Author: Toneyan Mark

ARMENIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY: THE IRANIAN SIDE ALREADY ACCEPTS THAT DISSEMINATION OF DISINFORMATION IS CHARACTERISTIC OF AZERBAIJANI MASS MEDIA

arminfo
2007-08-30 01:43:00

The Iranian side already accepts that dissemination of disinformation
is characteristic of Azerbaijani mass media, the Spokesperson of the
Armenian Foreign Ministry Vladimir Karapetyan said, commenting on a
piece of information disseminated by the Azerbaijani mass media.

According to the information, the Iranian Ambassador to Baku made
a statement expressing an opinion that he thinks it necessary that
Azerbaijan require compensation from Armenia for "the occupation of
Nagorno Karabakh Republic and adjoining regions".

"We turned to the Iranian Foreign Ministry with a request to comment
on this information disseminated through the Azerbaijani mass media
with reference to the Iranian diplomatic representation in Baku. The
Iranian FM refuted the information, saying that the Iranian Ambassador
didn’t make such a statement", V. Karapaetyan noted.

ROBERT FISK: THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST

The Independent/UK
Published: 28 August 2007

The killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the
First World War remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious
episodes of the 20th century. Robert Fisk visits Yerevan, and unearths
hitherto unpublished images of the first modern genocide.

The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the
first Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on
the move – men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot,
walking over open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the
beginning of their death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent
from Erzerum – in what is today north-eastern Turkey – survived. Most
of the men were shot, the children – including, no doubt, the young
boy or girl with a headscarf in the close-up photograph – died of
starvation or disease. The young women were almost all raped, the older
women beaten to death, the sick and babies left by the road to die.

The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most
terrible events of our times. Their poor quality – the failure of the
camera to cope with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees
in the close-up picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second –
lend them an undeniable authenticity. They come from the archives of
the German Deutsche Bank, which was in 1915 providing finance for the
maintenance and extension of the Turkish railway system. One incredible
photograph – so far published in only two specialist magazines, in
Germany and in modern-day Armenia – actually shows dozens of doomed
Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle trucks for their
deportation. The Turks stuffed 90 Armenians into each of these wagons –
the same average the Nazis achieved in their transports to the death
camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.

Hayk Demoyan, director of the grey-stone Museum of the Armenian
Genocide in the foothills just outside Yerevan, the capital of
present-day Armenia, stares at the photographs on his computer screen
in bleak silence. A university lecturer in modern Turkish history,
he is one of the most dynamic Armenian genocide researchers inside
the remains of Armenia, which is all that was left after the Turkish
slaughter; it suffered a further 70 years of terror as part of the
Soviet Union. "Yes, you can have these pictures, he says. "We are still
discovering more. The Germans took photographs and these pictures
even survived the Second World War. Today, we want our museum to be
a place of collective memory, a memorisation of trauma. Our museum
is for Turks as well as Armenians. This is also [the Turks’] history."

The story of the last century’s first Holocaust – Winston Churchill
used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the
Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal
of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels
with Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey’s reign
of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the
Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle"
their Armenian population – as the Germans were to speak later of the
Jews of Europe – the true intentions of Enver Pasha’s Committee of
Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear. On 15 September
1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists) Talaat
Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his
prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands
of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the
government… has decided to destroy completely all the indicated
persons living in Turkey… Their existence must be terminated, however
tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either
age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience." These words are almost
identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.

Taner Akcam, a prominent – and extremely brave – Turkish scholar who
has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish
documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack
for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives
that individual Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass
death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that
asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection
and food for the Armenians during their "resettlement". This weirdly
parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were
dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while
assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were
being well cared for and well fed.

Ottoman Turkey’s attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in
the Middle East – the Armenians, descended from the residents of
ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king
Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 – is a history of almost
unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers,
and Kurdish tribesmen.

In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting
Turkey’s Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several
historians – including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed
venture at Gallipoli – have asked whether the Turkish victory there
did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians
of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood,
with what Churchill called "merciless fury". Armenian scholars
have compiled a map of their people’s persecution and deportation,
a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the
railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians of Erzerum,
for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to
Erzinjan and on to Sivas province. The men would be executed by firing
squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and
children then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease
or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave I myself discovered on
a hillside at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were thousands of
skeletons, mostly of young people – their teeth were perfect. I even
found a 100-year-old Armenian woman who had escaped the slaughter
there and identified the hillside for me.

Hayk Demoyan sits in his air-conditioned museum office, his computer
purring softly on the desk, and talks of the need to memorialise this
huge suffering. "You can see it in the writing of each survivor,"
he says. "When visitors come here from the diaspora – from America
and Europe, Lebanon and Syria, people whose parents or grandparents
died in our genocide – our staff feel with these people. They see
these people become very upset, there are tears and some get a bit
crazy after seeing the exhibition. This can be very difficult for
us, psychologically. The stance of the current Turkish government
[in denying the genocide] is proving they are proud of what their
ancestors did. They are saying they are pleased with what the Ottomans
did. Yet today, we are hearing that a lot of places in the world are
like goldmines of archive materials to continue our work – even here in
Yerevan. Every day, we are coming across new photographs or documents."

The pictures Demoyan gives to The Independent were taken by employees
of Deutsche Bank in 1915 to send to their head office in Berlin as
proof of their claims that the Turks were massacring their Armenian
population. They can be found in the Deutsche Bank Historical Institute
– Oriental Section (the photograph of the Armenian deportees across the
desert published in The Independent today, for example, is registered
photo number 1704 and the 1915 caption reads: "Deportation Camp
near Erzerum.")

A German engineer in Kharput sent back a now-famous photogaph of
Armenian men being led to their execution by armed Turkish police
officers. The banking officials were appalled that the Ottoman Turks
were using – in effect – German money to send Armenians to their
death by rail. The new transportation system was supposed to be used
for military purposes, not for genocide.

German soldiers sent to Turkey to reorganise the Ottoman army also
witnessed these atrocities. Armin Wegner, an especially courageous
German second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der
Goltz, took a series of photographs of dead and dying Armenian women
and children. Other German officers regarded the genocide with more
sinister interest. Some of these men, as Armenian scholar Vahakn
Dadrian discovered, turn up 26 years later as more senior officers
conducting the mass killing of Jews in German-occupied Russia.

Computers have transformed the research of institutions like the
Yerevan museum. Poorly funded scholarship has been replaced by a
treasure-house of information that Demoyan is going to publish in
scholarly magazines. "We have information that some Germans who were
in Armenia in 1915 started selling genocide pictures for personal
collections when they returned home… In Russia, a man from St
Petersburg also informed us that he had seen handwritten memoirs from
1940 in which the writer spoke of Russian photographs of Armenian
bodies in Van and Marash in 1915 and 1916." Russian Tsarist troops
marched into the eastern Turkish city of Van and briefly liberated
its doomed Armenian inhabitants. Then the Russians retreated after
apparently taking these pictures of dead Armenians in outlying
villages.

Stalin also did his bit to erase the memory of the massacres. The
Armenian Tashnag party, so prominent in Armenian politics in the
Ottoman empire, was banned by the Soviets. "In the 1930s," Demoyan
says, "everyone destroyed handwritten memoirs of the genocide,
photographs, land deeds – otherwise they could have been associated by
the Soviet secret police with Tashnag material." He shakes his head
at this immeasurable loss. "But now we are finding new material in
France and new pictures taken by humanitarian workers of the time. We
know there were two or three documentary films from 1915, one shot
approvingly by a Kurdish leader to show how the Turks "dealt" with
Armenians. There is huge new material in Norway of the deportations
in Mush from a Norwegian missionary who was there in 1915."

There is, too, a need to archive memoirs and books that were published
in the aftermath of the genocide but discarded or forgotten in the
decades that followed. In 1929, for example, a small-circulation
book was published in Boston entitled From Dardanelles to Palestine
by Captain Sarkis Torossian.

The author was a highly decorated officer in the Turkish army who
fought with distinction and was wounded at Gallipoli. He went on to
fight the Allies in Palestine but was appalled to find thousands of
dying Armenian refugees in the deserts of northern Syria. In passages
of great pain, he discovers his sister living in rags and tells how
his fiancée Jemileh died in his arms. "I raised Jemileh in my arms,
the pain and terror in her eyes melted until they were bright as
stars again, stars in an oriental night… and so she died, as
a dream passing." Torossian changed sides, fought with the Arabs,
and even briefly met Lawrence of Arabia – who did not impress him.

"The day following my entry into Damascus, the remainder of the Arab
army entered along with their loads and behind them on a camel came
one they called… the paymaster. This camel rider I learned was
Captain Lawrence…

Captain Lawrence to my knowledge did nothing to foment the Arab
revolution, nor did he play any part in the Arab military tactics. When
first I heard of him he was a paymaster, nothing more. And so he was
to Prince Emir Abdulah (sic), brother of King Feisal, whom I knew. I
do not write in disparagement.

I write as a fighting man. Some must fight and others pay." Bitterness,
it seems, runs deep. Torossian eventually re-entered Ottoman Turkey
as an Armenian officer with the French army of occupation in the
Cilicia region.

But Kemalist guerrillas attacked the French, who then, Torossian
suspects, gave weapons and ammunition to the Turks to allow the French
army safe passage out of Cilicia. Betrayed, Torossian fled to relatives
in America.

There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians
appea r to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day
Armenia.

Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually
told me that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does not think
of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian
friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence
on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern Armenia –
the present-day state of Armenia.

Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia –
in what is now Turkey – lost their families and lands and still seek
acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians
did not lose their lands. Demoyan disputes all this.

"The fundamental problem, I think, is that in the diaspora many don’t
want to recognise our statehood," he says. "We are surrounded by two
countries – Turkey and Azerbaijan – and we have to take our security
into account; but not to the extent of damaging memory. Here we must
be accurate.

I have changed things in this museum. There were inappropriate things,
comments about ‘hot-bloodied’people, all the old clichés about Turks
– they have now gone. The diaspora want to be the holders of our
memories – but 60 per cent of the citizens of the Armenian state are
"repatriates" – Armenians originally from the diaspora, people whose
grandparents originally came from western Armenia. And remember that
Turkish forces swept though part of Armenia after the 1915 genocide
– right through Yerevan on their way to Baku. According to Soviet
documentation in 1920, 200,000 Armenians died in this part of Armenia,
180,000 of them between 1918 and 1920." Indeed, there were further
mass executions by the Turks in what is now the Armenian state. At
Ghumri – near the centre of the devastating earthquake that preceded
final liberation from the Soviet Union – there is a place known as the
"Gorge of Slaughter", where in 1918 a whole village was massacred.

But I sensed some political problems up at the Yerevan museum –
international as well as internal. While many Armenians acknowledge
that their countrymen did commit individual revenge atrocities – around
Van, for example – at the time of the genocide, a heavy burden of more
modern responsibility lies with those who fought for Armenia against
the Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. This mountainous
region east of the Armenian state saw fierce and sometimes cruel
fighting in which Armenians massacred Turkish Azeri villagers. The
Independent was one of the newspapers that exposed this.

Yet when I arrive at the massive genocide memorial next to the museum,
I find the graves of five "heroes" of the Karabakh war. Here lies,
for instance, Musher "Vosht" Mikhoyan, who was killed in 1991,
and the remains of Samuel "Samo" Kevorkian, who died in action in
1992. However upright these warriors may have been, should those
involved in the ghastly war in Kharabakh be associated with the
integrity and truth of 1915? Do they not demean the history of
Armenia’s greatest suffering? Or were they – as I suspect – intended
to suggest that the Karabakh war, which Armenia won, was revenge for
the 1915 genocide? It’s as if the Israelis placed the graves of the
1948 Irgun fighters – responsible for the massacres of Palestinians
at Deir Yassin and other Arab villages – outside the Jewish Holocaust
memorial at Yad Vashem near Jerusalem.

Officials later explain to me that these Kharabakh grave-sites were
established at a moment of great emotion after the war and that today –
while they might be inappropriate – it is difficult to ask the families
of "Vosht" and "Samo" and the others to remove them to a more suitable
location. Once buried, it is difficult to dig up the dead. Similarly,
among the memorials left in a small park by visiting statesmen and
politicians, there is a distinct difference in tone. Arab leaders
have placed plaques in memory of the "genocide". Less courageous
American congressman – who do not want to offend their Turkish allies –
have placed plaques stating merely that they "planted this tree". The
pro-American Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri left his own memorial
less than a year before he was assassinated in 2005. "Tree of Peace,"
it says. Which rather misses the point.

And yet it is the work of archivists that will continue to establish
the truth. In Yerevan you can now buy excellent witness testimonies
of the genocide by Westerners who were present during the Armenian
Holocaust. One of them is by Tacy Atkinson, an American missionary
who witnessed the deportation of her Armenian friends from the town
of Kharput. On 16 July 1915, she recorded in her secret diary how "a
boy has arrived in Mezreh in a bad state nervously. As I understand
it he was with a crowd of women and children from some village… who
joined our prisoners who went out June 23… The boy says that in the
gorge this side of Bakir Maden the men and women were all shot and the
leading men had their heads cut off afterwards… He escaped… and
came here. His own mother was stripped and robbed and then shot… He
says the valley smells so awful that one can hardly pass by now."

For fear the Turkish authorities might discover her diaries, Atkinson
sometimes omitted events. In 1924 – when her diary, enclosed in a
sealed trunk, at last returned to the United States, she wrote about
a trip made to Kharput by her fellow missionaries. "The story of this
trip I did not dare write," she scribbled in the margin. "They saw
about 10,000 bodies."

Anatomy of a massacre: How the genocide unfolded

By Simon Usborne

An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1917, either
at the hands of Turkish forces or of starvation. Exact figures are
unknown, but each larger blob – at the site of a concentration camp or
massacre – potentially represents the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of people.

The trail of extermination, and dispute about exactly what happened,
stretches back more than 90 years to the opening months of the First
World War, when some of the Armenian minority in the east of the
beleaguered Ottoman Empire enraged the ruling Young Turks coalition
by siding with Russia.

On 24 April 1915, Turkish troops rounded up and killed hundreds of
Armenian intellectuals. Weeks later, three million Armenians were
marched from their homes – the majority towards Syria and modern-day
Iraq – via an estimated 25 concentration camps.

In 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates
are strewn with corpses of exiles… It is a plan to exterminate the
whole Armenian people." Winston Churchill would later call the forced
exodus an "administrative holocaust".

Yet Turkey, while acknowledging that many Armenians died, disputes
the 1.5 million toll and insists that the acts of 1915-17 did not
constitute what is now termed genocide – defined by the UN as a
state-sponsored attempt to "destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnic, racial or religious group". Instead, Ankara claims the deaths
were part of the wider war, and that massacres were committed by
both sides.

Several countries have formally recognised genocide against the
Armenians (and, in the case of France, outlawed its denial), but it
remains illegal in Turkey to call for recognition. As recently as last
year, the Turkish foreign ministry dismissed genocide allegations as
"unfounded".

One authority on extermination who did recognise the Armenian
genocide was Adolf Hitler. In a 1939 speech, in which he ordered
the killing, "mercilessly and without compassion", of Polish men,
women and children, he concluded: "Who, after all, speaks today of
the annihilation of the Armenians?"

–Boundary_(ID_jwEsBpNmvDyvLYIPG nQn+Q)–

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT HOLDS DEBATE ON AZERBAIJAN

Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Aug 27 2007

Two-hour debates started in the European parliament on Azerbaijan and
Jordan, the parliament’s press service told APA. Head of Azerbaijani
representative office in European Union Emin Eyyubov is attending
the debates on "Human rights in European Neighborhood Policy".

Chief of Azerbaijani National Committee of Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly
Arzu Abdullayeva has also been invited to the debates. The discussions
focus on the implementation of European Neighborhood Policy principles,
state of democratic rights and freedoms, state of media, integration
into Europe and other issues.

Frozen conflicts – problems of Nagorno Karabakh, Transdnestria,
Abkhazia and South Ossetia will be debated today at the meeting of
European Parliament’s subcommittee on human rights. Representative of
European Union Foreign Policy Council Niku Popesku and representative
of Cambridge International Research Center Martin Ies Bielavski will
make report on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

Racing Post
August 23, 2007, Thursday

FOOTBALL: ARMENIA REPEL RONALDO AND CO TO STUN PUNTERS

BY IAN WILKERSON

Portugal players trudge off morbidly after dropping two points

COUPONS were being ripped up in disgust by bemused football punters
even before most of last night’s matches had kicked off as humble
Armenia held Portugal to a 1-1 draw in the Euro 2008 Group A
qualifier in Yerevan yesterday.

Anyone looking to string a set of bankers together on their list
would probably have included Portugal, who desperately needed three
points to reduce the gap on Group A leaders Poland.

Big Phil Scolari’s side were no bigger than 1-5 with Boylesports to
win in Armenia and as short as 1-7 elsewhere.

The star-studded Portuguese teamsheet included Chelsea’s Paulo
Ferreira, former Blues midfielder Tiago, Barcelona’s Deco and
Manchester United winger Cristiano Ronaldo.

But the humble Armenians had not read the script and Robert
Arzumanyan gave them a shock lead after ten minutes.

When Ronaldo equalised just before half-time, it looked like order
had been restored, but Portugal could not find a breakthrough in the
second half, seriously denting their chances in a group where Serbia
and Finland are also jostling for the secondqualification spot behind
pacesetters Poland.

Freddy Eastwood marked his Wales debut with a stunning solo strike in
their friendly against Bulgaria in Bourgas last night, giving
favourite backers even more grief.

Wales’s young brigade fought gallantly to stay in this friendly
against a Bulgarian side superior in technique and quality.

For much of the first half Wales were on the back foot, with
Manchester City new boy Martin Petrov having several chances to open
the scoring.

But in first-half injury-time Eastwood set off down the right, cut
inside and cracked a 20-yard drive into the bottom corner of the
Bulgaria net for the winning goal.

John Toshack’s team held on gamely in the second half to deny the 4-7
hosts, while any patriotic Welshmen who backed their team at 11-2
were counting their cash.

Poland struck twice in the second half to hold Russia to a 2-2 draw
in another friendly, while Brazil coasted to a 2-0 win over Algeria
with goals from Maicon and Ronaldinho.

Meanwhile, Real Madrid have agreed a deal to bring Manchester United
defender Gabriel Heinze to the Bernabeu, the Spanish champions
announced last night.

Madrid confirmed the news in a statement on their website, which
read: "Real Madrid and Manchester United have reached an agreement
for the transfer of Heinze.

"The Argentinian, 29, will sign a contract for the next four seasons
and will be immediately incorporated into Bernd Schuster’s squad."

No fee has been confirmed, although reports in the Spanish media
suggest he will cost Real around £8.1m.

He had been a Liverpool target.

BurlingtonFreePress.com, VT
Aug 23 2007

Montreal film fest opens today

Published: Thursday, August 23, 2007
By Susan Green
Correspondent

When Rebecca Gilman was a student at Middlebury College in the early
1980s, she reportedly witnessed events that would be fictionalized
more than a decade later in her play "Spinning Into Butter."

Now a Chicago resident, she has co-adapted that 1999 drama for a
movie with the same title starring Sarah Jessica Parker of "Sex and
the City" fame. The actress portrays a dean of students at a small
Vermont liberal arts school grappling with a racially charged
incident on campus.

The issue of hypocrisy is a crucial subtext in "Spinning," which will
premiere at the 31st Montreal World Film Festival, which runs
today-Sept. 3.

Gilman declined to do an interview. But, in a conversation this month
with an online magazine, based in her home state of Alabama, Gilman
recalls that her professional career was launched while still a
Middlebury freshman, when she won a nationwide young playwrights’
competition with a work about Krispy Kreme employees taking revenge
against their boss.

Gilman transferred to a college in the South at the end of her junior
year. "Spinning" opened at New York City’s Lincoln Center in 2000.
The film version, which was shot in Wisconsin, debuts at the Montreal
fest on Aug. 30.

It is among some 27 U.S. features and documentaries, a number dwarfed
by the more than 400 films of varying lengths from Canada, Latin
America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceana and the Middle East. In all, 70
countries are represented at the annual festival.

"There are so many things in Montreal that may not show up here
because they don’t find U.S. distribution," says Rick Winston, a
Vermonter who has been attending the festival for almost a decade
with various friends. "Sometimes, our process is arbitrary. We pick a
country — say, Burkina Faso or Uruguay — that we’ve never seen on
film before."

He and his wife, Andrea Serota, are always keeping an eye out for
motion pictures to book at their art house, the Savoy Theater in
Montpelier. "The Montreal focus is so international," he says. "It’s
a great immersion."

Festival audiences are faced with a proverbial smorgasbord of
multiculturalism that covers subject matter for every taste.

Is romantic comedy your bag? Then perhaps "I Do: How to Get Married
and Stay Single" is a good choice. This French release, with
Charlotte Gainsbourg, concerns the complications that ensue when a
bachelor hires a woman to pretend she’s his fiancee.

For those who enjoy history, "The Lark Farm" is an epic from brothers
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani about Armenians expelled from Turkey
during World War I. To toss even more nationalities into the mix,
it’s an Italian-Bulgarian-Spanish-French co-production.

A similarly complicated collaboration is apparent in "Los Cruces …
Poblado Proximo," from Guatemala, Norway and the Netherlands, that
tracks seven Central American guerrillas who defend a village
targeted for destruction in the 1980s by government soldiers.

The closing night selection, Claude Miller’s "A Secret," centers on
an unsuspecting adolescent in France who comes across clues that his
Jewish family is tied to the Holocaust.

A certain contemporary Republican presidential wannabe may take
exception to "September Dawn," about 120 people allegedly massacred
in Utah by top Mormon leaders on Sept. 11, 1857. Jon Voight, who’ll
be on hand at the festival for a tribute, plays a bishop in this tale
of religious fanaticism.

Political thrillers abound. "Morituri" takes place in Algeria during
the civil unrest of the 1990s and follows a police inspector looking
into the suspicious disappearance of a former government official’s
daughter. "The Last Queen of the Earth" tackles the immediate
aftermath of 9/11, when an Afghan immigrant stranded in Iran tries to
reunite with his family back home.

Stories that are of-the-moment command attention. "Kabluey," with
Lisa Kudrow, is a comic take on an inept guy helping his
sister-in-law raise two unruly sons while their father serves in
Iraq. "The Insurgents" provides a grittier approach to topical
material, specifically domestic terror. Four Americans, including a
disabled Iraq vet, plan to detonate a truck bomb. "War Made Easy," a
documentary narrated by Sean Penn, examines media coverage of U.S.
military interventions going back half a century.

The coming-of-age theme shows up in "Gangster High" from South Korea.
A studious boy and his soccer-mad friends are confronted by a gang.
"Dolls" sends a group of girls in the Czech Republic off on an
adventurous trip. "The Go-Getter," an American entry with Zoey
Deschanel, is also a road movie, in this instance about a teenager
looking for his long-lost brother.

For a more mature generation, "The Last Investigation" offers a 70-
year-old retired French cop who begins snooping around after a fatal
accident at an idyllic home for senior citizens. "Irina Palm" zeroes
in on Marianne Faithfull — a singer once best known as Mick Jagger’s
girlfriend — playing a middle-aged woman who works in a sex club to
raise money for her sick grandson’s operation. Talk about "As Tears
Go By"!

A quartet of films is linked to a universal passion: music. The
Greek-German "Eduart" considers a young Albanian man who dreams of
becoming a rock star but instead winds up implicated in a murder.
"Lilacs," directed by Pavel Lounguine, profiles Russian classical
composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. "The Satanic Angels," based on a true
case, centers on 14 Moroccan kids convicted of "shaking the
foundations of Islam" for their rock ‘n’ roll repertoire, hip
clothing and long hair.

Family dysfunction is always a popular genre. "The Influence," from
Spain and Mexico, explores the life of a disoriented woman whose
children must fill in as adults. "Foster Child" traces the worries of
a temporary caregiver in the Philippines delivering an abandoned baby
to adoptive parents at a plush Manila hotel.

And then there are the films that simply defy categorization, such as
"Puffball" from the United Kingdom, with Miranda Richardson and
Donald Sutherland. Directed by the legendary Nicolas Roeg ("Don’t
Look Now" and "Walkabout"), the saga involves an architect who moves
to a remote Irish valley, discovers she’s pregnant and learns that
her neighbors may be witches planning evil deeds.

This sounds a bit like "Rosemary’s Baby," but most savvy cineastes
are willing to embark on any vicarious Montreal journey into the
mystic.

MSNBC –
Aug 24 2007

Gymnast spurned by the Soviets welcomes chance to coach an American
champion

By EDDIE PELLS
Associated Press Sports
Updated: 4:08 p.m. ET Aug 23, 2007

The family sat in the airport, minutes away from its long-awaited
exodus out of a country that never felt like home.

But first, one more insult – this one in the form of a decision no
kid should have to make.

There were two boxes, one filled with the mother’s most expensive
jewelry and keepsakes, the other with the medals the daughter had won
during her successful but unappreciated gymnastics career in the
Soviet Union.

"Pick one,” the guard in the security line told Armine Barutyan and
her family.

It was the final slap in the face this young lady would endure before
she moved to the United States and became one of this country’s most
successful gymnastics coaches.

"Some of the things they did to me, I’ll just never understand,”
said Barutyan, now coaching American Ivana Hong and trying to take
her on the Olympic road she was never allowed to travel.

If life had been fair, Barutyan’s name might be as familiar today as
that of Russian superstar Svetlana Khorkina, or maybe even Nadia
Comaneci. She was that good. But things don’t always work out as they
should.

Part of that was because her heyday came in the mid-1980s – as in,
the 1984 Olympics, when the Soviets boycotted the Los Angeles Games,
a political payback for the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games four
years earlier.

The other part also had to do with politics, but of a much more
sinister type.

Barutyan’s father grew up in Syria, her mother in Jerusalem. They
moved to Armenia after World War II to find a better life and get
closer to the family’s roots. But there, even decades later, the
Barutyans were always viewed as newcomers, outsiders.

And no matter how long you’d lived there, being Armenian in the
postwar Soviet Union was a disadvantage for anyone looking to get
ahead, especially in a promising sports career, the likes of which
Barutyan was embarking upon when she was young.

The USSR was a huge country, spanning 11 time zones and at least 15
nationalities. But diversity was not part of the message in the
Soviet Union of the Cold War era. Rather, the message was one of
unity and power. Part of the superpower’s strategy to present that
kind of front was to have Russian athletes with Russian names leading
the way in the biggest sports.

The Soviets wanted Barutyan to leave home and come closer to Moscow –
not that unusual, even now, in Eastern European countries where
centralized gymnastics training is common. More significantly, they
wanted her to change her name – trading the ‘yan’ ending common to
those of Armenian decent for a more Russian-sounding surname, like
one that ended with "iva” or "ina.”

"I didn’t want to do that,” she said. "That was my family. I didn’t
understand why they would want me to be someone else.”

She paid a steep price for her recalcitrance.

They took away her uniforms, her spot on the national team, even
dropped her in the standings at some meets for no reason – all to
send a message, and fully knowing it hurt the team every bit as much
as the teenager.

In the 1980s, Barutyan was performing tricks none of the other women
were even thinking about then, and that not many do even today.

Her dismount off the uneven bars included three back flips. Off the
balance beam, she did a double layout – two flips with her legs
straight.

The politically correct way to explain away the Soviet Union’s
shunning of her was to say that her moves were so advanced, so
unheard-of, that judges didn’t know how to react to the tricks and,
thus, never gave her the scores she deserved.

It’s not the story Barutyan tells.

Instead, she recalls times before international trips when officials
would tell her they had heard she had relatives in France. Wouldn’t
she like to move there and be with them? Leave her parents and her
home and never come back?

"I had no idea what to say to that. I had no idea what they were
talking about,” she said. "I was a teenager.”

There were times when, despite her top performances, she was left off
the national team for the biggest trips. Other times, she was taken
on those trips, but wished she hadn’t been.

Once, after the team returned from a big, international meet at which
Barutyan had finished second, the women had an audience in front of
an important Soviet government official.

"Who finished first?” the official asked.

"Svetlana Boginskaya,” the coach of the gymnastics program
responded, speaking of the great Russian gymnast, one of Barutyan’s
contemporaries, who went on to win four medals at the 1988 Olympics.

"And who finished second?” the official said.

"Not one of us,” the coach responded.

"I was Armenian,” said Barutyan, who was left off that Seoul Olympic
team despite being one of the USSR’s best. "Things like that happen
and it hurts. They make you feel like nothing.”

More than 20 years later, the memories from those insults still
sting. Barutyan talks about it much more calmly than her husband, Al
Fong, who met the star gymnast shortly after she moved to the United
States.

Barutyan had walked into a Los Angeles gym owned by a friend of
Fong’s. The friend was a pack rat and a gymnastics nut. He recognized
Barutyan immediately, and took her to his office to show her
magazines with her pictures and videotapes of her performances.

She had no idea any of that stuff existed. The Soviets didn’t want
her knowing that anybody else thought she was worthy of worldwide
media coverage.

"He called me and said, ‘You know who just walked in here?”’ Fong
said. "He said I had to hire her.”

Fong did more than that. He married her, too.

Over the last eight years, Fong and Barutyan have established one of
the best elite training centers in the country, Great American
Gymnastics Express outside of Kansas City.

"My wife and I are passionate about training Olympians,” Fong said.
"We call it our life’s work. Everything we do from the business we
have to the lifestyle we lead is driven around that.”

Call their house and if they aren’t home, Fong’s message on the
voicemail tells it all: "Sorry you missed us, we’re out, busy
training Olympians.”

In 2004, the duo placed Courtney McCool and Terin Humphrey on the
squad that took a silver medal at the Athens Games. Humphrey also won
a silver on uneven bars.

With the Beijing Olympics less than a year away, it’s Hong, a
14-year-old California native, who looks like their best prospect for
2008. Hong is a member of the U.S. team that’s going to Germany for
the world championships, which begin next Saturday.

Hong stands out to national team coordinator Martha Karolyi because
of, as Karolyi puts it, "the preciseness, the body lines, the
perfection of the technique and the execution.”

Much of that detail would look familiar to anyone who saw Barutyan
perform in the 1980s.

"Bela says, ‘Armine is like a mini-Martha because of the
perfection,”’ Martha Karolyi says with a laugh, recalling her
husband’s take on Barutyan. "If a finger is not in the right place,
it used to bother me. She seems to be just like that.”

Indeed, Barutyan takes pride in her work.

Which might explain why, when faced with that impossible choice of
taking either her mother’s most precious keepsakes or her own
gymnastics medals on her last trip out of the Soviet Union in 1989,
she wasn’t so quick to leave the medals behind.

The family had earned a pass out of the country because they had
relatives in Los Angeles. It was during a transition phase in the
Soviet Union – toward the end of Perestroika, the largely
unsuccessful attempt to restructure the Russian economy, and just
before a reactionary crackdown that again made it almost impossible
for citizens to leave.

Barutyan said had the family’s papers arrived two or three weeks
later, they would have been stuck in Russia for years. Instead, they
found themselves stuck at security in the airport.

"My mother said, ‘These are my most precious things. I can’t leave
them behind,”’ Barutyan said. "I told her, ‘That’s OK, take them,
and I’ll stay here.’ Because I wasn’t leaving those medals behind.
I’d been through too much to win them.”

It took a few hours, but finally Barutyan’s father found a friend who
knew someone at the KGB and arranged for a bribe to be paid to one of
the security henchmen at the airport. That way, both boxes made it.

It was a victory – the first of many after so many heartbreaks

"She’s arguably the most powerful single female gymnastics coach in
the U.S.,” Fong said. "And now, nobody’s going to take anything away
from her. Not uniforms, not recognition, not anything.”

As for all those Soviets who shunned Barutyan, well, Fong is sure
they know exactly how his wife is doing these days.

"I’m not trying to prove myself. I did that long ago,” Barutyan
said. "I just like to say, ‘See, you didn’t let me do it, but maybe I
can help somebody else do it for another country.’ My husband says
it’s sweet revenge. I don’t know if that sounds harsh or not.”

Armenian National Committee – Western Region

104 North Belmont Street, Suite 200

Glendale, California 91206

Phone: 818.500.1918 Fax: 818.246.7353

[email protected]

PRES S RELEASE
: August 23, 2007

Contact: Haig Hovsepian

Tel: (818) 500-1918

ANC-WR Board Member Meets with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

Sacramento, CA – Armenian National Committee-Western Region Board Member
Hovannes Boghossian and his wife Silva Boghossian were invited to a
reception honoring the Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. Over
100 people attended the event, including former State Assembly Speaker and
former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, California State Treasurer Bill
Lockyer and various other elected officials.

"Governor Schwarzenegger has provided strong moral leadership on the
Armenian Genocide," stated Boghossian. "We look forward to continuing our
work with the Governor’s office in giving voice to the Armenian American
community in the Golden State," the ANC-WR Board Member added.

Boghossian met with Governor Schwarzenegger to discuss issues of concern to
the Armenian American community in California. He thanked the Governor for
his strong support of human rights issues and his dedication to secure
recognition of the Armenian Genocide. On behalf of the ANC-WR Board of
Directors, Boghossian extended a warm invitation to the Governor to attend
the organization’s Annual Banquet. Boghossian also thanked the Governor’s
Executive Appointees at the reception for their tremendous dedication and
commitment to furthering the goals of his administration.

The event was hosted by Napoleon Brandford III and the Los Angeles Focus
Newspaper and James Sweeney Associates.

The Armenian National Committee – Western Region is the largest and most
influential Armenian American grassroots advocacy organization in the
Western United States. Working in coordination with a network of offices,
chapters, and supporters throughout the Western United States and affiliated
organizations around the country, the ANC-WR advances the concerns of the
Armenian American community on a broad range of issues.

BAYLOR GOES WORLDWIDE WITH MULTIPLE MISSIONS OPPORTUNITIES
by Ashley Lintelman, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805

Baylor University, TX
p;story=46399
Aug 20 2007

They have different majors, follow different career paths and come
from different backgrounds. But Baylor University students are united
by a commitment to missions and a desire to demonstrate God’s love
throughout the world. This year Baylor offered more than 10 extended
mission trip opportunities, challenging approximately 125 students
to use their classroom studies to serve others and reminding them of
Baylor’s mission – "to educate men and women for worldwide leadership
and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment
within a caring community."

Baylor students, faculty and staff spent several weeks this summer
contributing to service projects and working to meet the needs
of people in Armenia, Honduras, Kenya and Mexico. Coordinated by
University Missions, Baylor’s Louise Herrington School of Nursing and
Baptist Student Ministries, each trip offered students in different
areas of study hands-on learning and mission opportunities.

University Missions was created through Baylor 2012, the university’s
10-year vision, to help Baylor students "understand life as a
stewardship and work as a vocation." The program allows students to
better understand how God might use their gifts to make a difference
in the world.

"At Baylor, we continue to focus on our Baptist heritage and the
Baptist tradition that is closely tied to missions, and it lives on
through our university," said Rebecca Kennedy, director for University
Missions at Baylor. "While encouraging students to participate in
church-based mission trips, Baylor also is offering discipline-specific
missions as an expression of our identity as a Christian university. We
want to create opportunities for students to understand and utilize
their God-given gifts and abilities in serving others and spreading
the love of Christ."

Armenia

Armenia is a country with a deep heritage of Christianity, located in
the middle of the largely unreached 10/40 window. Kennedy said Baylor’s
mission teams were focused on learning about and participating in
economic development that could truly impact an entire nation, while
helping spread the hope of the message of Christ and the richness of
discipleship as a believer.

During Baylor’s inaugural mission trip to Armenia this year, groundwork
was prepared for future ministry opportunities.

Students were pre-divided into three teams before they went into
Armenia. Dr. Walter Bradley, distinguished professor of engineering,
led Baylor’s engineering team of ECS majors who joined students from
two other universities to build two low-cost and energy-efficient
model homes for low-income families. With the assistance and contacts
of local Armenian-American builders, the team was successful in
accomplishing its goals and already has requests for 15 additional
homes.

The second Baylor team was geared toward business and leadership
development. Dr. Marlene Reed, visiting professor in management,
taught a leadership development course to Armenian business leaders
and has agreed to further partner with University Missions next year to
provide additional leadership for Baylor’s Outdoor Recreation/Tourism
team project. Students from that team will work to build partnerships
with local business leaders to create a sustainable tourism/outdoor
recreation business. Next summer, Baylor students and team leader Kelli
McMahan, assistant director of campus recreation and program director
for Outdoor Adventure Living-Learning Center at Baylor, will begin
a long-term task of mapping trails for hiking and biking in Armenia.

Maxey Parrish, lecturer in journalism at Baylor, led a general
ministry team to Armenia to provide social ministry and evangelism
to un-churched villagers throughout the country. The team assisted a
missionary and a local church through children’s Bible clubs, community
carnivals and manual labor, and was part of the first evangelical
Christian service to be conducted in the 1,500-year-old village.

Parrish said the team lived in villagers’ homes in Zarinja, Armenia,
and came as close as possible to experiencing 19th-century life.

There was no running water or sewage and all the food served was
grown at the home.

"My favorite part of every mission trip I take is seeing my students
exposed to situations in which the only way to succeed is to rely on
God and see Him at work," Parrish said. "Putting [the trip] in God’s
hands and leaving the results to Him, you can’t help but experience
Him in a different way."

As students served the Armenian people, they also got to see Biblical
sites such as Mount Ararat, the landing place of Noah’s Ark, and the
world’s oldest Christian cathedral.

Honduras

In Honduras, Kennedy said that Baylor students were challenged by
the faith and resolve of the people in the Central American country
who live out the gospel message in everyday life.

Baylor students have been serving in Honduras since 2002, beginning
with deaf education through the department of communication sciences
and disorders. This year five additional teams from engineering,
education, nursing, medical and general ministry participated in
the trip.

"Faculty and staff-led teams from various disciplines at Baylor
create ways for students to explore what it looks like to serve
God by using the skills and expertise from their major and field,"
Kennedy said. "Participating in discipline-specific teams often allows
students to have even more to offer as they serve in international
settings. Students also greatly benefit from learning and serving
alongside professionals in their respective fields, and this experience
can help shape a student’s view of their own future of service and
ministry."

Kennedy said Honduras continues to be an excellent location for
students to serve because of the many needs represented in Honduras.

Baylor students on the deaf education team were able to work with
students in the only deaf school in Honduras, while team leader Lori
Wrzesinski, director of Baylor’s American Sign Language program,
focused on teaching English as a Second Language to Honduras’ deaf
school teachers. This year Wrzesinski had her first graduating ESL
class, Kennedy said.

The second part of the team, led by Nancy Pfanner, lecturer
in communication sciences and disorders, assisted a non-profit
organization in hosting an annual camp for deaf and hearing-impaired
children.

"Each year has been a success," Kennedy said.

The medical and nursing teams provided relief and assistance to local
medical clinics. Baylor students gave immunizations to local villagers
each day and used medical supplies to meet the needs of impoverished
communities. Students had the opportunity to interact with villagers
and experience real-life needs of underprivileged people.

Andrew Pham, a senior biology major from Frisco, said the people
in Honduras re-emphasized that there is more to life than money and
materialistic desires.

"Their happiness spawned from the relationships developed between
friends and family. I believe our society needs to be reminded of
that as we all seek our own sources of happiness," Pham said.

As an aspiring physician, Pham said he hopes to one day be able to go
back to Honduras or other indigent countries and set up "more efficient
medical infrastructure to educate citizens in preventative healthcare."

Other teams included an education/general ministry team, led by
Baylor education professors Randy Wood and Rick Strot and Baylor BSM
director Clif Mouser, which provided Bible stories, manual labor,
health care and ESL training for teachers at a recently established
Christian school at a church in a small Honduran village. A Baylor
engineering team, in the meantime, was in the country to construct
a micro hydro-generator and install a water purification system,
led by Dr. Brian Thomas, lecturer in engineering at Baylor’s School
of Engineering and Computer Science.

Kenya

For the third year in a row, 93 Baylor faculty, staff and students
traveled to Kenya, the largest number of participants to date.

"Because of the large number of participants many different activities
[could] be accomplished," Kennedy said.

Baylor students had their perspective challenged, Kennedy said, as
they encountered the HIV/AIDS epidemic as an individual rather than a
statistic. But they also learned from believers with a rich deep faith.

Led by Dr. Randall Bradley, director of Baylor’s Center for Christian
Music Studies, and Dr. Sharyn Dowd, associate professor of religion,
Baylor students used music to reach orphans and neighboring villages,
while representatives from University Baptist Church in Waco built
partnerships with Kenyan churches to provide social ministry within
village communities.

Students from Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary
trained future Kenyan leaders in HIV/AIDS education, evangelism,
church leadership and community development, as well as business
sustainability. The teams worked with several faith-based organizations
in order to accomplish their goals.

Several freshmen and sophomore students provided general ministry to
Kenya’s HIV/AIDS victims, orphans and widows. Despite the language
barrier, students played games and learned songs with Kenyan children
during their lunch time.

Tiffani Riggers, a graduate assistant for University Missions and
a team leader with fellow grad student Marquette Bugg, said often
parents are too tired to play with and love on their children due
to long daily struggles to get money to feed their families. Simple
actions, such as giving individual attention to the children, allowed
team members to show God’s love by filling that parent-to-child void.

"Knowing that spiritually we made an impact is awesome, and we had a
great reminder that we don’t always see the fruit of our works until
we are in heaven," Riggers said.

Also in Kenya, engineering students, faculty and staff continued
to provide practical solutions for real-world needs, such as the
installation of solar panels in a deaf school with no electricity, the
construction of windmills to provide electricity for a school and the
designing of a foot bridge to be built over a river in eastern Kenya.

In 2006 Baylor students created a non-profit organization called
Omega Kids, which provides resources to Kenyan pastors who minister to
orphaned street children. This year Omega Kids donated money and helped
a local pastor purchase land for a dormitory to be built specifically
for street children.

Riggers reflected that the time in Kenya showed how much Americans
take for granted, "from the amount and type of food that we choose to
eat, to the clothes we wear." Riggers described the desperate need,
the incredible joy and indelible hope that the Kenyan people had,
even while living in abject poverty.

"It was a very special time for me, as I felt that our Baylor students
were seeing how much they are a part of something bigger than just
a mission trip," Riggers said. "It was wonderful to get to worship
God in a Kenyan church with my brothers and sisters and know that
even though we may have been speaking different languages, we were
worshipping the same God."

Baylor’s Louise Herrington School of Nursing, located in Dallas,
also offered Baylor nursing students an excellent way to get involved
in missions, as well as obtain hands-on experience in their field of
study. Lori Spies, mission coordinator for the nursing school, said the
growth of students on all levels during the trip is very impressive.

"It is gratifying to see our students spread the love and care of
Jesus Christ while they deliver much-needed health care," Spies said.

Nursing students participated in the University Missions’ trip
to Chuloteca, Honduras, providing health checkups to every child
attending the host church’s school. Students put together seminars
on health, hygiene, nutrition and sexually transmitted infections
at both public and private schools. A Baylor graduate student led an
extensive question and answer session specifically for women both at
the church and throughout the community.

David Kemerling, director of student ministries for the nursing
school, said faculty, staff and students were a "fresh set of eyes"
for the community.

"The question we ask ourselves throughout the trip is, ‘How can we
live differently once back in the U.S.?’ I believe, for students,
the trip puts value into nursing in preparation for their future
careers," Kemerling said. "It builds confidence and gives experience."

Mexico

Baylor’s nursing school also continued a 30-year tradition of students
providing care in Juarez, Mexico. While in Juarez, students set
up free clinics inside a local church and offered complete health
check-ups to assess the general needs of children and adults.

Medication, prayer and health education were often provided. Clinics
also are a way for the local church to make life-long contacts with
people in their community, helping them to continue to reach those
in need.

"It is a practical exercise in servant leadership, improving health
care and gaining skills and expertise as nurses," Spies said.

Another trip is planned for August in Mexico City, where faculty,
staff and students will continue to administer health check-ups to
the housing community in Mexico City.

Baptist Student Ministries

Baptist Student Ministries (BSM) is a specialized ministry of
the Baptist General Convention of Texas aimed at Texas college and
university campuses. The BSM offers students the chance to serve not
only their community but also the world around them throughout the
year. Missions and showing God’s love to others is heavily emphasized
through different programs offered by the BSM.

The Baylor BSM hosts Missions Week activities for Baylor students
to learn about the locations where missionaries serve, as well as
discover areas they can provide life-long changes in the lives of
those less fortunate. This year Missions Week hosted more than 20
missionaries who spoke in more than 40 classrooms at Baylor. A Global
Village was set up next to the Student Union Building and featured
ethnic student organizations, ministry organizations, international
students and missionaries. Baylor faculty, staff and students could
come and learn ways they might participate in mission work.

The BSM participates in weekly community ministries such as room
visitation at Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center in Waco, a partnership
with the Waco Association of Retarded Citizens for special needs
ministry, children’s tutorials at two community locations and
children’s missions in three Waco apartment complexes. These are
available to students during the school year.

GoNowMissions is a student missions program the BSM has provided to
Baylor students since 1946. Through GoNowMissions students have the
opportunity to raise money and serve others for either a semester or
for a summer. The program builds leadership, helps enrich student’s
spiritual walk and teaches them about selfless love and service to
others. This year’s giving goal was $4,000, and seven Baylor students
are currently serving during the 2007 summer both nationally and
internationally.

In addition to sponsoring a team to Honduras, the BSM partnered with
Habitat for Humanity to construct houses and provide practical relief
to the people of New Orleans. These trips held specific purposes to
meet the needs of the people in that region.

The BSM also took a trip specifically for international students at
Baylor. The trip offered the opportunity for international students
to see Texas and get to know each other and the BSM staff better.

This year there were seven different countries represented among the
Baylor students. The group stayed in churches as they toured Texas,
stopping at the Alamo, SeaWorld and the Houston Rodeo. During this
time, students were able to talk about their Baylor experiences,
their cultural heritage and discuss spiritual needs on a more personal
level with BSM staff.

For more information about University Missions at Baylor, contact
Rebecca Kennedy at [email protected].

For more information about Baylor’s Louise Herrington School of Nursing
missions, contact David Kemerling at [email protected] or
Lori Spies at (214) 818-7982.

For more information about the Baptist Student Ministries at Baylor,
contact Rae Wright at [email protected].

Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Aug 19 2007

US Jewish group fires official over `genocide’ stance

A respected US Jewish group has fired its New England regional
director after he publicly supported Armenian claims of genocide at
the hands of the Ottoman Empire and demanded that the organization
endorse the charges, according to a report in the US media.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), primarily known for fighting
anti-Semitism, fired Andrew Tarsy on Friday, the Boston Globe
reported. Tarsy told the newspaper that the organization’s stance is
"morally indefensible." The paper further reported that Tarsy’s
firing prompted a backlash among local Jewish leaders against the
ADL’s leadership.

"I’m devastated to hear the news," Ronne Friedman, senior rabbi at
Temple Israel, the largest synagogue in Boston, was quoted as saying
by the paper. "I think it’s an inexcusable behavior on the part of
the national office."

Tarsy said he had been in conflict with ADL leadership for several
weeks, although he added: "I regret at this point any
characterization of the genocide that I made publicly other than to
call it a genocide." Steve Grossman, a businessman and a former ADL
regional board member, said he predicted the firing of Tarsy "will
precipitate wholesale resignations from the regional board, a
meaningful reduction in the ADL’s regional fund-raising and will
further exacerbate the ADL’s relationship with the non-Jewish
community coming out of this crisis around the Armenian genocide."

In a response letter published in various community newspapers across
the New England region, the ADL said it has never denied "the
massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians — and by some
accounts more than 1 million — at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in
1915-1918" and that the "the Turkish government must do more than it
has to confront its history and to seek reconciliation with the
Armenian people."

But it added that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are
"counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips
with its past," explaining that it takes no position on a resolution
in the US House of Representatives that calls on the US
administration to recognize the alleged genocide.

It also said it cannot ignore concerns of the Jewish community in
Turkey, which "has clearly expressed to us its concerns about the
impact of congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those
concerns." It also noted its desire to protect the interests of
Israel, which considers Turkey a strategic ally in a hostile region.

Turkey categorically rejects characterization of the World War I
events as genocide, saying both that the death toll is inflated and
that as many Turks were killed when Armenians took up arms against
the Ottoman Empire and the civilian population of eastern Anatolia in
collaboration with the invading Russian army, hoping to create an
Armenian state in part of eastern Anatolia.

20.08.2007

Today’s Zaman Ýstanbul

ARMENIAN GOVERNMENT TO SUBMIT AMENDED VERSION OF PACKAGE OF SEVERAL BILLS TO NATION ASSEMBLY FOR DISCUSSION

Noyan Tapan
Aug 17, 2007

YEREVAN, AUGUST 17, NOYAN TAPAN. At the August 16 sitting, the Armenian
government made amendments in the RA government’s Decision No 1560-N
on Approval of Technical Regulations on Meat and Meat Products of
October 19, 2006, which is in particular conditioned by the necessity
to bring the safety indices prescribed by the regulations into line
with sanitary and epidemiologic rules and norms of the Hygienic
Requirements to the Safety of Food Raw Material and Foodstuffs and
to the Food Value. The decision also proceeds from the necessity to
make amendments, which are conditioned by the procedure of certifying
the conformity and are in compliance with legislative requirements
of the decision’s provisions.

In accordance with the RA Water Code and the RA Law on the National
Water Program, the government decided to appoint the RA ministry
of agriculture as the authorized state governance body in charge
of organization and implementation of measures aimed at preventing
and eliminating the harmful impact of river water. The minister of
agriculture was instructed to submit, within three months, a proposal
to the RA government regarding measures to ensure the use of powers
stipulated by the decision. The RA ministers of territorial governance,
urban development and environmental protection, and the chairman of
the State Committee of the Real Estate Cadastre adjunct to the RA
government were instructed to present, within 15 days, the necessary
information to the RA minister of agriculture and to assist with the
work on development of the program on protection of settlements,
areas of economic value and citizens’ property from the risk of
river flooding.

By making redistribution in the 2007 state budget of the RA and some
amendments in the RA government’s decision No 1851-N of December 21,
2006, the government allocated 40.2 mln drams (about 0 thousand) from
its 2007 reserve fund to the Syunik regional administration with the
aim of financing the construction of buildings for families that live
in wooden houses in the village of Lernadzor (Syunik region).

At the siiting, the government approved the Program of Geological
Prospecting Work stipulated in the RA Law on the 2007 State Budget
of the RA.

According to the RA Law on International Agreements of the RA, the
government approved the proposal for signing the Agreement on Free
Trade between the governments of Armenia and Egypt.

By another decision, amendments and additions were made,
in accordance with the RA Law on Archival Activity, in the RA
government’s Decision No 351 on Approval of the Exemplary List of
Archival Documents with Indication of Their Retention Period of March
9, 2006, which is also conditioned by the necessity to clarify the
current legislation. Particularly, taking into account the fact that
limitation of actions does not apply to the requests about return of
deposits that depositors file to banks. These amendments and additions
have also been made due to the fact that the currently prescribed
period of keeping bank documents about deposits is not sufficient in
case of demanding these deposits.

The governrment approved the bill on making an amendment to the RA
Law on State Registration of Property Rights, which will be submitted
to the National Assembly. Adoption of the bill is conditioned by the
necessity to specify the provision on period of state registration of
rights, which is stipulated by the indicated law. In particular, it
is proposed calculating the period for presenting the rights arising
from property-related transactions for state registration not from
the day of signing the transaction but from the day of their being
certified by the notary.

In accordance with the RA Law on State Administrative Institutions, the
government made amendments in the RA government’s decision No 1917-N
of Novemeber 28, 2002. The adoption of this decision is conditioned,
in particular, by the necessity to bring the decision’s provision
into line with requirements of the RA Judicial Code, the RA Law on
Bringing the RA Judicial Code into Force and the RA Law on Court
Service. The decision also envisages creating an Information and PR
Unit at the RA Ministry of Justice.

In accordance with the RA Law on Legal Acts, the government made an
amendment to the RA government’s Decision No 1112-N on Approval of the
Order of Transferring Students from One Higher Educational Institution
to Another of July 14, 2005, based on which such a transfer may be done
without permission of the RA minister of education and science. The
decision will increase autonomy of higher educational institutions
and allow to make efficient and independent decisions on transfer of
students from one higher educational institution to another.

In accordance with the RA Law on State Administrative Institutions,
the government decided to take the area (covering 286 square meters
and with the balance sheet cost of 1,269,268 drams) on the 4th floor
of the building at 25 Pushkin Street (Yerevan) belonging to the
Staff of Rescue Service of Armenia state administrative institution
of the RA Ministry of Territorial Governance and to transfer this
area to the Staff of the RA Ministry of Territorial Governance state
administrative institution.

Pursuant to Article 53 Part 4 of the RA Law on Rules of Procedure of
the RA National Assembly, the government made a decision to submit
to the RA National Assembly the amended version of the package
consisting of the bill on making amendments and additions to the RA
Law on Circulation of Poisonous Substances and Explosive Suvstances
and Devices, the bill on making amendments and additions to the RA
law on State Duty and the bill on making amendments to the RA Law
on Licensing.

By another decision, the government approved the governmenal
conclusions about several bills submitted on deputies’s initiative –
these conclusions will be presented to the RA NA.

The government approved the temporary schemes of using the lands of
the Vagharshapat city community (Armavir region) and the Hankavan
rural community (Kotayk region). Decision were made to change the
categories of these lands, as well as of lands in the Nor Geghi rural
community of Kotayk region.

NT was informed from the RA Government Information and PR Department
that in accordance with the RA Law on Civil Service, the government
made a decision to appoint Armen Shahnazarian the head of the staff
of the RA Ministry of Finance and Economy.