Author: Tvankchian Parkev

REPUBLICAN CONFERENCE HELD IN YSU ON OCCASION OF 15th ANNIVERSARY OF
FORMATION OF ARMENIAN NATIONAL ARMY

YEREVAN, JANUARY 26, NOYAN TAPAN. A republican conference dedicated to
15th anniversary of formation of Armenian national army took place
on January 26 at Yerevan State University (YSU). The conference
was organized by YSU and Vazgen Sargsian Military Institute of RA
Defence Ministry.

"The fact of holding such a conference is evidence that issues of
army building and further perfection of our armed forces are in the
focus of attention of not only officials immediately responsible
for armed forces, but also of representatives of science and
creative intelligentsia, public and whole people," Colonel-General
Mikael Haroutiunian, Head of RA Armed Forces General Headquarters,
first Deputy Defence Minister, said. He presented the main stages
of national army building over the past years. In connection with
future problems he said that when solving them we should take into
account the experience of developed countries, national peculiarities,
geopolitical situation in the world and in the region.

Before the beginning of the conference the participants visited
Yerablur pantheon, got familiarized with books on Armenian army
displayed in the lobby.

Film under the title "Tigran the Great: Ruler Adoring His Homeland"
was shown during the break of the conference.

According to the organizers of the conference, events didicated to the
15th anniversary of formation of Armenian army will be also held at YSU
Ijevan branch: the students will visit the military unit dislocated
in Ijevan where they will meet with veterans of Great Patriotic War
and Artsakh liberation fight.

EU going to send mission to Karabakh

PanARMENIAN.Net
24.01.2007 16:47 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ If Azerbaijan gives consent we will send a mission
for creation an atmosphere of trust in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict
region, said EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus Peter
Semneby.

According to him, the purpose of the mission is to investigate the
possibilities of carrying out measures in conflict zones within the EU
New Neighborhood Policy. Semneby also said that a mission of the kind
successfully works in the Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-Ossetian
conflict regions, reports APA.

NEGOTIATING PROCESS TO BE CONTINUED
[January 24, 2007, 22:53:16]

AzerTag, Azerbaijan
Jan 24 2007

The next round of negotiations at the level of heads of the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan and Armenia with participation of
co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group has come to an end in Moscow.
Meeting of Elmar Mammadyarov and Vardan Oskanian took place on behalf
of Presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia in a format of continuation
of contacts after the Minsk meeting.

As the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan E. Mammadyarov
has stated in exclusive interview to correspondent of AzerTAc,
at the Moscow negotiations the intensive exchange of opinions on
the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Nagorno Karabakh conflict took place, and
discussed the main principles of its settlement. As he said, the
basic attention has been focused on last principle of settlement of
the conflict. Characterizing the atmosphere of negotiations, Mr.
Mammadyarov has called them "enough difficult", noting that the
negotiating process will be continued.

"The parties have agreed to continue contacts at the level of
heads of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Alongside with it, co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group will come to
region, and consultations on the problem will be continued in Baku and
Yerevan. The possible meeting of presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia
will be ascertained by results of visit of co-chairmen to region",
Mr. Mammadyarov said.

PanARMENIAN.Net

Eyewitnesses: Hrant Dink’s Murderer Shouted: `I Shot At Non-Moslem’
20.01.2007 18:07 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Eyewitnesses have seen the murderer of Hrant
Dink. Muharrem Gozutok, a restaurant owner near the newspaper offices,
said the assailant looked about 20, wore jeans and a cap and shouted,
"I shot at the non-Muslim" as he left the scene. It’s worth reminding
that the cameras near the crime scene have fixed a young man with a
gun in his hands, who was running away from the scene. At the same
time it is worth mentioning the police thinks it has approached the
revealing of the crime. "We have definitive evidences," Istanbul
Governor Muammer Guler said.

Anarkismo.net
Jan 20 2007

Hrant Dink: This Heart Will Never Get Silent!

by ender yilmaz – AKi -Turkey Saturday, Jan 20 2007, 7:17am
greece / turkey / cyprus / anti-fascism / news report

`Those who killed Hrant Dink are’ shouted one speaker at Taksim
square sit-in yesterday evening `those who don’t want people’s
fraternity, …those who killed 1,5 million Armenians, … those who
exiled hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their villages, …those who
created Sivas, Çorum, Maraº massacres, …those who represent the
rotten gang order of this country, …’

`Those who killed Hrant Dink are’ shouted one speaker at Taksim
square sit-in yesterday evening `those who don’t want people’s
fraternity, …those who killed 1,5 million Armenians, … those who
exiled hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their villages, …those who
created Sivas, Çorum, Maraº massacres, …those who represent the
rotten gang order of this country, …’

Hrandt Dink, an Armenian journalist and a leftist intellectual, was a
firm supporter of a society without nationalisms. He was found guilty
in October 2005 of insulting Turkish identity after he wrote an
article which addressed the Armenian genocide. He said that he will
go to Paris and say that there is no Armenian genocide, if the
Armenian genocide law will pass in French parliament. He got lots of
threats. He represented the line of true intellectuals which every
country has.

The Istanbul sit-in to protest his murder began in the afternoon and
ended at 8 p.m. with a one-hour-long march to his newspaper, Agos.
Estimates of the participants range between 5 and 15 thousand. There
were also other protests in Ankara, Izmir and Bursa. Some of the
slogans in Istanbul protest were: `We all are Armenians, we all are
Kurds’, "Obsinately we all are Armenians", `We all are Hrant’s, we
all are Armenians’, `Long live people’s fraternity’ (in Turkish,
Kurdish and Armenian), `The ropes of the murderer is in the hands of
the state’, `Murderer state will pay back’, `Side by side against
fascism’, `Time will come, the order will change, fascist murderers
will pay back to the people’ etc.

Flags of the ex-`social-democratic’ new-center Republican People’s
Party (CHP) were burned (its building was near to the Agos newspaper
and people cut the flags hanging between the street lamps) and people
shouted: `CHP is not people’s, but fascists’ party’, `Fascist Baykal
(leader of the CHP)’, `Baykal! We are Kurds, shoot us too’.

Coincidentally (!) fascist gangs continued their provocations at
Istanbul and Mimar Sinan Universities yesterday. In the morning a
gang of 30-40 people (mostly outside the university) managed to enter
the university (security guards probably displayed an extreme
benevolence to them which they don’t have for leftist students) and
walked in the campus for leftists. In the evening a group of students
at the sit-in should leave to save the students at the Mimar Sinan
University campus in Beºiktaº from the fascist gang blocking the
exit.

The protests will continue today, but nobody knows really what is
aimed with this murder. Fascist sites are rejoicing. Some
conservative people even argue that it is the job of the Armenian
Diaspora. The big media is very sad (a sadness they didn’t have for
the persecution of Hrant Dink before, neither for the massacred
Armenians).

Hrant Dink represented the moderate Armenian who wanted to let the
Turkish people understand the past violence and knew that
interventions from first world states created nothing but xenophobia
dressed under anti-imperialism. We have to keep this line, but this
will be only possible by the participation of more and more people to
the protests. Only this can overcome the lack of this valuable friend
and stop inter-ethnic conflicts. Only then Hrant Dink can live as if
he is still speaking and writing, as if he was not murdered. As the
protesters were singing yesterday evening:

There is no death for us
This heath will never get silent

690

Bits of News
Jan 20 2007

Sylvester Stallone wants to Make Armenian Genocide Epic
Saturday, 20 January 2007 Written by Alexander G. Rubio

I think it’s safe to say a man of Sylvester Stallone’s means can
afford to globetrot with the best of them. But prudence should
perhaps dictate that he scratch Turkey off his shortlist of potential
vacation spots. As the whole pre-Nobel Prize saga of Orhan Pamuk, and
related cases, show, there are certain historical topics that are
prone to stir up a bit of… bad blood… in that part of the world –
One of them is, of course, the question of the status of the Kurdish
population. But chief among them is perhaps the festering sore that
is the Armenian genocide.

As recent events have shown, it is a question that still provokes
deadly conflict. The murder of the Armenian journalist and editor
Hrant Dink, who had been the victim of even official persecution, is
a glaring example of just how inflamed this topic really is.

And this is the hornet’s nest Stallone is planning to put his foot
to.

Slain journalist Hrant Dink
(Click for full image)The star of such movies as, "Rocky", its recent
sequel "Rocky Balboa", and the decidedly non-pacifist "Rambo" is
planning to shoot a movie based on the book "The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh" about the Armenian Genocide by the Austrian author Franz
Werfel, according to The Denver Post, via Filmstalker.

During World War I, as the Ottoman Turkish empire fought Russian
forces, some of the Armenian minority in eastern Anatolia sided with
the Russians.

Turkey took reprisals. On 24 April 1915 it rounded up and killed
hundreds of Armenian community leaders.

In May 1915, the Armenian minority, two or three million strong, was
forcefully deported and marched from the Anatolian borders towards
Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Many died en route.

The issue has long been a contentious topic in Turkey, which claims
the 1915 events were not genocide, something that has become a bit of
a problem in Turkish relations to the European Union, which it hopes
to join as a member, due to the European Parliament’s decision to
recognise as genocide the extermination of around 1.5 million
civilian Armenians in Turkey (the Ottoman Empire at the time) in
1915.

Late last year, French MPs also passed a bill making it a crime to
deny that the Ottoman Turkish empire committed genocide against
Armenians, a decision that delighted Armenians and infuriated the
Turks.

For years Stallone’s wanted to create an epic, and the book that
intrigues him is Franz Werfel’s "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,"
detailing the Turkish genocide of its Armenian community in 1915.
(After futile attempts to turn the novel into a movie, filmmakers
finally succeeded in 1982, but it was a low-profile production.)

French ships eventually rescued some Armenians, and Stallone has his
favorite scene memorized: "The French ships come, and they’ve dropped
the ladders and everybody has climbed up the side. The ships sail.
The hero, the one who set up the rescue, has fallen asleep,
exhausted, behind a rock on the slope above. The camera pulls back,
and the ships and the sea are on one side, and there’s one lonely
figure at the top of the mountain, and the Turks are coming up the
mountain by the thousands on the far side."

A pretty great shot.

The movie would be "an epic about the complete destruction of a
civilization," Stallone said. Then he laughed at the ambition. "Talk
about a political hot potato. The Turks have been killing that
subject for 85 years."

And the blow-back has not been slow in coming. UK daily The
Independent reports that the plans have attracted the wrath of the
Turkish community in Hollywood.

Victims of the Armenian genocide
(Click for larger image)A group calling themselves the Association on
Struggle Against Armenian Genocide Acknowledgement is targeting
Stallone with an angry letters campaign urging him not to make the
film.

"The book is full of lies, since the author got his information from
nationalist and radical Armenians," says the association’s chairman,
Savas Egilmez.

"We have already sent necessary documents about the mentioned days to
the producer of the film. Our allies will urge the producer not to
produce this film."

On the eve of the orchestration of his own genocide against the Jews,
Hitler took comfort from the fact that such an atrocity could
seemingly pass all but unnoticed to the outside world. "Who remembers
the Armenians?", he asked. Well, quite few, and more each day, seems
to be the answer.

ImediNews, Georgia
Jan 18 2007

Armenia openly demands involvement in Karsi – Tbilisi – Akhalkalaki
project

Negotiations on technical issues, connected with functioning the
project of railway lines between Karsi – Tbilisi – Akhalkalaki will
be renewed in Baku Today. The negotiations will concern Azeri Bank
and details on taking credit by Georgian side. The credit amount has
been defined with 200 million USD.

The government members discussed and approved the project. The
agreement will be made in several weeks. The investment of 300
million USD is to be implemented thought the project.

Armenia has openly demanded involvement in Karsi – Tbilisi –
Akhalkalaki project. The Armenian side makes comments on this issue
officially. Armenian Foreign Minister demands Karsi – Giumri –
Akhalkalaki railway to start functioning and transport goods through
Armenia.

Gegham Gharibjanian states, that economy of neighbouring countries
should be developed simultaneously. "We are ready for diplomatic
negotiations" – states official Armenia and call Turkey and
Azerbaijan for opening borders.

ARMENIA INTENDS TO INTEGRATE DISABLED IN THE EMPLOYMENT MARKET

Panorama.am
19:18 16/01/2007

Employment rehabilitation center for disabled will be established in
Armenia too, Sona Harutunyan, head of Employment State Service Agency,
told a press conference today. The center will engage in monitoring and
assessment of opportunities for employment of disabled. The results
of the studies will be given to employers. Harutunyan is sure the
center will promote integration of the disabled into the work market.

Employment centers and employers also organize classes of sewing and
computer for the disabled.

CO-RAPPORTEURS AND LEO PLATVOET TO TAKE PART IN MEETING OF PACE SUB-COMMITTEE ON NAGORNO KARABAKH

Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Jan 15 2007

The meeting of PACE Sub-committee on Nagorno Karabakh will be held
in the frame of PACE winter session, the chief of the committee,
Lord Russell Johnston’s Office told the APA.

According to the information, the meeting was set on January 25. The
discussions will be held concerning Resolution 1416 on Nagorno Karabakh
adopted by PACE in 2005. The chief Azerbaijani delegation Samad
Seyidov, the chief Armenian Delegation Tigran Torosian, co-rapporteurs
on Azerbaijan Tony Lloyd, Andreas Herkel ,co-rapporteurs on Armenia
Georges Colombier, Mikko Elo, PACE co-rapporteur Leo Platvoet and the
chief of the sub-committee Lord Russell Johnston will take part in
the meeting. Besides the representatives of Azerbaijan and Armenia
opposition will also take part in the discussions. Though it was
defined that Armenian opposition will be represented by member of
Liberal-Democrat party Shavarsh Kocharyan, Azerbaijani representative
is not known yet.

Ocalan tells Turkey it can help itself by granting regional autonomy to
Kurds
By Agence France Presse (AFP)

Saturday, January 13, 2007

ANKARA: Jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan urged Turkey on Friday
to grant its Kurdish community regional autonomy in order to resolve a
22-year conflict and avoid the kind of turmoil seen in Iraq. "I believe it
is vital for Turkey to have a strategic alliance with the Kurds," Ocalan,
the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), said in a
statement relayed by his lawyers, who met him on the prison island of
Imrali.

"What I mean is for Turkey to make peace with the Kurds living on its
territory and recognize their democratic autonomy," he explained. "Let the
Kurds have regional parliaments and governments."

Ocalan argued that such a step would not damage Turkey’s territorial
integrity but actually strengthen it.

"Otherwise, Turkey will turn into another Iraq," he warned.

The rebel leader said that he had no desire for independence, but added that
Kurds in the region would opt for breaking away if Turkey, Iran and Syria
insist on what he called their policies of oppression.

"This is not an option we desire because we know it will not provide a
solution but bring about a disaster," Ocalan said.

Ocalan’s PKK took up arms against Turkey in 1984 for independence in the
country’s mainly Kurdish southeast in a bitter conflict that has claimed
more than 37,000 lives.

Since his capture and conviction for treason in 1999, Ocalan has said on
several occasions that he wants greater political and cultural rights for
the Kurds and denied intentions to carve up an independent Kurdish homeland.

The Ankara government categorically rules out Ocalan and the PKK as an
interlocutor in the Kurdish conflict and is cool to suggestions to give its
Kurdish community any measure of autonomy. – AFP