helped curtail some of the corruption, Kenney
said, those problems still linger on. “Money has to flow through the
system,” she commented.
How the government plans to keep that money flowing, however, is
unknown. For now, in addition to the privatization revenue, emphasis
is being placed on outside assistance. At a June 2004 donors’
conference in Brussels, Georgia submitted requests for $82 million in
assistance for the energy sector, an amount second only to “budget
support,” the online news service Civil Georgia reported. The
government also expects to use funds from the US-run Millennium
Challenge Program for refurbishing small hydropower stations and
monies from the German bank KWF to revamp the regions’ electricity
supplies, Gilauri told a January 6 press conference, the Prime News
Agency reported. The exact amount of these funds has not been
disclosed.
A comprehensive government plan to revamp the energy system has also
been announced, but not made public. The Energy Ministry did not
respond to EurasiaNet requests for information on the plan in time
for this article.
Meanwhile, despite the government’s promises, public exasperation
with Georgia’s energy crisis shows no sign of abating. In December
2004, some 600 protestors in Kutaisi, Georgia’s second largest city,
took to the streets with placards bearing a simple message: “Give us
light.” They were joined by 200 demonstrators in the nearby town of
Zestafoni.
At the time, local officials appeared divided on how to respond to
the crisis. While Giga Shushania, deputy governor for Imereti
province, home to Kutaisi, took aim at power distributors for leaving
the city “blacked out for the past few months” and without adequate
drinking water, Deputy Governor Gia Tevdoradze took issue with
protestors, asking “You haven’t had electricity for 13 years [so] why
do you remember it?” the daily 24 Hours reported.
Georgia produces mainly hydropower, which provides enough energy for
the spring, summer and autumn when water levels are high. When water
levels fall in the winter, imports – from Russia, Armenia, Turkey and
Azerbaijan – cover the gap. Energy Efficiency Center Georgia, a
renewable energy consultancy sponsored by the European Union,
estimates that Georgia’s domestic oil, gas and coal supplies can
cover only 20 percent of annual demand.
These days, the degree of the problem is not always felt in Tbilisi,
where the situation has drastically improved over the past few years.
But the capital still feels the pain of aging transmission lines and
equipment. Periodic blackouts hit the capital in October, November
and December; largely the result of faulty transmission lines, in
addition to the general disrepair of the entire sector.
But while Tbilisi may go several days without reliable electricity,
several weeks or even months is more the norm in the regions, home to
approximately 68 percent of Georgia’s population of 4.7 million.
Bill payment is one frequent explanation cited by both the government
and energy sector experts for the electricity system’s woes.
According to statistics from the Energy Efficiency Center, roughly 60
percent of Tbilisi residents pay their electricity and gas bills. In
the regions, though, that number drops to around 30 percent.
“There is a difference between [electricity company] management in
Tbilisi and the rest of the country,” said George Abulashvili,
director of Energy Efficiency Center Georgia, “The customers in
Tbilisi are paying for the energy.”
But in the western province of Guria, home to Imzari Chartishvili,
paying or not paying electricity bills makes little difference. While
electricity company officials have announced that they will provide
electricity for a few hours per day only to account holders who have
paid their monthly bills (roughly nine lari, or about $5), recently,
even those residents who had paid their bills have still been left
sitting in the dark for days on end, villagers in Lesa say. What
power there is comes for a few hours at night only.
Ongoing corruption at each stage of the electricity system –
generation, transmission and distribution – plays a large role in
hampering bill payment, commented USAID’s Dana Kenney. “People don’t
want to pay because they don’t know where the money is going,” she
said.
So far, under Saakashvili’s relatively free-form anti-corruption
campaign, few details have been provided on how the government plans
to tackle that problem.
Meanwhile, outside interest in Georgia’s energy industry continues
apace. In December, plans were announced by Canargo Energy
Corporation, a Channel Islands-based oil and gas production company,
for a $57 million oil drilling project in the Samgori and Ninotsminda
fields. Georgia’s Vartsikhe Hydro Power Plant was recently sold
together with Chiaturmanganumi, a manganese mining enterprise, to the
Russian company EvrAz Holding and the Austrian-Georgian company
DCM-Ferro for $132 million. Talks have also reportedly started about
selling the country’s gas distribution stations, a heating plant and
a backline pipeline, to Russian energy giant Gazprom, according to
Rustavi-2 television – deals that would require amendments to
existing legislation.
But whether or not this show of investor interest will make a
difference for ordinary Georgians remains unknown. So far, the lack
of workable solutions has only slowed Georgia’s economic recovery
still further, observers say. The country’s per capita income and
economic growth rates lag far behind those of neighbors Armenia and
Azerbaijan.
“Energy is everything for our people . . .They can’t do anything
without energy,” said Manana Dadiani, head of the EEC’s Renewable
Energy Department. “Giving them energy gives them the possibility to
do something.”
Editor’s Note: Molly Corso is a freelance journalist and photographer
based in Georgia.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress