Armenian Ichthyologists Set No Limits On Crucian Carp Fishing In Sev

ARMENIAN ICHTHYOLOGISTS SET NO LIMITS ON CRUCIAN CARP FISHING IN SEVAN

YEREVAN, MAY 5. ARMINFO. Armenian ichtyologists have imposed no limits
on crucian carp fishing in Lake Sevan this year.

Deputy Director of Institute of Hydrology and Ichtyology of Armenia’s
National Academy of Sciences Boris Gabriyelyan says that as many
crucian carps live in Sevan today as sigs (white fish). They eat the
food of the basic species and so are not wanted in the lake. The fish
got into the lake in 1980 because of negligence and has been quickly
multiplying there since then. Meanwhile bakhtak and bojak (kinds of
trout) are near extinction. Gabriyelyan says that the raising of
Sevan’s level and urgent ecological measures will allow if not to
fully restore at least to save the population of trout in Sevan.

Meanwhile scientists are convinced that human activities and shallowing
rather than other species are responsible for declining number of
trout and white fish in Sevan. Sig is fished in uncontrolled amounts
while trout suffers from inability to spawn in the shallowing lake.

To remind, the level of Sevan was lowered by 20 meters for using its
water for irrigation. In the last two years the level has been raised
by 93 cm to 1,897.78 meters.

Armenian speaker pleased with official embezzlement probes

Armenian speaker pleased with official embezzlement probes

Public Television of Armenia, Yerevan
3 May 05

[Presenter] The investigations carried out by the audit commission of
the Armenian National Assembly have yielded positive results. About
79.6m drams [180,000 dollars] have been returned to the state budget.
Nineteen cases have been investigated by the Prosecutor-General’s
Office. Criminal proceeding have been instituted in connection
with some of those cases, while others entail administrative
responsibility. According to Armenian Speaker Artur Bagdasaryan,
the work that has been carried out is positive.

[Correspondent] The Armenian Prosecutor-General’s Office has presented
the audit commission of the Armenian National Assembly with a report
about the measures it has taken on the basis of the commission’s
investigation. As a result of the measures taken by the Prosecutor’s
Office, 63 warnings have been issued to various officials.

[Artur Bagdasaryan] On the basis of the cases I presented to the
audit commission, I will inform you about the list of 63 people
who have been warned, including three people from the Ministry of
Transport and Communications, 13 from the Ministry of Ecology, four
from the State Water Economy Committee, three officials from State
Social Security Fund and about 40 community leaders.

[Passage omitted: other details]

Britons flock to eastern Europe

The Telegraph, UK
April 3 2005

Britons flock to eastern Europe
(Filed: 03/05/2005)

A growing number of British travellers are taking holidays in eastern
Europe, with the former Communist bloc countries that joined the
European Union a year ago proving particularly popular.

According to statistics released this week by the Civil Aviation
Authority, the number of Britons visiting the Czech Republic alone
rose by 59 per cent (an additional 770,000) last year. The increase
in visits to other newcomers to the EU – including Hungary, Poland,
Slovakia and the Baltic States – almost doubled.

Tour operators to the region have also recorded significant rises,
with bookings to Hungary this year soaring by 150 per cent, and those
to Poland rising by 96 per cent. Although actual traveller numbers
remain modest compared with those to countries such as France and
Italy, the trend has been more pronounced than many predicted.

“Until last year, much of eastern Europe was still uncharted territory
for most British travellers and people wanted to go and have a look
at it,” said Frances Tuke, spokeswoman for the Association of British
Travel Agents (Abta).

“I think people had the idea that it was grey and miserable behind
the Iron Curtain and they have been really surprised to discover
beautiful cities and landscapes, and a thriving cultural scene.”

Historic cities such as Prague and Budapest have long been on
the tourist map, but the accession to the EU on May 1 last year of
Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech and Slovak Republics and Estonia,
Lithuania and Latvia has resulted in a dramatic increase in the number
of air links to the region, bringing many previously unexplored spots
within reach.

As our map shows (above right), in addition to rapidly emerging
favourites such as Krakow and Ljubljana, adventurous travellers can now
take weekend breaks in destinations as far flung as Wroclaw, Rzeszow
and Gdansk. No-frills airlines such as EasyJet, Ryanair, SkyEurope and
Wizz have led the expansion, but they have been joined by traditional
carriers such as British Airways, which now offers services to a host
of eastern destinations including Vilnius and Riga. BA is also looking
beyond the EU, with competitively priced services to Dubrovnik already
under way, a new route to Bucharest starting tomorrow and, from June,
regular flights to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia.

The German national carrier, Lufthansa, is looking even farther
afield. This week it announced an extension of its eastern network
to include Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, Yerevan, the capital of
Armenia, and Timisoara in Romanian Transylvania – all reachable from
the UK via Munich.

In addition to cheap flights, British visitors are attracted to the
east partly out of a sense of adventure and partly because hotel
rooms and meals are still very reasonably priced.

Many of the countries – in particular the Czech Republic – are also
famous for the high quality (and low price) of their beers. Prague,
Tallinn and Vilnius are already well established on the stag-party
network.

According to Neil Taylor, director of Regent Holidays, a specialist
in trips to eastern Europe, many travellers are also beginning to
venture beyond the capitals to discover relatively unspoilt areas
of countryside.

“Undoubtedly the fact that these countries are now part of the EU has
given people confidence to explore, and when they do, they find that
standards have really risen in the region,” he said.

“In the old days, when you travelled behind the Iron Curtain you took
everything you might need with you; now if you run out of toothpaste
you can buy more, as you would in France or Germany. For those that
want it, you could say that you’re never more than 50 miles away from
a four-star hotel.”

BAKU: Azeri officer’s trial due in May

Azeri officer’s trial due in May

Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
Posted May 2 2005

Baku, April 29, AssA-Irada — The trial of Azerbaijani officer
Ramil Safarov, who murdered Armenian serviceman Gurgen Markarian,
will be held in Budapest, Hungary on May 10, Ombudsperson Elmira
Suleymanova said.

Representatives of the Hungarian public organizations are expected to
attend the trial. The Ombudsperson said she requested her Hungarian
counterpart to be present in the court as an observer.

Safarov’s trial, originally scheduled for February, had been postponed
to examine the evidence forwarded to Hungarian lawyers. Safarov, who
comes from Jabrayil District occupied by Armenia, killed the Armenian
officer during NATO courses on February 27, 2004 for insulting the
Azerbaijani flag and people.*

Armenia’s Tears

FrontPage magazine.com, CA
May 2 2005

Armenia’s Tears

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 2, 2005

April 24, 2005 marked the 90th “anniversary” of the Armenian
genocide. With the purpose of decapitating the Armenian community, on
April 24, 1915, Turkish Interior Minister Mehmed Talaat ordered the
arrest of all Armenian political and community leaders suspected of
opposing the Ittihad (~SYoung Turk~T) government, or favoring Armenian
nationalism. In Istanbul alone, 2,345 seized leaders were
incarcerated, and most were subsequently executed. None were
nationalists, political or charged with sabotage, espionage, or any
other crime. None were even tried.1 According to Turkish author Taner
Akcam, systematic plunder, raids, and murders of Armenians were
already occurring daily, under the pretexts of ~Ssearching for arms,
of collecting war levies, or tracking down deserters…~T 2 Within a
month, the final, definitive mass deportations of the Armenian
genocide would begin.3

In recognition of that anniversary, I interviewed Vahakn Dadrian,
the world’s preeminent scholar of the Armenian genocide. The author
of Warrant for Genocide and The History of the Armenian Genocide in
March and April alone received two lifetime achievement awards~Wfrom
the Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches,
and from the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Dadrian studied
mathematics, history and international law at the Universities of
Berlin, Vienna and Zürich before earning his Ph.D. in sociology from
the University of Chicago. He has been a Research Fellow at Harvard
University, a guest professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and a visiting professor at Duke University, received two
large National Science Foundation grants and for years headed a
genocide study project for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation. From 1970
to 1991, he taught sociology at the State University of New York. In
1998, he received the Khorenatsi Medal, Armenia’s highest cultural
award. He currently heads Genocide Research at the Zoryan Institute.

*

Q. I’d like to know about your recent lifetime achievement award.

A. Which one there are many.

Q. The recent one.

A. The work by the specialists of the Holocaust [in Los Angeles] was
a lifetime achievement in the area of the general genocide studies
and the Armenian genocide in particular. Five years ago, the same
assembly of Holocaust scholars had invited me to deliver a keynote
address on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Holocaust
conference, along with the Nobel prize laureate, Eli Wiesel and
distinguished Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer. When I finished my
recent delivery to the holocaust scholars, I got a standing ovation.
Several people were unhappy that I couldn’t speak longer. One female
graduate student came to me, it is very funny, it never happened, and
said at her table, they were betting that I was reading rather than
speaking and she asked me to verify. I said, no, I never read, I
always speak, I never read from notes.

Q. Does Yehuda Bauer recognize the Armenian genocide.

A. Bauer is one of the few holocaust scholars who does recognize the
Armenian genocide, and tells everybody that whatever he knows about
the subject comes from Dadrian.

Q. Well it’s true, you have written an encyclopedia. What are the
most important sources for your study, because I noticed in the
background, you try not to use British, French, Russian sources.

A. You are so prepared. It is a pity this is for Internet.

Q. Most readers are not familiar with the historical background, so
could you briefly review the Abdul Hamit era, and the triumvirate of
the Young Turks or the Ittihad, in other words, the origin of the
genocide.

A. The Armenian genocide was the culmination of a decades long
process of persecution of the Armenians in the Ottoman empire. That
persecution was punctuated in the last two decades of the 19th
century during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamit, the so-called Red
Sultan.

Q. Red for blood?

A. Yes. In the period of 1894-1896, some quarter of a million
Armenians fell victim, directly and indirectly, victim to a series of
atrocious massacres, and what is significant about these pogroms was
that there was no retribution against the perpetrators. In other
words, impunity became the hallmark of the history of the Armenian
persecution and it is the dominant feature of the tragedy of the
Armenian people. We have yet to appreciate the incredible
ramifications of the problem of impunity in international conflicts.
In the most recent three volume Encyclopedia of Genocide, I have a
separate article analyzing this problem in order to emphasize [its]
immense destructive potential.

Q. Well was the Armenia genocide the first time this happened.

A. No, I will explain what happened. The subsequent 1909 Adana
massacres was a byproduct, in my judgment, of this phenomenon of
impunity, even though it was carried out by a successor regime,
namely the Young Turk, Ittihad triumvirate, [Constantinople military
governor Ahmed Djemal Pasha, war minister Enver Pasha and interior
minister Mehmed Talaat] and I maintain that the world war and the
Armenian genocide is the culmination of the consequences of impunity
accruing to the perpetrators of the massacres of the previous
decades.

Q. Please elaborate.

A. As I see it, impunity is intimately linked to the problem of
vulnerability that has been the curse of minorities, such as the
Armenians and the Jews. I believe that impunity lies at the heart of
the vulnerability of the potential victims. If you examine the two
most prominent vulnerable minorities in modern history, that is the
Armenians and Jews, you will see that the vulnerability was of dual
character. First internally, which is associated with the status of
minority. Minority status implies a number of disabilities that make
them vulnerable. But equally and perhaps more importantly, both
victim groups were vulnerable also externally, that is, they did not
have a parent state to protect them. So I therefore maintain that
genocide is intimately linked with the problem of vulnerability of
the victim population.

Q. One thing I did before I came was to look at some maps, and
Salonika is Greece, but it was part of the Ottoman empire. Can you
talk about the changes of the map from 1910 to

A. There was very little change, because, geographically, the
Armenian population remained constant within the confines of the
Ottoman empire. In other words, there was a heavy concentration of
the Armenian population in the 6 eastern provinces of the empire. It
was historically and geographically Armenia, but it was never
politically a separate Armenian state. Ottoman Armenians were a
subject population. There was one minor change in boundaries. That
was at the end of the 1877-78 Russo Turkish war, when Russia occupied
the provinces of Kars and Ardahan, and therefore presently, Armenian
territorial claims have relevance only with respect to those two
provinces that they have considered part of Southeast Russia since
1877-78. So therefore the Armenians claim that it was reoccupied
illegally by the Ottomans at the end of World War I, even though it
was Ottoman territory before the 1877-78 war that Ottoman Turks had
lost to the Russians.

Q. But Greece was part of the Ottoman empire, Syria was part of the
Ottoman empire, all these countries that are now separate, were part
of the empire. It was huge.

A. It was a huge empire, and the tragedy of the Armenian genocide is
intimately linked to the massive shrinking of that empire.

Q. Explain.

A. Beginning with the end of the Russo Turkish war, one by one, the
Christian nationalities of the Balkan peninsula emancipated
themselves from the yoke of the Ottoman empire, and that process of
emancipation reached its acme in the 1912 first Balkan war. It was in
the fall of 1912 that the Ottoman Turks were literally expelled from
Europe with grave consequences involving demography, human misery,
destitution, frustration and anger against Christianity. I believe
that this cumulative hatred against Christians very significantly
played out in the World War I genocide, because many of the
organizers and the perpetrators of the genocide were destitute
refugees of the first Balkan war. All their cumulative hatred against
non-Muslims and Christians was transferred into anti-Armenian
savagery. We call this in social psychology displaced aggression. And
even some Turkish historians recognize that in this sense the
Armenians were the unfortunate targets, the scapegoats.

Q. Talk about it please.

A. The Bulgarians and Greeks were the main driving force in pushing
the Ottomans out of the Balkans. This problem has not been
sufficiently appreciated. Namely, the instrumental role of refugees
of the first Balkan war in the Armenian genocide. For example,
interior minister Talaat appointed 5,000 of them exclusively as
gendarmes, and the gendarmes were the main escort personnel of the
deportee convoys. Thousands of them were escorts.

Q. The Kurds, the Circassians.

A. The Kurds played a role in the utmost eastern provinces,
particularly in Van and Bitlis. So in the Van and Bitlis segments,
the Kurdish tribes were the principal instrument of the genocide. To
illustrate the point, Mush city and Mush plain is the heart of
historic Armenia. The golden age of Armenian civilization in the 5th
century, Christianity, monasteries, the discovery of the Armenian
alphabet, were all concentrated in that Mush plain. Mush city had
about 15,000 Armenians and Mush plain is about 90 miles in length and
had about 100,000 Armenian population. The overwhelming majority of
this Armenian population experienced the most gruesome form of
genocide, namely being herded into stables and burned alive. A
veritable holocaust. So this is the real holocaust, burning alive,
and this was done by the area’s Kurdish tribes.

Q. A lot of the methodologies were later used in the Nazi period.
Burning and drowning.

A. There was some of this in the Jewish holocaust, but in the
Armenian genocide, it was massive. It was the main instrument but
also in Harput, and Mush were massive episodes of burning. There is a
description by a Jewish eyewitness of the massive burning of Armenian
orphans.

Q. I recall this from your article.

A. Of course, speaking of methods of genocide, another ghastly method
that is unique to the Armenian genocide is the massive drowning
operations. In particular in the Black sea coast, involving such
cities as Trabzon, Samsun and Ordu, and many of the tributaries of
the Euphrates River, in particular there is a spot of the Euphrates,
north of Erzurum city, called the Kemach Gorge, where nearly 20,000
to 25,000 were mutilated and thrown into the river. And Ambassador
Morgenthau says in his memoirs that at that spot in the river, the
corpses were so massive that the river changed course for about 100
meters.

Q. Clearly there is a dispute about the statistics. What are your
estimates and how do you source that.

A. I am glad that you used the word estimates, because given the
primitive conditions of the empire and the statistics, there are no
definite and reliable statistics. They are all estimates. I estimate
that the number of dead as a result of the deportations and massacres
[during the World War I genocide] was 1.2 million and an additional
several hundred thousand succumbed subsequently to their deprivations
and hardships. Included in that category are also tens of thousands
of forcible conversions to Islam of children and women, orphans and
harem victims. And I rely mostly on German estimates, and this is
more acceptable because, unlike the British and the French, Germany
was the military ally of the Ottoman empire.

Q. Does that include the massacres of 1894 to 1896?

A. No. My estimates for the victims of the Abdul Hamit era massacres,
direct and indirect, is some 200,000 because large numbers of
Armenians succumbed to the wounds inflicted in the massacres. There
is one more thing. During the same massacres, in the aftermath of
them, many Armenians died of famine. Indeed, because of the
cataclysmic events of the massacres, tens of thousands of other
Armenians succumbed to famine, starvation.

Q. Now, let’s discuss the importance of Islam in these events.

A. Now we come to the delicate issue of Islam.

Q. It’s pretty clear in Warrant for Genocide that Islamic teaching
and practice is a problem and that religion played a big role in
this.

A. A very big role. First of all, Islam played a major role both in
the period of the Abdul Hamit massacres [1894-1896] and the 1909
Adana massacres and the World War I genocide. During the Abdul Hamit
era, Islam was the main impetus, the direct impetus of the massacres,
because 90 percent of the massacres took place on Fridays, which is
the religious holiday. Immediately at the end of the religious
ceremonies in the mosques, the mobs, harangued by Muslim clerics,
were incited and as a result the motivation was reinforced to attack
and massacre the Armenian population of the respective regions. In
other words, Islam as an institution, and champions of Islam, the
Muslim clerics, played a major role in the organization and execution
of the series of massacres. In World War I, Islam also was exploited
by way of formally declaring jihad, the main target of which became
the Christian Armenians. Holy War can only be proclaimed by the
sultan who is also the Khalif, the supreme religious authority, and
the Sheikh ul Islam, the religious head of Islam. One of the greatest
incentives of jihad for motivating people to kill is the promise of
celestial bliss, and other kinds of rewards in heaven. This played a
major role in mobilizing the masses, the naïve masses. In Archbishop
Balakian’s book, the Armenian Golgotha, there are scenes in which,
after every massacre, the head of the gendarmes units, spread his
prayer rug and thanked god for serving him through jihad-borne
massacres massacres.

Q. Was Islam the state ideology during the Ittihadists rule?

A. Let me move to the era of World War I, and Islam, there is a very
significant aspect to it. The authors of the Armenian genocide, the
Young Turks, were almost entirely either atheistic or agnostic, they
did not believe in religion, but they had to exploit the religious
beliefs of the masses. So Islam was instrumental in this condition of
paradox of irreligious leaders are seen exploiting religion.

Q. So they used Islam.

A. They exploited Islam and in both instances, the Abdul Hamid era
and the World War I era, many many times victims were given the
option of converting to Islam or to be killed instantly. And in that
connection, I consider the condition of the Armenians very very grave
when projecting into the future.

Q. From now.

A. Yes, because Armenia is literally surrounded by Moslem populations
and the growing trend of Islam renders the condition of Armenia very
very precarious.

Q. What’s the population now.

A. I think in a few months there will be a census. Unofficially,
right now it’s 3.2 million, but officially maybe 2.5 million. So
Armenia is shrinking, because of economic conditions, but I will also
add that recourse to exodus has been the curse of Armenian history.
Armenians tend to migrate, and it is very significant that
historically the largest Armenian populations in the Caucasus have
been concentrated in Georgia and Azerbaijan, , i.e. Tbilisi and Baku,
more than in Armenia proper. This is a weakness of the Armenians, not
to hold on to their natural habitat, and to seek fortunes abroad.
Thousands now, some of them justifiably, but some of them
unjustifiably, are abandoning Armenia.

I believe that the greatest danger to Armenia comes from Islamic
Turkey. I think the Turkish government that is also essentially
Islamic, even though the Turkish government is going through the
motions of embracing European values, I call this expedient
adaptiveness. That is, to accede to the European Union, and then to
use sheer demography, to become a dominant force in the future in
Europe. By sheer demography, I mean by rapid population growth,
Europe may be inundated by Moslem Turks, who then are bound to change
the nature and design of European civilization. It should be noted
that the present Turkish government is a reflection of an
overwhelming ascendancy of Islam in Turkey, in particular in terms of
the Islamic Turkish masses, The proliferation of mosques in Turkey
today is a signpost of the ascendancy of Islam; the same
proliferation is observable in those European countries with sizable
and growing Muslim populations.

Q. Really a bad thing for Turkey to be admitted to the EU.

A. It is a major liability for Europe to embrace Turkey [but] I am
not sure that the prospects are favorable for Turkey. It may well be
that European leaders are using the prospects of accession to the
European Union as a device to transform Turkey into a democratic
country, but it’s an attempt with dubious prospects of success. I
think Europe may be using the prospects of [Turkey’s] accession as a
subterfuge.

Q. Interesting that you talked about the present government.

A. The present government is secular, but on the surface. They are
essentially Islamic people with Islamic ambitions. I call this
adaptive expediency. The tremendous political rapprochement of the
present [Islamist] Erdogon government demonstrates immense agility,
but which, I think, is superficial. All the reforms that the Turkish
government is adopting now are essentially meant to accommodate
Europe expeditiously.

Q. Reflective of history isn’t it. This is what happened in the 19th
Century and 20th Century reforms that were in name only.

A. Tanzimat reforms [forced on the Ottomans by Europe from 1839 to
1876] never gained a foothold in Anatolia amongst the masses. It was
a superficial phenomenon limited to the Europeanized leadership in
Istanbul. There was massive resistance to the Tanzimat reforms in the
provinces. But bear in mind that the Ottoman empire during the reign
of sultan Hamit had very little connection to Turks or Turkey, but
rather to Islam. Up to that time, there was no Turkish nationalism.
And it is very significant that in all the discussions of the
Armenian question in the 19th Century, they always use the sentence
Armenians versus Moslem’s, never Turks. So as a result, non-Turks,
i.e., Kurds, Circassians, Chechens, were subsumed under Muslims
without differentiating them ethnically or nationality.

Q. But they had pretense historically, to reform on the surface, but
nothing really changed. It’s like now.

A. You have to differentiate between European capital of the Ottoman
Empire, Istanbul, and the backward provinces of Turkey. There was
always a cleavage, a gap, between the capital of the empire and the
coastal cities like Smyrna, Adana and Trabzon on the one hand, and
the rest of the empire on the other. Indeed, the interior underwent
very little change.

Q. And that is true now also. A. To some extent, yes.

Q. Would you say that now, there is a call to jihad.

A. Jihad is a byproduct of warfare and hence it is a call to war;
presently, only terrorists are using it. This is the most belligerent
aspect of Islam, the provision for holy war, to which it
differentiates from Christianity. The propensity for lethal violence
is a central element.

Q. Jihad is not a big factor now.

A. No, Jihad is a condition of warfare. It sanctifies murder with a
promise of rewards. This is the most interesting part of jihad, that
it holds out rewards, celestial bliss.

Q. Well it is also the assets of the murdered people, their land,
their property.

A. Yes, in addition to the celestial promises, there are mundane
rewards, i.e. plunder, enrichment, sexual gratification, sexual
designs. Rape has been a major ingredient of all massacres in the
Ottoman empire, which is of course a common phenomenon in all
episodes of atrocities.

Q. Can you talk about your family and your background. What
interested you in the first place.

A. I was a student of mathematics in Berlin, but then I went to the
University of Vienna, since it is customary in Europe to change
universities after two or three semesters. And I went to the
University of Vienna and my teacher upon learning that I am an
Armenian, told me that he was a classmate of Franz Werfel, the author
of Forty Days of Musa Dagh. So he urged me to read Forty Days of Musa
Dagh, and I read it. Forty Days of Musa Dagh was a turning point in
my education. I read it twice in its original German, and this was
the first time that I had a powerful sense of injustice that has been
afflicting my people. Such a crime of magnitude, and no retributive
justice. That was my main and powerful experience of rebellion at the
time.

Q. How old were you.

A. I was 21. Then I read a second book, Archbishop Balakian’s
Armenian Golgotha, a book full of graphic descriptions of atrocity.
Then another thing that was really final straw was a scene that is
deeply ingrained in my psyche. It was a book by Leon Surmelian,
titled I Ask you Ladies and Gentlemen. He was adopted as a young
child to serve, tending animals, as a shepherd to a Muslim family,
and there was a scene of a massacre nearby, and a woman in the throes
of dying recognized that this boy was an Armenian and said, my child,
if you ever manage to survive, please see to it that our martyrdom is
not consigned to oblivion, that we are remembered. This impressed me
terribly: the last wish of a dying victim of a massacre is not to be
consigned to oblivion but to be remembered. It is a very powerful
thing. So after that, I relinquished my interest in math and became
fully engrossed in the history of the Armenian genocide. So after
reading these books, my first step was to branch off into archive
research. I visited the state archives of the German republic almost
14 times, digging into every possible German document, then I went to
the Austrian state archive several times, collecting hundreds and
hundreds of other documents, fully cognizant of the fact that these
two countries were the military allies of Ottoman empire during the
war. Then I studied the Jerusalem archives of the Armenian
Patriarchate because the Armenian Patriarch after the armistice had
collected many many documents of the Turkish military tribunal that
was set up during the armistice. The Turks in the post-war period had
initiated courts martial against perpetrators and during the courts
martial, many documents came into the possession of the tribunal. And
Armenian employees of the court martial at night stole the documents
and copied them and then returned them in the morning. Then of
course, there are surviving Ottoman documents. As I mentioned many
times, a crime of such great magnitude is impossible to have all the
documents disappear. Almost always, some documents survive. So there
is a considerable body of authentic Ottoman documents that the
military tribunal acquired, authenticated and used.

Q. What about your own family experience.

A. My family largely survived the genocide, because my father was
very popular among the Turks. He was a judge, and I understand that
he was very respected for his sense of probity and justice. At one
time, he was even urged by his Turkish colleagues to become a deputy
of Chorum, and he refused. I understand also that I come from a very
wealthy family. My grandfather erected the church of Chorum, and my
father built the school at Chorum, as a result the Patriarch issued
an encyclical declaring the Dadrian family national benefactors. I
have lots of title deeds documenting amassed wealth in Chorum
involving Dadrian family properties. But I am prepared to relinquish
any claim on property if the Turks recognize the genocide. A sizable
portion of the city of Chorum was owned by the Dadrian family but I
am an academician, and I have an aversion against wealth and greed.

Q. It’s very striking to read about the Constantinople Conference and
the pressure to accommodate Turkey on reforms, so they watered
everything down.

A. In the Abdul Hamit era, the Constantinople Conference was a
failure because Abdul Hamit absolutely refused to grant European
control over Ottoman reforms in the provinces. The European powers
insisted that the reforms be supervised by the powers, and the sultan
said, this is a sticking point; he said that this is an encroachment
on Ottoman sovereignty. Another delicate point in the Constantinople
Conference was the issue of non-Muslims, Christians, having the
right to bear arms. And the Sheikh ul Islam said categorically no,
our subjects, non-Muslims can never be armed, and this is the heart
and soul of Armenian vulnerability. When you are surrounded by people
armed to the teeth and you have no way of defending yourself, you
learn the art of submissiveness as a means of survival. This was the
case with the Jews. Submissiveness becomes a survival technique,
because if you don’t submit, you are done. So five centuries of
abject submissiveness nipped in the bud the Armenian spirit of
combativeness and self-defense. And it is very significant that the
few citadels of Armenian heroism and self-defense were locations
where Armenians were armed, such as Sassun and Zeitun, this is north
of Hajun near Adana. And other ones, such as Shabin Karaisor, and
Urfa and Musa Dagh, of course. So mountain Armenians took advantage
of the landscape and mounted self-defense. They had been armed for
centuries, primitive, very primitive arms.

Q. What would you say were the most important factors were the
warrant for genocide.

A. Two factors stand out. The extreme vulnerability of the Armenians,
and the constancy of impunity with which the perpetrators have been
rewarded, vulnerability and impunity.

Q. Do you have any optimism that Turkey will recognize the genocide
for what it was.

A. No. Because as I said, vulnerability is a function of power
relations. Vulnerable means that you are impotent, and the
perpetrators are powerful. This is the relationship between victims
and perpetrators. And today, Turkey is even more powerful than during
the massacres, and as long as that power position holds, there is
very little incentive for any perpetrator to concede guilt. The only
prospect of recognition by the Turks can be if there is a civil war,
Turkey is terribly weakened, destitute, as was the case at the end of
the war, in the two years before the rise of Kemalism. Turkey was
completely ready to acknowledge guilt and to compensate.

Q. So why didn’t they.

A. The ascendancy of Kemalism changed the picture dramatically.
Abject weakness was transformed into defiant power.

Q. Some would say that if the U.S. and Israel accepted the genocide,
then Turkey would recognize it, and they should.

A. I doubt it. As long as Turkey has the power and leverage it has,
not even God can change the conditions. We cannot afford to
underestimate the leverage of power. Power tends to make people
arrogant, willfully deceitful and manipulative, especially in the
Orient.

Q. But Israel should recognize the genocide. There are Zionists who
recognize the genocide.

A. There is one remote possibility of recognition by Turkey, and that
is if and when there emerges in Turkey today what we call a potent
civil society that can challenge the omnipotent state. Turkey has
always been ruled by an omnipotent state. In Turkey, the concept of
devlet, state, is an all-embracing concept. Turks worship their state
and they have always been submissive. But now, there are signs of the
development of a middle class civil society that is posed to question
and challenge the omnipotence of the state, in particular as regards
the Armenian genocide. Next month, in Istanbul, three major
universities will conduct a conference focusing on the Armenian
genocide in which they will challenge the doctrines of the Turkish
Historical Society, which is an arm of the state. In no democratic
country can you see an academic organization such as a historical
society being an arm of the state. They mimic, they copy, they
emulate, they reflect the position of the state. Now these
universities are saying enough is enough. Historical study should be
detached from the state.

Q. So the factors behind the genocide were the Armenian victims’
vulnerability and the perpetrator power of the Turks.

A. Genocide almost always presupposes the power of the perpetrator
against the vulnerability of the victims.

Q. Could it happen again.

A. Only if there is an armed conflict. I think, I am convinced that
deep in their hearts, the Turks would like to do away with Armenia,
because it is a constant reminder of this terrible blot in Turkish
history. In fact, I think they would have achieved their goal of
wiping out Armenia completely in the Fall of 1920 if it weren’t for
the intervention of the 11th Red Army that marched into Armenia and
imposed communism. In 1920, the fledgling and ill-equipped Armenian
army was defeated by the Turkish armies, and Armenia, or what was
left of it, wouldn’t have survived but for the intervention of the
Red Army that preempted the Turkish conquest of Armenia by marching
into Armenia and for all practical purposes rescuing it from near
obliteration.

1. Uras E., The Armenians and the Armenian Question in History, 2nd
ed., (Istanbul, 1976), p.612.

2. Akcam T., Turkish National Identity and the Armenian Question,
(Istanbul, 1992), p. 109.

3. Hovanissian R., Armenia on the Road to Independence, (Berkeley,
CA, 1967), p. 51.

–Boundary_(ID_Io0lE7tEOCdn6VPLvPGwIw)–

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17910

If Race Research Banned Now, How Will We Cope With Brave New World?

VDARE.com, Virginia
May 1 2005

If Race Research Is Banned Now, How Will We Cope With A “Brave New
World?”
By Steve Sailer

Through genetic selection and modification, we will be soon be able
to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse.

Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming.

The good news: we still have time figure out the physical,
psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies
might be – by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.

The bad news: we won’t fund research into existing human biodiversity
– because it’s politically incorrect.

Genetic engineering, and associated technologies such as neural
implants, is explored in two new books.

Microsoft programmer Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human: Embracing
the Promise of Biological Enhancement, never seems to have met an
idea for fiddling around with our genes that he didn’t like. I find
his optimism likable even though I don’t share it. Unfortunately, the
numerous small errors of fact in his book saps confidence in his
overall reliability.

In contrast, Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau – known to
VDARE.COM readers as author of the provocative The Nine Nations Of
North America – can’t seem to make up his mind in his upcoming
Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our
Bodies – and What It Means to Be Human.

Garreau evenhandedly interviews futurist cheerleaders, like inventor
Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements daily as
part of his plan for living forever, and doomsayers, like Sun
Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who fears that genetically
manipulated germs could wipe out all of humanity.

(The inaptly named Joy strikes me as a Gloomy Gus. But, just in case
some apocalyptic catastrophe does transpire, it would make sense to
pay a couple of dozen military families to live for two year
stretches at the bottom of a Kansas salt mine, from which, if the
worst were to happen, they could eventually re-emerge like Noah’s
family to repopulate the planet.)

What Naam and Garreau can agree upon is that the post-human age will
be here Real Soon Now.

I’m not so certain. medicine progresses slowly these days. But I am
sure that that it’s time to start getting serious about whether we
want them or not.

The situation oddly resembles the political impact of immigration.
When I first started writing about immigration, it was widely assumed
that the Hispanic share of the vote had become so huge that it was
political suicide to try to cut back on immigration. Yet closer study
showed this was far from true.

For example, in the overall 2004 exit poll, the un-massaged Hispanic
share of the respondents turned out to be only 5.9 percent, far below
the 8 or 9 percent forecast by Michael Barone.

Similarly, when it comes to human bioengineering, the future hasn’t
yet gone through the formality of taking place.

We still have time to figure out what we want to do and what we
don’t.

But how? Answer: By studying honestly the human genetic diversity we
see all around us – and learning how it already affects society.

Unfortunately, political taboos against the study of human
biodiversity retard this crucial work.

Occasionally, I get emails telling me I’m foolish to worry about the
long term effects of immigration because genetic engineering will
soon give us all IQs of 1,000 … or we’ll live forever … or robots
will take over and enslave us … or nanotechnology will make us all
richer than Croesus … or nanotechnology will run amok and suck all
the life out of everything on Earth … or …

But technological trees don’t always grow to the sky. Consider the
rise and fall of the Transportation Revolution. From the development
of the steamship to the moon landing took less than 170 years. Smart
science fiction writers like Robert A. Heinlein assumed that this
progress would continue.

Yet, in the last quarter of a century, the greatest breakthrough in
transportation technology has been, what, the minivan? The Concorde
is dead, the Space Shuttle is teetering …

Nor do technical revolutions always arrive on time. Medical gene
engineering of humans has been much slower to become usable than many
assumed a decade ago.

One problem: getting the effectiveness to risk level high enough.
Operating on humans isn’t like engineering corn or mice, where you
can throw away your mistakes.

Another difficulty: although there was a vast amount of publicity
back in 2000 about how the genome had been “mapped,” we still don’t
know what most genes actually do.

Moreover, while a few diseases, such as sickle cell anemia and
Huntington’s, are the result of a single bad gene, the big bad
illnesses seem to have other causes. Indeed, Darwinian logic, as
first enunciated by Gregory Cochran, suggests we might have been
focusing too hard on finding heritable genetic causes for diseases.
In the words of top British genetic journalist Matt Ridley, “Your
genes don’t exist to kill you.”

Indeed, a new report called “Microbial Triggers of Common Human
Illness” from the American Academy of Microbiology supports Cochran’s
insight that many diseases that are assumed genetic may more likely
be triggered by germs.

That’s because natural selection would tend to eliminate harmful
genes in us, but pathogens evolve at least as fast as our defenses
against them.

Your genes haven’t evolved to make you sick, but to give you
capabilities to survive and reproduce. So genetic technologies might
be more suited to enhance skills than to cure illnesses.

Yet some capacities are likely to require many genes working together
in complex ways, so the payoff from altering a single gene would be
small. Superstar cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has said, “I think
an Achilles heel of genetic enhancement will be the rarity of single
genes with consistent beneficial psychological effects.”

Considering the intricacy of the human brain, this is particularly
likely to be true of intelligence, which would make engineering
higher IQs difficult.

Conversely, single genes often have multiple uses, which means that
genetic engineering could often have unfortunate side effects.

For example, back in 1999, Time Magazine ran a cover story called
“The I.Q. Gene?” about how Dr. Joe Tsien had genetically engineered
“Doogie” mice to have superior memories.

But subsequent studies showed the Doogie mice (named after the
supersmart TV character Doogie Howser, M.D.) are also more sensitive
to chronic inflammatory pain, which isn’t a trait you’d want your
children to possess.

Farmers have been modifying their barnyard animals’ genetic
frequencies for thousands of years through selective breeding. One of
the many interesting aspects of the new book Animals in Translation:
Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by animal
sciences professor Temple Grandin, who is America’s best known
autistic, is how she documents some of the weird things that go wrong
when breeders emphasize a single genetic trait.

For example, don’t expect Lassie to figure out anymore that the way
to rescue little Timmy from the quicksand is by extending a long
branch to him. Since WWII, collie breeders have been trying to give
collies narrower and narrower snouts because they look so darn
elegant that way. Unfortunately, they made their skulls so narrow
there is no room left for brains. Collies are now dumb as a box of
rocks.

Side effects can be more unpredictable and even nastier. In recent
years, as chicken ranchers have bred for more meat on their birds,
they’ve had to deal with an unprecedented rash of rooster sex
murderers who kill hens.

In humans, Cochran has pointed out that torsion dystonia, a
hereditary illness which puts about 10 percent of its sufferers in
wheelchairs at an early age, may be a side effect of intense
selection pressure for higher IQ. In one study, the average IQ of
patients was 122.

So parents may not rush into genetic engineering their children quite
as fast as the futurists expect.

Futurists – being smart, nerdy guys – generally assume that the most
desirable human trait is IQ.

But we can look right now at racial groups with higher average IQs,
such as Northeast Asians and Ashkenazis, to get some idea of the
social impact of high IQ.

Higher IQ groups tend to exhibit positive social patterns such as low
crime rates and high wealth creation rates. Unfortunately, what Amy
Chua calls “market dominant minorities” haven’t always been looked
upon favorably by the masses. Top IQ researcher Linda Gottfredson
points out in her important article “What If the Hereditarian
Hypothesis Is True?” that “Virtually all the victim groups of
genocide in the 20th century had relatively high average levels of
achievement (e.g., German Jews, educated Cambodians, Russian Kulaks,
Armenians in Turkey, Ibos in Nigeria).”

Among average people, it is not at all clear that intelligence is
considered as desirable as desirability. I suspect that most parents
would choose attractiveness over intelligence for their children,
because being able to outcompete your peers for the best spouse is so
important, especially in making grandchildren, that looks matter
greatly.

Heinlein might have been the first thinker to explore some of the
consequences.

In his prescient 1942 novel about a genetically engineered future,
Beyond This Horizon, the world is populated by fairly intelligent but
extremely sexy people straight out of a Hollywood casting call.

The men are manly and the ladies lovely. The men are so macho in
fact, that no gentleman would be seen without his gun, and dueling
has made a major comeback. The strict code of etiquette that limits
when these square-jawed bravos are allowed to blast away at each
other inspired Heinlein’s famous remark, “An armed society is a
polite society.”

As insightful as the best science fiction writers are, we can learn
the pros and cons of a higher testosterone future society right now
by examining the social behavior of current racial groups with higher
levels of male hormones and stronger male hormone receptors, such as
African-Americans.

But, that kind of research on naturally occurring genetic diversity
is largely taboo. Instead, we will probably walk blindly into the era
of genetic engineering.

Good luck to us all. We’re going to need it.

[Steve Sailer [email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity
Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website
features site-exclusive commentaries.]

www.iSteve.com

Tehran: Iran begins work on Armenia gas pipeline

IranMania, Iran
May 1 2005

Iran begins work on Armenia gas pipeline

Sunday, May 01, 2005 – ©2005 IranMania.com

LONDON, May 1 (IranMania) – Managing director of National Iranian Gas
Company said that executive operations of the gas export pipeline
project to Armenia has begun, adding that the project will become
operational by early 2007.

Mohammad Mallaki told ISNA that the contractor of the project has
been ascertained. `We began the project as soon as the feasibility
studies ended and the winner of the tender took charge of the
affairs,` he said.

Roknoddin Javadi, who heads the National Iranian Gas Exports Company,
further told ISNA that the gas deal with Armenia has been finalized
and executive operations have started.

He said studies by the Russian company Gazprom on possible gas
exports to Armenia would have no implications on the Tehran-Yerevan
deal.

`Gazprom will be involved mostly in projects related to domestic gas
supply network in Armenia,` he said.

The official further said that a new oil swap deal has been struck
with Azerbaijan.

`Based on the agreement, Iran will transfer gas from Astara to
Nakhichevan and receive the transit fee from Azerbaijan,` he added.

High-profile talks are underway with New Delhi and Islamabad on gas
exports to India via a pipeline crossing Pakistan.

At present, Iran is exporting gas via pipeline only to Turkey.

Turkey, the largest buyer of Iranian gas, began purchases totaling 4
bln cubic meters in 2001 under a 25-year deal. It is expected to
raise its purchase from Iran to 10 bln in 2007 from 6.689 bln in
2005.

Turkey is reportedly preparing to resort to international arbitration
after negotiations failed to settle the pricing of natural gas from
its second-biggest supplier Iran.

The Turkish government said last year it would resort to
international arbitration after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan failed to persuade Tehran to cut prices.

Erebuni Armenian Chorus to sing May 15

Belmont Citizen-Herald, MA
April 28 2005

Erebuni Armenian Chorus to sing May 15
Thursday, April 28, 2005

The Erebuni Armenian Chorus of Greater Boston will hold its Spring
Concert on May 15 at 3 p.m. at the Sacred Heart Church, 1321 Centre
St., Newton.

A special feature of Erebuni’s program will be an appearance by
the children’s chorus of the Montessori Educare School of Newton and
the St. James Armenian Church Jr. Choir/Chorale of Watertown. More
than 60 youngsters, many of whom are not of Armenian descent, will
share their unique repertoire which includes Armenian music.

This is the 10th anniversary year for the Erebuni Chorus which
performs a cappella music, much of which has been arranged for
four-part singing by its founder and artistic director, Maestro Artur
Veranian. The chorus has an international repertoire of music –
Armenian and non-Armenian, traditional and classical, liturgical and
modern. The group has been invited again this year to appear at the
Massachusetts State House during its annual Armenian Genocide
commemorative program in April.

Erebuni’s Spring Concert will include musical compositions of
Komitas Vardapet, Makar Ekmalian, Sayat Nova, Alexander Haroutunian,
Robert Amirkhanian, and Robert Petrossian, among others. Conducting
the entire program, both adult and children’s choruses, will be
Maestro Veranian, who has won many grand and special prizes in
international competitions in Italy, Germany and Spain. Former
conductor of the Armenian State Academic Chorus and the State Chamber
Orchestra in Armenia, Veranian is currently on the faculty of the
Montessori Educare School and is music director of St. James Armenian
Apostolic Church.

Tickets for the concert are available through any Erebuni Chorus
member at $15 for adults and $5 for children under 12. For further
information, please contact Nicole Simmons at 617-484-6748, Hasmig
Maserejian at 617-484-1451, or write to Erebuni Armenian Chorus of
Greater Boston, P.O. Box 378, Belmont, MA 02478.

Calling a Crime by its Name; America and the Armenian Genocide

Opinion Editorials, VA
April 29 2005

Calling a Crime by its Name; America and the Armenian Genocide
Sean Gannon

Regrettably, the United States has once again allowed the April 24th
commemorations of the Armenian Genocide to pass without calling the
crime by its name. On that date in 1915, 250 Armenian leaders and
intellectuals were
deported from Constantinople and subsequently tortured and killed,
the beginning of a campaign which resulted in up to one and a half
million Armenian Ottoman subjects dead and a further one million in
exile. While Turkish threats to cancel lucrative defence contracts
and curb use of military airbases kept Bill Clinton onside, it was
rumoured that President Bush would use this year’s 90th
anniversary to end U.S. appeasement of Ankara by recognizing these
deaths as genocide. Sadly, such speculation appears to have been
unfounded.

Turkey, of course, strenuously rejects the genocide charge and
accuses Armenia, and in particular America’s sizeable Armenian
community, of wilfully disseminating an inaccurate picture of what
happened in the World War I period and why. And to be fair, there is
an element of truth in Ankara’s claim that the situation in Anatolia
in 1915 was not as clear cut as is generally presented today.
For instance, it is rarely acknowledged that the rise of Armenian
nationalism in the 19th century led to enormous tensions between
Armenians and their Ottoman overlords with the result that many took
sides against the Empire in 1828, 1854 and 1877. It is also
infrequently admitted that although 250,000 Armenians were
conscripted into the Ottoman armies during World War I, another
150,000, out of
a sense of religious affinity with the Orthodox Slavs and in the hope
that a Russian victory would lead to an independent Armenian state,
volunteered to serve in the Czarist forces while a further 50,000
joined various guerrilla groups such as the Dashnaks and the Huchnaks
who openly sided with Nicholas II against the Central Powers. And
seldom spoken of is the fact that about 200,000
Moslems, Greeks and Jews died directly at their hands.

But while it is then perhaps understandable that the Ottomans came to
view the Armenians as a fifth column within the Empire, there was no
justification for their
response to this perceived problem. Aside from the fact that the
treasonable tendencies of a substantial minority can never be used to
justify the wholesale slaughter of the substantial majority, it is
clear from non-partisan sources that the massacres and deportations
of Armenian civilians began before the rampages by Armenian regular
and irregular forces through Anatolia. As David Fromkin,
who studied German sources for his acclaimed book on the period
writes; “There are historians today who continue to support the claim
of Enver and Talaat that the Ottoman rulers acted only after Armenia
had risen against them. But observers at the time who were by no
means anti-Turk reported that such was not the case. German officers
stationed there agreed that the area was quiet until the deportations
began.”

In any case, Ankara continues to deny that a substantial majority of
Armenians were actually murdered during the War. While some Turkish
historians go so far
as to allow that up to 600,000 Armenians died during the period in
question, the semi-official Turkish Historical Society maintains that
the figure is closer to 300,000 and that, of these, only 10,000 were
massacred, the remainder dying of the starvation and disease which is
the inevitable accompaniment of war. It further claims that these
10,000 were killed, not as the result of any master plan to rid the
Empire of a turbulent minority, but in the heat of battle and more
often than not by non-Turkish Kurds.

But it is a matter of historical record that there existed the
“Special Organization,” an official department of the Central
Government which oversaw the activities of Einsatzgruppen-style
killing squads which, in the words of one American diplomat,
travelled around Anatolia “massacring men, women and children and
burning their homes. Babies were shot in their mothers’ arms, small
children were horribly mutilated, women were stripped and beaten.”

Furthermore, Turkey’s claim that the Kurds were primarily responsible
for the killing is disingenuous in the extreme. For a start, the mass
murder of Armenians
by Ottoman Turks was not unprecedented, having occurred between 1894
and 1896 and again in 1909. Certainly Kurds were involved in the
events of 1915-1923 but they were consciously co-opted by Enver Pasha
for the purpose of
massacring Armenians in the knowledge that their historic blood
enemies would lose no opportunity to avenge ancient and
not-so-ancient grudges. Therefore, the army command in Constantinople
was fully culpable for the anti-Armenian
activities of its Kurdish battalions.

In addition, Turkey’s drawing of a distinction between those who died
directly at the hands of the Ottomans and indirectly from starvation,
exposure and disease
is entirely unsustainable. With no provisions made for clothing, food
or shelter, the anticipated outcome of the forced deportations of
Armenians into the Syrian deserts was obviously death. Indeed, Talaat
Pasha termed them “marches to eternity” and his meaning was
manifestly clear to his appalled Austrian and German allies who went
to great lengths to distance themselves from the policy.
To say that the Armenians who died during the deportations were not
deliberately killed by the Ottomans is akin to claiming that no
intentional Jewish deaths occurred during ‘relocation to the East’
during the Second World War or on the ‘death marches’ to the West
which followed the Russian advances in 1944 and
1945.

So, by any international standard, the events of 1915-1923
constituted genocide, the Ottoman campaign against the Armenians in
this period conforming to the accepted 1948 U.N. definition in having
being “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” An American
acknowledgement of this fact is long overdue and, with U.S./Turkish
relations in the doldrums since the invasion of Iraq, President Bush
has for once little to lose by extending it.

http://www.opinioneditorials.com/freedomwriters/sgannon_20050429.html

Sahakashvili’s reputation falling rapidly

A1Plus

| 13:50:30 | 29-04-2005 | Politics |

SAHAKASHVILI’S REPUTATION FALLING RAPIDLY

`There is information that when the Georgian President was given the results
of the survey about his reputation and told that the data of the already
fallen reputation are not real, Mikhail Sahakashvili tore the paper’, said
Gia Areshidze, head of the Center for National and International Studies
during the international conference `Caucasus-2004′ today. The explanation
for why the `rose revolution’ had such `sad’ development is clear – everyone
suffered from the revolution.

`The 4th channel of the business racket is being realized’, mentions Gia
Areshidze. In the post-revolutionary Georgia the e-Mass Media are completely
under control. The press is relatively free, as the print run of the
newspapers is very small. Referring to the Georgian developments, Mr.
Areshidze concluded, `Sooner or later everyone will realize that a step bask
has been taken’.