BAKU: ‘Armenia’s Unconstructive Position On Karabakh Issue To Affect

‘ARMENIA’S UNCONSTRUCTIVE POSITION ON KARABAKH ISSUE TO AFFECT IT NEGATIVELY’

news.az
May 4 2010
Azerbaijan

Aydin Mirzazade Turkey is a big country and the opening of borders
with Armenia will not bring it a special dividend.

The situation around the ratification of the Turkish-Armenian
Protocols retards the process of solving the Karabakh problem,
deputy chairman of the parliamentary Committee for Security and
Defence Aydin Mirzazade said.

‘However, Armenia and international circles protecting it should
know that the damage from this will be primarily caused to Armenia’,
said A. Mirzazade in an interview with the official website of the
ruling Yeni Azerbaijan (New Azerbaijan) party on Tuesday.

‘Turkey is a big country and the opening of borders with Armenia will
not bring it a special dividend’, added the MP.

According to Mirzazade, Azerbaijan will resolve Karabakh problem. "The
priority attached to the talks does not mean that Azerbaijan refused
the factor of war.

Resources allocated by Azerbaijan for the development of its army
are making inroads. The session, chaired by President Ilham Aliyev
at the Ministry of Defense, shows that our army is able to provide
the country’s territorial integrity, and this factor will be used’,
he said.

According to the MP, Armenia as a whole has a negative attitude towards
peace in the region. "Armenia puts territorial claim in respect of
the three states which surround it. Armenian occupation of Azerbaijani
territories, its territorial claims to Turkey and the Javakheti region
of Georgia create problems for the region and Armenia itself’, he said.

The Press Has Developed Into A Full-Fledged Institution, Despite Pro

THE PRESS HAS DEVELOPED INTO A FULL-FLEDGED INSTITUTION, DESPITE PRONLEMS
Lusine Vasilyan

"Radiolur"
04.05.2010 14:58

The total number of print media editions in Armenia reaches 60
thousand. The figure already speaks about the problems that exist
in the field of press, editor-in-chief of the Hraparak daily Armine
Ohanyan told a press conference today.

There are a lot of problems in the filed of print media, which range
form financial-economic to the moral-psychological ones. Summing up
the situation over the past 20 years, Armine Ohanyan says the number
of problems has not decreased.

There is no problem in the filed that would have bypassed the Haykakan
Zhamanak, director of the daily Anna Hakobyan said, adding however,
that she sees a positive tendency of solving the issues, although
the process is rather slow.

Despite problems the editors say the press has developed into a
full-fledged institution over the past 20 years.

HSBC Bank Armenia Announce Its Best Trade Customers Of 2009

HSBC BANK ARMENIA ANNOUNCE ITS BEST TRADE CUSTOMERS OF 2009

PanARMENIAN.Net
May 4, 2010 – 14:15 AMT 09:15 GMT

HSBC Bank Armenia cjsc held its first Trade Award ceremony and
announced its Best Trade Customers of 2009 on May 4, at its Yerevan
head office. It also announced the launch of a new Trade Academy in
Armenia, in cooperation with the SME Development National Centre.

Five customers each received Trade Award Certificates from Stuart
Nivison, Head of HSBC Trade and Supply Chain Europe, and a prize
of AMD one million to be used towards trade facilities. Awards were
granted in the following categories: Best Trade Customer; Best Trade
Customer – Documentary Credits; Best Trade Customer – Bank Guarantees;
Best Trade Customer – Collections and Best Trade Newcomer. The Trade
Awards are conducted on annual basis and may be expanded in the future.

"Across Europe and here in Armenia HSBC is focused on providing
advice and support to companies that want to trade and invest
internationally. These Trade Awards are an important recognition of
success and we hope the winners help to inspire and motivate others,"
said Stuart Nivison.

To increase trade activity and encourage businesses to look
internationally for opportunities, HSBC Bank Armenia has teamed up with
the SME Development National Centre and have drawn up a statement of
intent to work together to support trade in Armenia. The key element
of this is the delivery of Trade Academy workshops to educate and raise
awareness of trade related issues, and to simplify the whole end-to-end
process for customers and businesses trading internationally.

"In a country like Armenia it is vital to have a developed
infrastructure for trade finance and HSBC, with its 140 years of
trade expertise, is best positioned to deliver the required financial
education to Armenian importers and exporters," said Aram Pinajyan,
HSBC Bank Armenia Head of Commercial Banking.

"In the current economic climate it is paramount to help businesses
trade beyond national boundaries and in particular to encourage and
support Armenia’s export businesses," added Arthur Petrosyan, HSBC
Bank Armenia Trade and Supply Chain Manager.

Brussels Hosts Third Meeting Of "Democracy, Good Governance And Stab

BRUSSELS HOSTS THIRD MEETING OF "DEMOCRACY, GOOD GOVERNANCE AND STABILITY" PLATFORM

Panorama.am
03/05/2010

Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Karine Ghazinyan attended the
third meeting of Eastern Partnership "Democracy, good governance and
stability" platform in Brussels, April 29. Representatives of EU member
states and 6 partner states participated in the meeting, MFA reported.

In her speech Deputy Minister Ghazinyan highlighted the significance
Armenia attaches to the cooperation in the frames of the Eastern
Partnership, stressing Armenia’s readiness to actively involve in
the multi-faceted format of the program.

At the sitting, as public management and reforms were being discussed,
K. Ghazinyan referred to the process of reforms implemented in Armenia
particularly highlighting the measures undertaken by the Armenian
Government to combat corruption.

At the end of the meeting, within the framework of the "Democracy,
good governance and stability" platform, a decision was taken to
establish a working group of EU and 6 partner state representatives
to fight against corruption.

Mouradian: The Sound of Footsteps on April 24 in Istanbul

Mouradian: The Sound of Footsteps on April 24 in Istanbul
By: Khatchig Mouradian

Armenian Weekly
Fri, Apr 30 2010

If you were one of the few hundred people in Istanbul that publicly
commemorated the Armenian Genocide on April 24, 2010, you probably
heard the sound of footsteps.

Activists holding photos of murdered Armenian intellectuals during the
Genocide commemoration at the Haydarpasha Station in Istanbul. (Photo
by Mujgan Arpat)
I am not referring to the footsteps of the defiant Turks, Kurds, and
Armenians who gathered at open-air commemoration events. Nor am I
referring to the footsteps of counter-demonstrators holding placards
that read, `The Armenian Genocide is an imperialist lie,’ and yelling,
`Death to the Armenian Diaspora.’

Daniel Varoujan – the prominent Armenian poet who was arrested on April
24, 1915 and eventually killed, just like hundreds of his fellow
Armenian intellectuals – says in one of his poems that he can `hear the
footsteps of a rose-flooded dawn’ of victory. From a distance of 95
years, you probably were hearing, dear friend, the sound of the very
same footsteps.

I know I was.

And the sounds of footsteps were gradually becoming louder.

I was hearing those footsteps as I watched Kurdish women hold pictures
of their `disappeared’ sons and pictures of Armenian intellectuals
murdered in 1915. I was hearing those footsteps as I was at the
commemoration at the Haydarpasha Station. I was hearing those
footsteps as I was delivering a genocide commemoration lecture in
Beyoglu. And I was hearing those footsteps during the vigil on Taksim
Square.

An activist holding Varoujan’s picture at one of the commemoration
events in Istanbul on April 24. (Photo by Khatchig Mouradian)
The footsteps of Varoujan’s rose-flooded dawn of victory.

The victory of memory over amnesia, affirmation over denial, and
action over indifference.

On April 24, 2010, I was in Istanbul for you, Varoujan. For all that
your work, your life, and your murder means to me. And I, too, heard
the footsteps.

The Turkish version of this article appears in this week’s issue of Agos.

2010 World Expo In Shanghai To Kick Off Apr. 30 Evening

2010 WORLD EXPO IN SHANGHAI TO KICK OFF APR. 30 EVENING

PanARMENIAN.Net
April 30, 2010 – 11:12 AMT 06:12 GMT

The opening ceremony of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai will kick
off at the Expo Park on Friday night.

192 countries and 50 international organizations will take part
in the Shanghai Expo, which features 189 National Pavilion Days
and 39 International Organization Days as well as 20,000 cultural
performances.

The six-month event is expected to attract over 70 million visitors,
of which 3.5 million are from abroad. It will also be attended by
leaders from more than 100 countries, xinhuanet.com reports.

Armenia’s pavilion will feature the City of the Future, a model of
a new city to live in.

Vanes Martirosyan To Compete With Joe Greene

VANES MARTIROSYAN TO COMPETE WITH JOE GREENE

PanARMENIAN.Net
April 29, 2010 – 11:06 AMT 06:06 GMT

Armenian boxer Vanes Martirosyan (U.S.), who is boxing in the light
middleweight (69.9kg), will compete with undefeated American Joe
Greene on June 5, in Bronx (NY, U.S.)

The match between Martirosyan and Greene will be a part of a big
boxing event.

Turkish-Armenian Rapprochement: The End Of A Long Beginning

TURKISH-ARMENIAN RAPPROCHEMENT: THE END OF A LONG BEGINNING

Qantara (Dialogue with Islamic World)
hp/_c-476/_nr-1322/i.html
April 28 2010
Germany

A dialogue between Armenians and Turks on the Armenian genocide
appears to be an impossible prospect – but academics on both sides
are showing that the opposite is the case. Wolfgang Gust reports

A dialogue between Armenians and Turks on the Armenian genocide
appears to be an impossible prospect – but academics on both sides
are showing that the opposite is the case. Wolfgang Gust reports

Whenever Armenians and Turks discuss the Armenian genocide in
the German public arena, the clash is pre-programmed. Turkish
representatives attempt to silence their opposite numbers with the
same old arguments, while Armenian representatives insist on Turkish
recognition of the genocide as a pre-condition for any dialogue. But
there is another way of approaching the matter.

In early April, researchers working on the Armenian genocide met for
a workshop at Boston’s Clark University in the US. Among them were –
as usual – the most well-informed Armenians and – a first in recent
times – the most well-informed Turks.

Organisers of the event were Taner Akcam, holder of the Clark
University Kaloosdian/Mugar Chair, the only professorship in Armenian
Genocide Studies in the US, as well as the Strassler Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Co-sponsors were the "National Association for Armenian Studies
and Research" with Marc Mamigonian, as well as the US specialist on
genocide and modern German history at the University of Minnesota,
Eric Weitz.

The workshop focused on the Armenian genocide, and paid special
attention to its documentation in archives scattered across the world,
but also the question of how further research into the genocide should
be conducted.

On the way to normalisation

The event was a display of academic diversity; the lectures, the
discussion and even – in fact perhaps primarily – the diverging views
were highly informative. The Turkish academics made an excellent
contribution to the debate. One became witness to a process of
normalisation.

"We have a long road behind us, and an even longer road ahead of us,"
said Taner Akcam in summary. All participants had "experienced the
end of the beginning," he added.

This genocide is now no longer first and foremost the domain of
Armenian researchers, he said. European, American and Turkish
researchers in various disciplines also attended the workshop as
a way of integrating the subject into their own deliberations and
comparative studies of genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against
humanity. "This development will lead to higher standards in the
field of genocide research," said Akcam.

The genocide of Armenians is not portrayed globally from a unilateral
point of view, as many Turks maintain, but completely unambiguously –
and Turks who are interested in knowing the truth are making an ever
greater contribution to this presentation.

Shortly before the workshop, my wife and I released a new edition of
some 350 German Foreign Ministry files titled "Deportation Plans"
on our Internet portal , which focuses on the
publication of official documents.

These documents are hand-written, barely legible and therefore largely
unknown files on Armenians working for Germany. In addition to a
lack of civil courage on the part of the Germans, they primarily
show what Turkish officialdom disputes energetically to this day:
the power that enabled the Young Turk movement to decide on the fate
of each and every Armenian.

Only rudimentary details can be gleaned from the German files on
what role provincial authorities and local committees of Young Turks
played in this process. But just exactly what their role was in the
genocide was described by Ayhan Aktar, Turkish professor of sociology
at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, in his workshop lecture. Documents
from the Foreign Office of Germany and Aktar’s analysis of the Ottoman
administration provide very valuable insights into what was actually
happening on the ground at the time.

Academic cloak for sham version

Instead, the US genocide denier Professor Justin McCarthy, whose views
have long been disputed, was sent by Turkey to travel the length and
breadth of the country in a bid to drape an academic cloak over the
official Turkish sham version of events.

But many Turks now view the issue quite differently – thanks to recent
events in Turkey itself: increasing numbers of Turkish grandmothers
who reveal themselves as Armenians to their shocked grandchildren
shortly before they die, a Nobel prize winner who hauls the state
before the courts for refusing to concede that this was genocide,
an Armenian-Turkish intellectual murdered by the nationalist Hydra
and whose coffin was followed by vast crowds of mourners chanting:
"We are all Hrant Dink!" Turkey is waking up.

Over the past five years, the Turkish world as I perceive it has
undergone significant change. While my audience consisted almost
exclusively of Armenians, after I published my first book on the
genocide in the year 1993, now the majority are Turkish. They want
to know what really happened back then.

Three years ago, a Turkish spectator asked me after a public conference
in Berlin how he could verify my claims, which he doubted were true. I
referred him to my previously published book containing hundreds of
German Foreign Ministry documents on the genocide.

A few weeks ago, I heard back from this man, a Turkish national in
his mid-50s. We met up, and he told me his story: whenever possible,
once a week, he had been going to the political archive at the foreign
ministry to compare the files.

He told me that he had then realised that it was all true. He went
on to study further documents and made almost 800 pages of notes –
in Turkish. Many of the additional files that he had read were unknown
to me.

My interlocutor had almost outstripped me in his understanding of
the German documents. And of course, he was no longer the slightest
bit doubtful that the events of 1915/16 represented a classic case
of genocide.

Tentative dialogue

A grassroots movement has formed in the US and in Istanbul, which is
pursuing a clearly-defined goal: to meet up with Armenians, drink
tea together and to talk – to dispel all awkwardness and seek out
the truth about those years during World War One.

These people call themselves "Friends of Hrant Dink". In Germany,
the name "Projekt 2015" is under consideration. Ahead of the
100th anniversary of the start of the genocide, the children and
grandchildren of the victims and perpetrators want to have fathomed
one of the most terrible chapters in Ottoman history. And get to know
each other again.

For the first time, Turks, Kurds and Armenians have joined together
this year to remember the events of 24 April 1915, when members of the
Armenian elite in the Ottoman Empire were arrested and for the most
part killed. It is the beginning of a period of joint remembrance –
and, as recognised in Boston, the end of a long road for Turks in
particular.

Will the Armenians go with them? At the Clark Workshop Ron Suny,
Director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the
University of Michigan, complained that the Armenians have thus far
been too nationalistic.

This agitated the doyen of research into Armenia, Richard Hovannisian,
who said that even as a convinced Armenian patriot, he was also obliged
to find the truth. A dialogue would be possible with this approach.

Turkish ultras are in the process of losing their decades-long
dominance. Some two hundred Turks and several Armenians attended
an event in Frankfurt, Germany, to which a Turkish association had
invited Taner Akcam and myself.

Then half a dozen neatly dressed young men appeared. "There they are,"
a Turkish man said to me and pointed to the group. These were the Turks
who still dominated the scene a decade ago, and who now appeared as
almost stigmatised outsiders: Kemalists, once courted by the Soviets,
now representatives of an antiquated nationalism.

They are still trying to avert their failure, and are now even cozying
up to Armenian hardliners who are also not interested in dialogue.

The next few years will show whether the Turks, Kurds and Armenians
who are ready for dialogue can take the decisive step that researchers
of both nations have already sealed in Boston.

Wolfgang Gust

© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung / Qantara.de 2010 Translated from
the German

Wolfgang Gust worked as an editor at "Der Spiegel" until 1993. His
book "Der Völkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16. Dokumente aus dem
Politischen Archiv des deutschen Auswärtigen Amts" (The Genocide
against the Armenians 1915/16. Documents from the Political Archive at
the German Foreign Ministry) was published in 2005 by Klampen Verlag.

http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.p
www.armenocide.net

President Barack Obama Again Used The Armenian Term For The Armenian

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA AGAIN USED THE ARMENIAN TERM FOR THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MEDS YEGHERN

NOYAN TAPAN – ARMENIANS TODAY
APRIL 27
WASHINGTON

In his just issued April 24, 2010 statement, President Barack Obama,
expanded on his 2009 statement, again used the Armenian term for the
Armenian Genocide Meds Yeghern. We present below the full text of
the president’s statement which is reported by "Erkirmedia" TV.

"On this solemn day of remembrance, we pause to recall that ninety-five
years ago one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century began. In
that dark moment of history, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or
marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. Today
is a day to reflect upon and draw lessons from these terrible events.

I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and
my view of that history has not changed. It is in all of our interest
to see the achievement a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the
facts. I salute the Turks who saved Armenians in 1915 and am encouraged
by the dialogue among Turks and Armenians, and within Turkey itself,
regarding this painful history. Together, the Turkish and Armenian
people will be stronger as they acknowledge their common history and
recognize their common humanity.

Even as we confront the inhumanity of 1915, we also are inspired by
the remarkable spirit of the Armenian people. While nothing can bring
back those who were killed in the Meds Yeghern. The contributions
that Armenians have made around the world over the last ninety-five
years stand as a testament to the strength, tenacity and courage of
the Armenian people and it is a lasting triumph over those who set
out to destroy them.

Many Armenians came to the United States as survivors of the horrors
of 1915. Over the generations Americans of Armenian descent have
richened our communities, spurred our economy, and strengthened
our democracy. The strong traditions and culture of Armenians also
became the foundation of a new republic which has become a part of
the community of nations, partnering with the world community to
build a better future.

Today, we pause with them and with Armenians everywhere to remember
the awful events of 1915 with deep admiration for their contributions
which transcend this dark past and give us hope for the future."

Armen Khachatryan Appointed Armenia’s Ambassador To Belarus

ARMEN KHACHATRYAN APPOINTED ARMENIA’S AMBASSADOR TO BELARUS

armradio.am
27.04.2010 15:19

On April 26 President Serzh Sargsyan signed a decree to release Armen
Khachatryan from the duties of the Ambassador Extraordinary and
Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Armenia to Ukraine and appoint
him Armenia’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the
Republic of Belarus (seat in Minsk).

According to another presidential decree, Oleg Yesayan was released
form the duties of Armenia’s Permanent Representative in Statutory
and other Bodies of the Commonwealth of Independent states.