Author: Toganian Liana

TURKEY’S ERDOGAN SAYS PARLIAMENT TO APPROVE IRAQ RAID (UPDATE3)
By Mark Bentley

Bloomberg
Oct 16 2007

Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said
the parliament will approve plans for an incursion into northern Iraq
to attack Kurdish militants, defying a U.S. demand to show restraint.

There is a "common will" among lawmakers to sanction a cross-border
assault when they vote on the proposal tomorrow, Erdogan told a
televised meeting of his party in Ankara. He said a military strike
would come under international laws governing self-defense.

Crude oil rose to a record $87.97 a barrel in New York on concern
an attack will disrupt crude shipments from Iraq and heighten
instability in the Middle East. Turkey says it must act because
U.S. and Iraqi forces have failed to control the 3,500 members of the
PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, who are sheltering in Iraq while
they pursue a two-decade conflict with Turkish forces to gain autonomy.

Turkey, with the second-largest army in the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, sent troops into northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK rebels
several times in the decade before the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam
Hussein in 2003.

Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi was in the Turkish capital today
for emergency talks with Erdogan. Iraq’s cabinet held an unscheduled
meeting in Baghdad to discuss efforts to avert a Turkish military
strike.

Hope for Resolution

The Turkish prime minister said he expects Iraq’s Kurds to distance
themselves from the PKK and added that he hoped Turkey won’t need to
resort to an attack on the group’s members in northern Iraq.

The PKK’s fight for autonomy has cost almost 40,000 lives. The group is
designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union.

Turkey must "show restraint" and avoid a military raid, the U.S. said.

"We all have an interest in a stable Iraq and a desire to see the PKK
brought to justice," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in a
statement late yesterday. "But we urge the Turks to continue their
discussions with us and the Iraqis and to show restraint from any
potentially destabilizing actions."

Turkey should play a "constructive" role in stabilizing Iraq and
respect the nation’s sovereignty, European Commission spokeswoman
Krisztina Nagy told a Brussels news conference today. Majority-Muslim
Turkey’s membership talks with the European Union, which began two
years ago, have stumbled over the nation’s occupation of northern
Cyprus.

Turkish Deaths

Erdogan’s government asked parliament to approve the incursion after
more than two dozen soldiers and civilians were killed over the last
two weeks in attacks blamed on the PKK. A Turkish soldier was killed
when a landmine exploded in the mainly Kurdish southeast today,
the CNN Turk news channel said.

Erdogan’s plan, which requires the backing of a simple majority of
lawmakers in Turkey’s 550-seat parliament, is supported by the main
opposition Republican People’s Party and Nationalist Action Party.

The measure will empower Erdogan to order a military strike within
a maximum period of one year.

Relations between the U.S. and Turkey, both NATO allies, worsened
last week after a U.S. House of Representatives committee passed
a resolution labeling the World War I-era killing of Armenians by
Ottoman Turks as genocide. Turkey withdrew its ambassador to Washington
in protest.

Oil Price Rises

Oil has gained more than $3 since Erdogan issued a written request
yesterday to Turkish lawmakers to approve military action. Crude
for November delivery increased as much as $1.84, or 2.1 percent,
to $87.97 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile
Exchange, the highest since the futures were introduced in 1983. The
contract traded at $87.43 at 12:38 a.m. in London.

"The concern is that an attack will destabilize Iraq further and that
will disrupt the limited output from Iraq," said Dariusz Kowalczyk,
chief investment strategist with CFC Seymour Ltd. in Hong Kong. "And
that may carry over to the whole Middle East."

Turkey’s military stands ready to invade northern Iraq and fight
Kurdish guerrillas in the mountains even in winter, the Milliyet
newspaper reported, citing General Ergin Saygun. Turkey is already
responding to cross-border rocket attacks by the PKK, Saygun added.

Turkey has stopped short of an incursion into northern Iraq since the
U.S.-led invasion, instead attacking PKK units as they have entered
Turkey to launch attacks.

FROM THE ASHES OF FUNDAMENTALISM
Sharif Nashashibi

The Guardian, UK
Oct 15 2007

The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury sees a way forward through
separation of religion and state, and acceptance of diversity.

About Webfeeds October 15, 2007 7:30 PM | Printable version The first
time I read about Elias Khoury, I was surprised to find that this
award-winning Lebanese novelist had not only espoused the power of
the pen (literally – he does not use keyboards), but also that of
the bullet.

One does not readily associate eloquent, fantasy novel-writing
with real-life militancy. When I interviewed Khoury at a public
meeting in London last week it was hard to believe that this quiet,
silver-haired man of such a small frame had enlisted in Fatah – the
largest resistance group in the Palestine Liberation Organisation –
in the 1970s, and fought in the last Lebanese civil war.

In view of the current volatility in the Middle East, I must admit
that I was more interested in hearing about Khoury’s political views
than his renowned literature, and the audience seemed to agree. In
particular, I found his background take on pan-Arabism intriguing,
deeply cynical and yet somehow hopeful.

The Arab national movement seems to have died multiple deaths,
according to Khoury. The first was due to the Sykes-Picot agreement
that resulted in the British and French division of the Arab
world after the first world war. Then there was the 1948 Nakba
("catastrophe") – when Israel was established on the ruins of Palestine
– and the Arab military dictatorships that followed. He also cited the
failure in 1961 of the union between Egypt and Syria, "because this
type of military Arab nationalism based on dictatorship couldn’t work".

The final death knell of the pan-Arab national movement was the
military defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967. What has filled the
void since then is fundamentalism, "a very complicated phenomenon"
created by "the Saudis, Americans and Pakistanis with oil money
to fight the last battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan,"
he added.

Fundamentalism is taking the region to "a new catastrophe, the worst
one," which is a Sunni-Shia war, said Khoury, a Christian who describes
himself as having an Islamic background, who used to go to church and
read the Qur’an at the same time. He warned "our Israeli cousins"
not to wish for such an outcome, for this would lead the region,
including Israel, to self-destruction.

The Arab media is among the victims of fundamentalism and dictatorship,
according to Khoury. "The pan-Arab newspapers are Saudi, and the
pan-Arab satellite TV stations are either Saudi or Qatari, which means
that all the media is under the control of a fundamentalist ideology,"
he said. "And the media is under the service of regimes."

The Arab world is in a deep darkness, Khoury added, due to several
factors: "Israeli occupation and humiliation of the Palestinian
people, mainly"; "dictatorships that are becoming more and more
savage" (citing Syria’s current role in Lebanon, and the Egyptian
republic’s transformation "into a kind of monarchy"); and the US
invasion of Iraq, "which is leading to a total chaotic system in the
Middle East". Describing the invasion as not an error but a crime,
he continued: "This is not the way to get rid of a dictatorship. This
is the way to create from one dictator hundreds of dictators that
you are seeing in Iraq nowadays."

Khoury even called into question the viability of the region’s
nations. "The idea of the nation state can’t work in our societies
because the nation state needs a kind of ethnic purification," he
said, citing Turkey’s massacres of the Armenians and Israel’s ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinians. He said the kind of problems being
seen in Iraq and Lebanon could occur at any time in Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain, and North Africa between Arabs and Berbers.

The only solution for the region is "a rational, secular, democratic
approach towards politics and culture," according to Khoury, who has
put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, with his involvement
in the establishment of the Democratic Left Movement, one of the few
political parties in Lebanon calling for a secular state.

"We have to invent a political system that separates religion and
state, accepts diversity, and goes back to the idea that Arabic
culture was never one-dimensional," he said.

Current Arab literature is going some way towards this, whereby one
can pick up an Arabic novel and tell from its style and content where
the author is from, according to Khoury, who has written 11 novels.

"This is a very important step towards accepting and promoting
diversity in Arabic culture." Such diversity must be the basis for
unity, he added.

Khoury says his prescription, which "might have been popular 30 years
ago," is now "totally unpopular in the Arab world". He believes,
however, that the experiences of fundamentalism will bring about a
resurgence in his way of thinking. "This is a long struggle and my
feeling is that we have to begin again from scratch, but we have no
other choice."

And the prospects for this struggle? "I’m hopeful, but history is
hopeless."

PRESS RELEASE
Catholicosate of Cilicia
Communication and Information Department
Contact: V.Rev.Fr.Krikor Chiftjian, Communications Officer
Tel: (04) 410001, 410003
Fax: (04) 419724
E- mail: [email protected]
Web:

PO Box 70 317
Antelias-Lebanon

Armenian version: nian.htm

HIS HOLINESS ARAM I WILL ADDRESS
THE CONVENTION OF EUROPEAN ARMENIANS

His Holiness Aram I departed for Brussels, Belgium on the morning of October
13 to attend the 2nd Convention of European Armenians and deliver His
Pontifical address as Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia. The Pontiff
heads a delegation which includes Archbishop Varoujan Hergelian (Pontifical
Vicar to Cyprus), Bishop Khoren Doghramadjian (Primate of the Diocese of
Greece) and V. Rev. Krikor Chiftjian (Communications Officer of the
Catholicosate of Cilicia).

Following the conference, the Catholicos will move on to Geneva, where he
will hold ecumenical meetings and then to Naples, Italy, where he will
deliver a lecture in the international conference organized by Sant’Egidio.

##
The Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia is one of the two Catholicosates of
the Armenian Orthodox Church. For detailed information about the Ecumenical
activities of the Cilician Catholicosate, you may refer to the web page of
the Catholicosate, The Cilician
Catholicosate, the administrative center of the church is located in
Antelias, Lebanon.

LABELING GENOCIDE WON’T HALT IT

Los Angeles Times, CA
Oct 15 2007

Armenians were murdered, but the current Turkish regime shouldn’t be
faulted for what happened more than 90 years ago.

Last Wednesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee condemned mass
murder in the Middle East. Quite right, you may say — except that
this mass murder took place more than 90 years ago.

The committee approved a resolution, which could go to the House
floor this week, calling on the president "to ensure that the foreign
policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and
sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing
and genocide . . . relating to the Armenian genocide."

Now, let’s be clear about three things: First, what genocide means;
second, whether or not the Armenians suffered one; third, whether or
not it was smart for a U.S. congressional panel to say so.

The term "genocide" is a neologism dating back to 1944, coined by
Raphael Lemkin to describe what the Nazis had done to the Jews of
Europe. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide sets out a clear definition: Genocide covers
"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole
or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such":

* Killing members of the group;

* Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

* Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

* Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

* Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

On this basis, did the Armenians suffer a genocide? For my latest
book, "The War of the World," I reviewed the available evidence,
including not just the reports of Western diplomats and missionaries
but also, crucially, those of representatives of Turkey’s ally,
Austria-Hungary. It’s damning.

For example, according to Joseph Pomiankowski, the Austrian military
plenipotentiary in Constantinople, the Turks had undertaken the
"eradication of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor" (he used the terms
Ausrottung and Vernichtung, which will be familiar to students of
the Holocaust). There is also contemporary Turkish testimony that
corroborates such reports.

Armenian males of military age were rounded up and shot. Women and
children were herded onto trains, driven into the desert and left to
die. The number of Armenians who were killed or died prematurely may
have exceeded 1 million, a huge proportion of a prewar population that
numbered, at the very most, 2.4 million, but was probably closer to
1.8 million. With good reason, the American consul in Izmir declared
that the fate of the Armenians "surpasse[d] in deliberate .

. . horror and in extent anything that has hitherto happened in the
history of the world."

It is absurd, then, that Turkish politicians and some academics (not
all of them Turks) insist that the issue is somehow open to debate,
though there is certainly room for more research to be done in the
Turkish archives. And it is deplorable that writers in Turkey can still
be prosecuted for describing the fate of the Armenians as genocide.

Yet I remain far from convinced that anything has been gained by last
week’s resolution. Indeed, something may well have been lost.

Relations between the U.S. and Turkey were once good. The heirs of
Kemal Ataturk were staunch allies during the Cold War. Today, Turkey
allows essential supplies to Iraq — around 70% of all the air cargo
that goes to U.S. forces — to pass through Turkish airspace.

Moreover, the regime in Ankara currently offers the best available
evidence that Islam and democracy can coexist.

Now consider this: For years, a campaign of terrorism has been waged
against Turkey by separatists from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or
PKK. The Turks are currently preparing to launch cross-border strikes
on PKK bases in the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. To say the least,
this will not be helpful at a time when Iraq teeters on the brink of
bloody fragmentation.

Does gratuitously bringing up the Armenian genocide increase or
decrease our leverage in Ankara? The angry responses of Turkey’s
president and prime minister provide the answer. On Thursday,
President Abdullah Gul called the resolution an "attempt to sacrifice
big issues for minor domestic political games" — an allusion to the
far-from-negligible Armenian American lobby, which has long pressed
for a resolution like this.

The absurdity is that the genocide of 1915 was not perpetrated by
today’s Turkish Republic, established in 1923, but by the Ottoman
Empire, which collapsed at the end of World War I. You might as well
blame the United States for the deportation of Acadians from Nova
Scotia during the French and Indian Wars.

"If we hope to stop future genocides, we need to admit to those
horrific acts of the past," argued Rep. Brad Sherman, a California
Democrat and a sponsor of the resolution. Really? My sense is that all
the resolutions in the world about past genocides will do precisely
nothing to stop the next one.

And if — let’s just suppose — the next genocide happens in Iraq,
and the United States finds itself impotent to prevent it, the blame
will lie as much with this posturing and irresponsible Congress as
with anyone.

AZG Armenian Daily #187, 13/10/2007

Genocide Recognition

RESOLUTION 106 TO BE CONSIDERED DURING THIS SESSION

According to information received from the Armenian Assembly of
America, Speaker of the US Congress House of Representatives Nancy
Pelosi announced that the Resolution 106 on Armenian Genocide will
have been included in the agenda of the House of Representatives by
November 22, the date when the Congress ends its autumn session.

On the other hand, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defence
Minister Robert Gates called upon Ms. Pelosi not to submit Resolution
106 to the plenary session of the House of Representatives. To be
reminded, Rice and Gates had spoken against the adoption of the
Resolution already on October 10.

Translated by A.M

Public TV, Armenia
Oct 12 2007

Armenian minister unruffled by Turkish attack on Iraq

[Presenter] Touching on the deployment of Turkish troops near the
Iraqi-Turkish border, Armenian Defence Minister Mikayel Harutyunyan
said today that Turkey’s attack on Iraq is not desirable. However,
our borders are well-defended and Armenia is following events in the
region, he added.

[Harutyunyan] The Russian border guards defend our border with
Turkey. Certainly, we will follow events happening there and we
should be ready for everything. I am sure that these decisions [by
Turkey] have nothing to do with Armenia, but we should always be
ready.

ArmInfo Agency, Armenia
Oct 12 2007

Australian company Iberian Resources to increase gold output in
Armenia almost 30 times in 2009

ArmInfo. From October 1, 2009, the Australian company Iberian
Resources is planning to increase the gold output in Armenia to 10 kg
per day as against the present 10 kg per month, Manvel Bagratyan, the
director of the company’s Armenian representative office, told
journalists during his visit to Meghri, Thursday.

According to him, the capacity will be increased due to a new plant
to be built in Meghri. At the moment, the present plant is processing
up to 7 thsd tons of ore per month, and the capacity of the new plant
will total 2 thsd tons of ore per day. As a result, the number of
employees (400 people) will double. M.Bagratyan noted that the
present plant is currently extracting gold by means of gravitation
method (mechanical way) and the extraction ratio totals 40%. The rest
of the ore is stored in tailing dumps until it its deeper procession
by means of new methods at the new plant. The old plant will be
closed, and the new one will extract gold by means of chemical method
(according to international technology) with use of cyanides, which
will contribute to growth of extraction ratio to 97%, M.Bagratyan
said.

M.Bagratyan said that the whole project is estimated at $65 mln,
$18-20 mln of them to be spent on construction of the new plant.
About $5-6 mln will be spent on supplementary exploration of gold
reserves. Investments will also be made in improving of
infrastructures and exploitation of the deposit. The plant will be
built on a waste plot of land, as the company tries to minimize the
possible ecological damage, he said.

M.Bagratyan pointed out that Iberian Resources has been exploiting
the Terterasar gold deposit in Meghri in the south of Armenia since
1995, as well as the polymetallic Lichkvaz-Tey deposit, which is 50
km away from the Terterasar deposit. According to preliminary data,
the Lichkvaz-Tey deposit contains 3,6 mln tons of ore and 17 tons of
gold with the average gold percentage being 5 g per ton. The
Terterasar deposit contains 100 thsd tons of ore and 3 tons of gold
with the average gold percentage being 10 g per ton. Both deposits
are polymetallic and also contain silver, lead, copper, however, the
company focused its attention on gold extraction, M.Bagratyan said.
He added that in 2008 supplementary exploration of gold reserves will
be carried out to re-estimate them.

Alalam News Network, Iran
Oct 12 2007

PM: Turkey Not Wait for US Permission

ANKARA, Turkey, Oct 12–Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said
Friday that Turkey would not be deterred by the possible diplomatic
consequences if it decides to stage a cross-border offensive into
Iraq against Kurdish rebels.

"If such an option is chosen, whatever its price, it will be paid,”
Erdogan told reporters in response to a question about the
international repercussions of such a decision, which would strain
ties with the United States and Iraq. "There could be pros and cons
of such a decision, but what is important is our country’s
interests.”

Erdogan also had harsh words for the United States, which opposes a
Turkish incursion into Iraq because it could disrupt one of its few
relatively stable areas.

"Did they seek permission from anyone when they came from a distance
of 10,000 kilometers and hit Iraq?” he said. "We do not need anyone
else’s advice.”

Analysts say Turkey could be less restrained about defying the United
States because of a US congressional committee’s approval of a
resolution labeling the mass killings of Armenians around the time of
World War I as genocide.

"Democrats are harming the future of the United States and are
encouraging anti-American sentiments,” Erdogan said. Democratic
Party leaders in the House of Representatives support the resolution.

Erdogan said Turkey was ready to sacrifice good ties with Washington
if necessary.

"Let it snap from wherever it gets thin,” Erdogan said using a
Turkish expression that means breaking ties with someone or
something.

"In the United States, there are several narrow-minded legislators
who can’t think of their own interests and who cannot understand the
importance of Turkey,” Mercan said.

Erdogan said Turkey has long been seeking the cooperation of Iraq and
the United States in its fight against Kurdish guerrillas, but there
has been no crackdown on the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party, which has
bases in Iraq. Erdogan said a recent anti-terrorism deal signed with
Iraq was not valid since it had not been approved by Iraq’s
parliament yet.

The Turkish parliament was expected to approve a government request
to authorize an Iraq campaign as early as next week, after a holiday
ending the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

"We are making necessary preparations to be ready in case we decide
on a cross-border operation since we don’t have patience to lose more
time,” Erdogan said, adding that Turkey has lost 30 people in rebel
attacks over the past two weeks.

A Turkish soldier was killed in a mine explosion on Thursday night on
Mt. Gabar in southeastern Sirnak province, which borders Iraq,
authorities said Friday.

The private Dogan news agency reported, meanwhile, that troops and
rebels were fighting on a mountain near the town of Uludere, in
Sirnak. The rebels fired mortar shells and opened fire with heavy
machine guns from the Iraqi side of the border, sparking a response
from Turkish soldiers, the agency said. One soldier was injured in
the clash.

Bahoz Erdal, a senior rebel commander, said the PKK fighters were
moving further inside Turkey and taking new "positions” in the face
of attacks from Turkey, pro-Kurdish Firat News Agency reported
Friday. The agency is based in Belgium.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people since 1984.

Spiegel Online, Germany
Oct 12 2007

ARMENIAN LOBBY’S TRIUMPH:
Genocide Resolution Risks Shattering Relations with Turkey

By Gregor Peter Schmitz in Washington

A small resolution with a big effect: A US Congressional committee
has voted to call the massacre of Armenians during World War I
genocide — a move that now threatens to shatter the Turkish-American
friendship. The history of the resolution is a lesson in the power of
lobbying.

AFP
Picture circa 1915 of Turkish soldiers standing next to the hanged
bodies of Armenians.
Stephen Walt is a down-to-earth man who doesn’t like long sentences.
He is a professor at Harvard and together with his colleague from
Chicago John Mearsheimer he caused quite a fuss earlier this year.
They published an article and then a book with the simple title "The
Israel Lobby." Their central thesis: A small group of very
influential friends of Israel have forced US foreign policy into an
unconditional backing of Israel, which is damaging Americans’
strategic interests.

When SPIEGEL ONLINE recently asked Walt if other interest groups had
a similar influence in Washington, the realist wouldn’t hear of it.
He said that the actions of Armenian-Americans or Cuban-Americans
would never have the same far-reaching effects on US foreign policy.

Really? Two days ago the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs
Committee approved a remarkable resolution. The mass murder of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire starting in 1915 was to be named
genocide.

The result was a medium-level political earthquake. US President
George W. Bush reacted with anger. Turkey temporarily recalled its
ambassador from Washington, and Turkish newspapers seethed with rage.
And all that even though the resolution is only symbolic in character
and won’t be presented to Congress for a vote until November. How
could it go so far?

REPRINTS
Find out how you can reprint this SPIEGEL ONLINE article in your
publication. Armenians say that more than 1.5 million people were
killed during the deportations and massacres during World War I,
while according to Turkish figures between 200,000 and 300,000
Armenians were killed. Turkey still refuses to accept the description
of the crimes as genocide and speaks instead of the "repression" of a
rebellious people who were allied with the Russians during World War
I.

The Triumph of the Armenian Lobby

Armenian-Americans have been fighting for years to have the massacre
of Armenians be officially named genocide in the United States.

Concerns over a lasting cooling of relations between Turkey and the
US had always prevented a genocide resolution being passed —
President Bush had failed to stick to his election promise to work
towards the recognition of the genocide. He regularly declined to use
the word genocide in his annual speech in April to mark the beginning
of the massacres. In 2000 a similar draft resolution was pulled when
US President Bill Clinton intervened at the last moment.

The fact that it has now been approved is a triumph for the "Armenian
Lobby," if you want to call them that. Around 1.2 million Americans
have Armenian forefathers and many of them grew up listening to the
tales of the suffering of their people.

Armenian-Americans are particularly active in California, New Jersey
and Michigan — which happens to be the constituency of Nancy Pelosi,
the Democratic Speaker of the House. Her Californian colleague Adam
Schiff, who promoted the resolution, has the issue to thank for his
own political career. His predecessor in the constituency lost his
seat when he failed to push through the resolution in 2000.

Armenian groups have been bombarding their representatives over the
past few years with an unusually massive PR drive. Their most
important umbrella group "Armenian Assembly of America" has 10,000
members and an annual budget of over $3.5 million. It employs four
different influential PR firms in Washington to keep the suffering of
the Armenians on the agenda in the US capital.

The Turkish government couldn’t do enough to counter them, even
though for years it has invested millions of dollars in presenting
its arguments. Ankara engaged prominent former representatives like
Republican Bob Livingston, who even produced his own video in which
he argued against unnecessarily damaging relations with Turkey. And
he said that Turkey was still an important symbol of how a Muslim
society can build democratic structures.

In the complicated intertwining of minority representation in the US,
many Americans with Armenian roots also say the approval of the
resolution as a sign that they have arrived in the center of American
society. They compare their lobby work with the success of the Jewish
lobby in the US, which has anchored the commemoration of the
Holocaust in Americans’ collective memory.

Washington is Worried

Admittedly they have a long way to go: the massive protests against
the resolution showed the effects of its passage a day later. Of
course, some representatives ruefully admitted that perhaps it was
not the best of the timing. According to the hearing, the
congressional representatives are already considering another
resolution — one that would stress how important relations with its
Turkish ally are to the US.

And President George W. Bush immediately expressed his concern,
saying the initiative undermines relations with a close ally in the
fight against terrorism. All eight living former US Secretaries of
State signed a letter of protest against the resolution. Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates sought to remind people that around 70 percent
of all air transports for the US troops heading to Iraq go through
Turkey. And US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs,
Nicholas Burns, tried for an entire day at the beginning of the week
to convince members of Congress to veto the resolution.

That’s an awful lot of attention paid to a vote about an historical
event about which very few Americans (or even Europeans) know the
details. But because the memory of the Armenian suffering is still a
delicate subject for modern Turkey, any attempt to deal with it risks
being a powder keg for the once-warm relationship between the US and
Turkey.

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everyday.

The relationship has been approaching a crisis for some time —
recently more than ever because the Turks are agitated about the
attacks by militant Kurdish troops in Iraq and are even considering a
military attack. The US wants to avoid this at all costs. Turkey’s
logistical support for the US-led Iraq invasion is, in turn, still
highly controversial. A current poll reported that 83 percent of
Turks would wish to discontinue such support if the US Congress votes
to pass the Armenian resolution.

The Turks have proven in the past that such threats are not empty
promises: When the French parliament passed a resolution making
denial of the Armenian genocide a crime punishable by law in 2006,
the Turkish broke off their military relationship with France. But up
until now there has been no clear sign — aside from the short-term
departure of the ambassador to Washington — that they would go far
beyond symbolic gestures.

ld/0,1518,511210,00.html

Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK
Oct 12 2007

IWPR visit to Samtskhe-Javakheti challenges biased reporting on this
neglected region.

By Salla Nazarenko, CCJN project leader

Local journalists say an IWPR-organised study trip to
Samtskhe-Javakheti has generated more balanced and informed reports
on the isolated southern region of Georgia in the mainstream media.

In mid-September, 13 journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia
took part in the second OSCE-funded visit to the region – aimed at
helping Tbilisi-based and regional media establish sustainable
contacts with journalists, NGO activists, politicians and government
officials there.

Samtskhe-Javakheti is considered one of Georgia’s problem areas. In
two of its six districts – Akhalkalaki and Ninotsminda – ethnic
Armenians make up 90 per cent of the population, the majority of
which has little or no knowledge of the Georgian language.

This together with the mainstream Georgian media’s lack of knowledge
of the region has led to Samtskhe-Javakheti being misrepresented in
the press, and stories which appear are often one-sided or based
entirely on rumour.

Giorgi Putkaradze from the Tbilisi-based Prime News agency admitted
that journalists in the capital have an unclear picture of
Samtskhe-Javakheti.

`After taking part in the study trip, I can see I was in an
information vacuum. It helped me a lot in my reporting, now that I
know more about the ethnic minorities, local government and state
structures here,’ he said.

According to Putkaradze, similar tours to the breakaway territories
of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are vital for Georgian journalists.

Local businessmen and former deputy governmor of Samtshkhe-Javakheti
Armen Amirkhanyan said he had noticed a change in journalists’
attitudes following the meetings – which is reflected in their
stories.

`I took part in the last meeting with the journalists and saw with my
own eyes that their attitudes were anything but positive towards the
ethnic minorities,’ he said.

`However, I read the stories published after the meeting, and for the
first time, I felt that some journalists were really trying to reach
balance and break the tendencies that usually prevail in Georgian
press.’

Representative of the local government in Akhalkalaki region Artur
Eremian said that his office – previously ignored by journalists –
has now become an important source of information for the media
throughout Georgia.

`These kinds of meetings are not only important but absolutely
necessary. As a rule, journalists write about our region without ever
having been here, never asking for our views. Although I must say
that my phone now rings perhaps too often,’ he said.

A third mission will take place in October and a concluding
roundtable will be held in Tbilisi in late November.

As a part of the project, the IWPR Georgia office will continue to
monitor the quality of reporting on Samtskhe-Javakheti in both
Tbilisi-based and regional press and broadcast media.