Author: Navasardian Karapet

IMPERFECT AND PARTIAL
R. SARGSYAN

Hayots Ashkhar Daily
Published on May 29, 2008
Armenia

This Is The Estimation Of The Prosecutor’s To Ombudsman’s Report

The General Prosecutor’s studied the extraordinary public report made
by RA Human Rights Defender and drew clear conclusions. Which is – by
that report the Ombudsman went beyond his commissions.

Moreover, the report includes unsigned, partial information exclusively
based on the publications in the press. Armen Harutyunyan didn’t try to
make use of the wide power given to the Ombudsman. He didn’t even try
to check the righteousness of the information published in the press.

In this respect the Prosecutor’s estimated the report as `imperfect and
partial’, which can be considered a political assessment. In general we
can say that by this he tried to create an impression among the
society, that the Ombudsmen is very much concerned about the settlement
of the developments which followed `March 1′. But how can he speak
about concern, in case when he didn’t make any proposals regarding the
settlement of the existing problems.

After all what is the obligation of the Ombudsman – to deliver
political speeches, or to make certain proposals to the competent
bodies regarding the correction of certain falsifications? In this case
not only did the report lack such proposals, but also the Ombudsman
gave instructions to inquest bodies, something that is beyond his
commissions.

Thus, why was it necessary for the Ombudsman to appear with an
extraordinary report? He could have grounded his public report in the
following way: `In case of the failure to settle issues of vital
importance and violation of human rights, the Ombudsman has the right
to appear with a public report.’

But A. Harutyunyan passed round the before mentioned legal base and
underscored: `The contents and the structure of the report is the
analyses of the presidential elections and the post-election
developments.’

`By the way it is not the base of an extraordinary report envisaged by
the law,’ the General Prosecutor’s underscores and adds: ` In our view
the Ombudsman has surpassed his commissions not only in terms of bases
and objectives, but also in terms of his obligations.’ It turned out
that `the Ombudsman shoulders constitutional obligations, to give
objective assessments to the created situation and look for ways out.’

But it is not clear from where the Ombudsman took those obligations;
one thing is obvious – the Constitution doesn’t envisage these
obligations for the Ombudsman.

It is very interesting that the Ombudsman doesn’t utter a word
regarding the fact that Levon Ter-Petrosyan manipulates wide masses and
that this manipulation has a very bad influence on them. Instead he
expresses his admiration on the skill of the opposition leader in
`massive unification and governing tricks’. In fact the Ombudsman over
again gives political assessment to the tricks used by this or that
candidate.

In this regard the Prosecutor’s gave a correct and strict assessment
saying: `The ombudsman tried to observe the situation by the
`sharpness’ of the opposition, ignoring the fact that according to the
results of the investigated criminal cases the `sharpness’ of the
opposition has serious connections with criminal liability, especially
because the masses were inspired not only by their sharp speeches but
also concrete breaches’.

Eventually according to the Prosecutor’s the Ombudsman is trying to
give instructions to the law enforcers, which is also beyond his
competences. The expressions such as: `it is necessary to clarify’ or
`¦must become a subject of inquest,’ testifies to the before mentioned
fact.

The Prosecutor’s expressed its objections regarding the assessment of
the Ombudsman given to March 1 developments. `The latter tries to
explain it as a manifestation of extremisms by the opposition and the
authorities. Whereas the extremism manifested by the authorities is
that the latter didn’t properly elucidate the speeches made during the
illegal demonstrations, instead they introduced facts regarding
violations of the Constitutional rights of others, etc.’

Thus, according to the Prosecutor’s the Ombudsman overlooked the fact
that the `peaceful’ demonstrations were often followed by the breaches
of social order as well as many other manifestations of massive and
long-lasting violations of constitutional rights.’

To be continued

PR Newswire (press release), NY
May 27 2008

AJA Raises Funds With Los Angeles Jewelry Runway Show

A Charitable Organization Comprised of Leading Jewelry Designers Comes
Together For a Good Cause

LOS ANGELES, May 27 /PRNewswire/ — Armenian Jewelers Association
(AJA), a charitable organization comprised of leading
Armenian-American Jewelry Designers, have announced today that they
have raised over $100,000 dedicated to their various charitable causes
with their 2nd annual jewelry runway show held on May 11, 2008 at the
Biltmore hotel in Los Angeles.

(Photo: 36)

Attended by the Who’s Who of the elite jewelry community, on the
special mother’s day version of the yearly show, all mothers received
a rose and enjoyed a unique Brazilian themed gathering. The attendees
of this black tie banquet affair were treated to a runway show
featuring jewelry from 10 Armenian Designers including Giantto
Designer Jewelry, Haytayan Jewelers, Inc., Kirkara, Luxiriator/Franco,
Inc., Media Imports Micheal M. Jewelry, Oro Diamante, Simon
G. Jewelry, and Von Dutch Watches.

The AJA was created in order to develop a stronger network of jewelers
in the U.S. and to help further develop and promote education
initiatives and programs for those youths interested in excelling in
the jewelry industry. The purpose of AJA is to draw on the heritage
and the diverse entrepreneurial and business strengths and experience
of its members in order to increase communication and cooperation
between U.S. jewelers, to enhance the professional image, promote the
interests and assist in the development and expansion of educational
initiatives of the future generations of the jewelry industry.

Part of the proceeds from the event will go to an educational relief
fund set up to help encourage youth and to provide them with the
valued support they need to get through school and to get a start in a
more than successful profession.

For more information on the AJA, please visit their web site at

/retail/20080527/LATU03627052008-1.html

Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
May 27 2008

OSCE official: `If Azerbaijani Government appeals, we will send
fact-finding mission to Nagorno Karabakh in regard to arsons’

[ 27 May 2008 14:06 ]

Baku. Tamara Grigoryeva -APA. `OSCE cannot pass a unilateral decision
on fact-finding mission to Nagorno Karabakh to estimate damage
assessment of arsons. The Government should pass a decision on it’,
David Swalley, OSCE Regional Desk Officer for the Southern Caucasus
told APA.

The OSCE official noted that the Government of Azerbaijan had not
appealed to the organization to send mission to the region. He
mentioned that there were several recommendations for Azerbaijani and
Armenian Governments in the report last year.

`We are engaged in observation of implementation of recommendations at
present. These are recommendations, but not commitments. We cannot
insist on implementation of these recommendations. If there is any
problem, we will help to both countries’, he said. Mr. David Swalley
has estimated arsons committed in Nagorno Karabakh as painful fact.

`These arsons have caused damage to flora and fauna’, he said.

PRESIDENT: ARMENIAN FINANCIAL SYSTEM ABLE TO TRANSFORM TO REGIONAL FINANCIAL CENTER

ARKA
May 26, 2008

YEREVAN, May 26. /ARKA/. Armenian financial system has real potential
for transforming to a regional financial center, said Armenian
President Serge Sargsian at the financial and banking conference held
in Armenian resort town of Dilijan.

The President expressed belief that this idea should guide the
government work in the next few years.

The authorities are well aware of the advantages on this way, but
they know also the problems and the obstacles, Sargsian said adding
that the government will aim at strengthening the advantages and
intensely attracting any world innovations to Armenia.

Sargsian pointed out the intention of the authorities to seek for
international contribution and establish stable trends on Armenia’s
financial markets and expressed his positive attitude toward OMX
Scandinavian exchange operator’s coming to Armenia. "We should continue
taking similar efficient steps in this direction," the President said.

The first financial and banking conference in Dilijan was organized by
the Union of Banks of Armenia and was attended by Armenian President
Serge Sargsian and the Premier Tigran Sargsian. The aim of the
conference was to ascertain main directions of further development in
Armenian financial and banking system and its role in the country’s
development.

‘ADORATION’ A SIMPLE FAMILY STORY, SAYS DIRECTOR EGOYAN

Agence France Presse
May 23 2008

CANNES, France (AFP) — Canada’s Atom Egoyan, in the running for
the Cannes festival top prize with "Adoration," said the complex,
multi-themed film is at heart a simple story of an orphan who wants
to find out what happened to his parents.

"The story of his parents is kept from him for various reasons and
as a result he’s compelled to create his own story," he said in
an interview.

But the movie’s simple premise provides a backdrop for a flurry of
themes such as the impact of new media on our lives, inter-cultural
miscommunication, victimhood, and the collective fears of the
post-September 11 world.

"I think the most predominant theme is how do we negotiate family
histories," Egoyan, whose work often deals with alienation and the
subjective nature of truth, told AFP.

"Every family has a central myth and that myth is based on an
arrangement of events that may or may not have happened, that are used
to sustain illusions or aspirations of what that family should be."

"Adoration" tells how a Toronto school teacher, played by the
director’s wife Arsine Khanjian, asks her students to translate from
French a magazine article about a Middle Eastern terrorist who plants a
bomb in his pregnant girlfriend’s bag as she is about to take a flight.

One of her students, Simon, played by Devon Bostick, turns the exercise
into a fictional quest in which the couple become his parents.

His real parents, one Canadian and the other Lebanese, died in a car
accident which Simon suspects was deliberately caused by his father.

He goes online with his fictional family history and rapidly sparks
a flood of video chatroom reactions.

"His friends respond with disbelief, asking why he had never told
them this before," said Egoyan. "And then there are responses from
people who were on that plane, mourning a catastrophe that never
happened. The story gets very dense with all these possibilities."

"Then it all gets stripped away as we come to understand what’s
actually happening," said Egoyan, whose 12th feature film premiered
late Thursday, one of the 22 films in the running for the Palme d’Or
prize to be announced Sunday.

The teenager has to move beyond the cyberworld and find real objects
and places to give meaning to his life, "as opposed to the instant
meaning accorded to the sea of responses he is dealing with over the
Internet," said the director.

The complex plot is classic Egoyan fare. As in his previous works
"The Sweet Hereafter" and "Exotica," a series of flashbacks and the
unfolding plot slowly reveal the truth of the unlikely connections
between a group of people.

Egoyan’s own background explains his interest in cross-cultural
issues. He grew up in Canada, where he still lives, but is of Armenian
origin and was born in Cairo.

INDICES OF SERVICES GREW, INDUSTRY WENT DOWN

KarabakhOpen
23-05-2008 13:50:20

In January-March 2008 the GDP in NKR totaled 14,136 million drams
compared with 12,063.8 million drams in 2007, said the head of
the National Statistics Service Manushak Minasyan during the press
conference yesterday.

According to her, service had a positive impact on the growth of
the GDP, 15.2 percent, the negative effect is the fall in industry
(8.2 percent), which was caused by fall in the rate of construction.

"Of the 5.6 percent growth of the GDP 2.8 percent was provided by
the sphere of government and defense, 1.2 percent communications,
1.1 percent industry, finance and loans. The share of the VAT on
service went up by 5.4 points. The share of production of goods went
down by 3.5 percent, tax on goods and imports by 2.4 percent," said
the head of the Statistics Service.

NASIB NASIBLI: "WE SHOULD STOP BEING SURPRISED THAT IRAN CONSIDERS IT NORMAL TO HAVE DIRECT CONTACTS WITH KARABAKH SEPARATISTS"

Today.Az
ws/politics/45156.html
May 22 2008
Azerbaijan

"We should stop being surprised that Iran, which officially recognizes
the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, considers it normal not only
to develop comprehensive relations with Armenia, which occupied 20%
of Azerbaijani lands, but also to have direct contacts with Karabakh
separatists".

The due announcement was made by Milli Medjlis deputy from Musavat
party, former ambassador of Azerbaijan to Iran Nasib Nasibli,
commenting on the information that the Telecommunication Kish Company,
one of the mobile operators of Iran, concluded a roaming agreement
with the Karabakh Telecom company, operating in the occupied land of
Azerbaijan-Karabakh, thus violating international norms.

"Such close cooperation of Iran with Armenians does not comply with the
officially declared position of official Tehran, which states that it
takes care of the interests of Muslims in the whole world. But Iran
is used to conducting of such a policy, while Azerbaijan should be
aware of it and react in the duly manner", said Nasibli.

AFTER PERFORMING IN SEMI-FINAL OF EUROVISION – 2008 CONTEST SIRUSHO ENTERS FINAL STAGE

Noyan Tapan

Ma y 22, 2008

YEREVAN, MAY 22, NOYAN TAPAN. Sirusho, who represented Armenia in the
semi-final of the Eurovision – 2008 international contest, which was
held late in the night of May 20, entered the final stage. Among the
representatives of the 19 countries, which took part in the first
semi-final stage, the representatives of 10 countries, including
Russia, Norway, Israel and Azerbaijan, gained access to the final
stage due to the sms messages and calls of TV watchers.

It should also be mentioned that the second semi-final of the contest
will take place on May 22 and the final one on May 24.

WHEN THE KREMLIN TRIED A LITTLE OPENNESS
By Philip Taubman

St. Petersburg Times
May 20 2008
Russia

A dash of openness can be a dangerous thing in an autocratic
state. Mikhail Gorbachev discovered this two decades ago when his
campaign to inject some daylight into Soviet society doubled back on
him like a heat-seeking missile.

Now China’s leaders are playing with the same volatile political
chemistry as they give their own citizens and the world an unexpectedly
vivid look at the earthquake devastation in the nation’s southwest
regions. The rulers of cyclone-battered Myanmar, by contrast, are
sticking with the authoritarian playbook, limiting access and even
aid to the stricken delta region where tens of thousands of people
were killed by the storm.

While China’s response to its natural catastrophe is certainly more
humane, and is only a small step toward openness, it could set in
motion political forces that might, over time, be unsettling. That’s
especially true in an age of instant communications, even in a nation
like China, which tries to control Internet access.

"When you start opening up and loosen controls, it becomes a slippery
slope," Jack Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow during much of
the Gorbachev period, said last week as he watched the events in
China. "You quickly become a target for everyone with a grievance,
and before long people go after the whole system."

Chinese leaders are well aware of the Soviet experience. The bloody
crackdown against the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989
seemed motivated in part by fears that a relaxation of repression would
lead to a replay of Soviet turbulence in China. It was no accident
that China was the first country to translate and reprint Matlock’s
1995 account of the demise of the Soviet Union, "Autopsy on an Empire."

And China has taken a different reform path, in effect offering its
people robust economic growth, with a degree of responsiveness when
problems can be blamed on local officials, in exchange for continued
one-party rule. Playing up the response to the earthquake, even as
China restricts coverage of repression in Tibet, could prove a shrewd
move, rather than one that cascades into instability.

Still, it is worth recalling a time when a little openness flew out
of control.

As a correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times in
Moscow in the late 1980s, I had a ringside seat to observe the slow
disintegration of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. The collapse of
the Soviet empire and dissolution of the Communist Party were not
exactly what he had in mind when he took power in 1985 and launched
his twin policies of glasnost and perestroika.

As events unfolded, it was like watching a scientist start a nuclear
chain reaction that races out of control, eventually consuming him
and all those around him.

Gorbachev realized that his country was rotting from within, paralyzed
by repression and ideological rigidity, a backward economy and a
deep cynicism among Russians about their government. "We can’t go
on living like this," he told his wife, Raisa, hours before he was
named Soviet leader, he recalled in his 1995 memoirs.

But he clearly had no inkling of where his initiatives were headed
when, shortly after taking office, he broke new ground for a Kremlin
leader by mingling with citizens in Leningrad and giving unscripted
interviews.

As glasnost gathered force in the years that followed, it ripped away
the layers of deceit that were the foundation of the Soviet state. Each
step undermined the authority of the party and the government.

The explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in April 1986
shattered the Kremlin’s credibility — and gave a powerful impetus to
glasnost. The Kremlin, like the Burmese leaders after the cyclone,
seemed paralyzed by the accident. The first government announcement
— an innocuous 44 words — came more than a day after the reactor
meltdown, and hours after Sweden detected alarming levels of radiation
in its air.

The glacial flow of information imperiled thousands of people living
in the accident area. Gorbachev, embarrassed by the debacle, redoubled
his efforts to make the government and party more transparent.

The truth about Stalin’s brutality, and even Lenin’s, was exposed
as a bright floodlight illuminated the hidden recesses of Soviet
history. Newspapers and journals wrote honestly for the first time
about government corruption and mismanagement. Artists, playwrights,
filmmakers and writers looked unsparingly at the abuses of the
Soviet system.

Last week, Svetlana Savranskaya recalled the electrifying days in 1987
and 1988 when the truth about Soviet history trumped the distortions
that had long been taught at Moscow State University, where she was
a student.

But resistance to the accelerating change grew as the rivets that held
together Soviet society started to snap. Savranskaya, now an analyst
at the National Security Archive, a research institution at George
Washington University, challenged the traditional history textbooks
used at the Moscow high school where she taught history. She was soon
forced to teach English instead.

"Gorbachev thought he could control glasnost, and use it, but in the
end, even he turned against it," she said.

The scale of opposition became clear in March 1988, when an obscure
chemistry teacher named Nina Andreyeva attacked Gorbachev’s reform
agenda in Sovietskaya Rossia, a prominent newspaper. The attack,
which filled a full page, and its timing — while Gorbachev was
traveling in Yugoslavia — had the hallmarks of a Kremlin mugging.

That was all but confirmed when several members of the ruling Politburo
defended the article at a meeting convened when Gorbachev returned
to Moscow.

"A split was inevitable," Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs about the
Politburo gathering. "The question was, when?"

A striking moment of glasnost came with the killer earthquake in
Armenia in December 1988. Faced with the deaths of tens of thousands
of Soviet citizens, and desperate for outside aid, the Kremlin lifted
restrictions on travel to Armenia. Western reporters in Moscow were
stunned to discover that they could just go to the airport and catch a
flight to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, no advance government approval
required. Foreign relief flights, including U.S. military planes
carrying food, water and medical supplies, were welcomed in Yerevan.

Sounds a lot like China today.

As the old regime frayed, Gorbachev wasn’t prepared for the assault
of long-repressed political forces let loose by his reforms. The most
potent was nationalism, the fierce pride in nationhood that Stalin
and his successors had tried to suffocate in places like Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia; Armenia and Georgia; and throughout Eastern Europe.

Once uncorked, nationalism essentially overwhelmed Gorbachev, who,
to his credit, choose not to try to hold together the Soviet empire
by force.

Russia today, despite the restoration of authoritarian rule by Vladimir
Putin, enjoys a degree of freedom that was inconceivable at the height
of Communist rule. Glasnost helped make it that way.

China’s leaders may not take comfort in that thought.

As Matlock said last week, "If you remove the power of repressive
state organs while stirring up a nation with many problems, you will
get a process you can’t control."

Philip Taubman is deputy opinion page editor at The New York Times,
where this comment first appeared.

PM TIGRAN SARGSYAN CONDOLES WITH EDWARD AGHAANOV’S FAMILY AND FRIENDS

armradio.am
20.05.2008 14:46

RA Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan issued a message of condolence
connected with the death of Edward Aghajanov. The message states:

"With great pain I learnt about the sudden death of famous economist
and political scientist, Dean of the Chair of Economy at the Slavonic
University Edward Aghajanov.

Edward Aghajanov was always notable for active work, unique economic
analyses, and was not indifferent toward the developments in our
country and had his clear views and approaches.

I extend my deep condolences to Edward Aghajanov’s family, relatives
and friends."