Author: Vardanian Garo

The New Anatolian, Turkey
April 15 2005

Prejudice ise Worse than Poison (On Turkish-Armenian Relations)

Nursun Erel

We now have a historic opportunity for both Armenia and Turkey to
reconcile their relations, but it seem that, once again, it will be
lost to prejudice.

– “How do you know?” I hear your question, so let me tell you.

It was four years ago, on behalf of the TV channel I was working for,
I asked for an appointment from Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan
Oskanyan to evaluate the Turkish-Armenian relationship. After our
request was accepted, we went to Yerevan. Let me not go in to the
details of our tough journey (Ankara-Istanbul-Tbilisi-Yerevan,
because the direct flights were cancelled once again).

But once I arrived in Yerevan, I spent perhaps the most interesting
days of my professional life, because I could see things with my own
eyes.

What do you mean?

I’m sorry to say this, but an unparalleled prejudice is in every
Armenian’s thoughts.

In schools, universities, churches, government offices, even on the
streets.

Why on the streets?

Because as you’re walking along, all of a sudden you’re confronted
with a huge building facade on which the Armenian flag is painted,
but with a slight (!) difference. On the flag, Mt. Ararat appears in
its all magnificence.

Why in the schools?

Because all the students, even very young pupils, were conditioned
towards one goal:

– Our ancestors were the native citizens of Ararat, it was once our
capital. One day we will take it back.

– Thousands of our relatives were killed by the Turks, we must take
our revenge.

– Mt. Ararat was the longtime home of our ancestors, we have to have
it back.

– Okay, we don’t want war, but Turkey must compensate the Armenians.

Even take a look at the lyrics of the Armenian national anthem:

“Our motherland should be free, but it is under invasion. So our sons
say: Let’s take our revenge. Do it my brother, do it. Man dies once,
but if he dies for the sake of his people and freedom, it is a sacred
death�”

While talking to these people and seeing all the poverty in the
suburbs of Yerevan, I was thinking to myself:

– What a pity they condition their citizens towards such impossible
dreams. Do they think this is the way to get rid of their hunger?

One of the most striking pictures that stuck in my mind was in front
of the U.S. Embassy. Hundreds of Armenians, waiting for hours in a
long long queue, to get visas to go to the States.

I thought to myself:

– The Armenian politicians keep on complaining about the deportation
once applied to Armenians by the Ottomans. So what about today? Isn’t
it almost the same situation for the citizens of today’s Armenia that
they are deporting their own citizens because they can’t give them
any hope in staying, besides poverty and disappointment?

Because I heard that, every day, about 30 families were leaving
Armenia, choosing to live in other countries.

So I asked this question to the ambitious-looking Armenian Foreign
Minister Vartan Oskanyan during our interview. Because he told me
that his Turkish-origin family once lived in Turkey, in Urfa and
Maras. Because of the deportation decision, they left Turkey and
moved to Syria in 1922. First, he told me that he had been raised
with stories of Turkish genocide and deportation in his childhood and
than added:

– In fact, Turkey accepts that there was a genocide towards the
Armenians, but due to the fear of compensation the Turkish
politicians prefer to deny it.

Then I reminded him the long queue in front of the U.S. Embassy and
asked:

-You complain of the Ottomans’ deportation of the Armenians. But what
about your own citizens today? Since every day 30 families are
leaving their homeland, isn’t it the same for your government, as if
you’re forcing them to leave?

He kept his silence for a moment and said:

– Well, there is immigration from almost every country, even from
Turkey. We work for the future of our people, but we can’t force them
to stay here”(*)

So, once again, I believed that prejudice is worse than poison for
the human brain”

Armenian foreign minister meets OSCE’s Karabakh mediators in London

Mediamax news agency
15 Apr 05

YEREVAN

Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan met the Russian, French and
US co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group in London today, the press
service of the Armenian Foreign Ministry has told Mediamax new agency.

”The meeting discussed the agenda of the Prague process. The meeting
aimed at preparing a possible meeting between the Armenian and
Azerbaijani presidents in May this year,” the press service of the
Armenian Foreign Ministry reported.

Vardan Oskanyan is to return to Yerevan tonight.

WIDOWS AND MOTHERS OF THOSE KILLED IN KARABAKH WAR DEMAND
SPECIFICITY FROM ARMENIAN AUTHORITIES

YEREVAN, APRIL 14. ARMINFO. Widows and mothers of those killed in the
Karabakh war demand that the Armenian authorities be more specific in
their stated compromises in the Karabakh peace process.

Widow Shushanik Abrahamyan is worried lest the question might be
about possible return of the liberated territories. “We would like to
know what territories they mean. Are they really going to give back
say Jebrail wherefrom the Azeri side shelled the Armenian towns of
Goris and Kapan.” “What security guarantees are they talking about –
everybody knows the value of Azerbaijan’s and Turkey’s guarantees.”
“Let them not scare us with war – we have already seen one,” says
Abrahamyan.

Mother of a killed soldier Goar Karapetyan wonders how having fought
throughout the military actions and having seen the whole horror of
the war President Robert Kocharyan and Defence Minister Serzh
Sargsyan can now accede to returning territories liberated at the
price of blood. “I trust Kocharyan but want him to bring clarity in
the matter,” she says.

A1p;us

17:45:59 | 14-04-2005 | Culture |

TOP CLERGYMEN IN HOLY ECHMIADZIN

In Holy Echmiadzin the executive body of the Committee on Orthodox
participation in the World Church Council started its work.

During the meeting the Committee comprising more than 16 top clergymen
discussed church, public and moral issues, matters related to the WCC
membership.

This was the last meeting of the ad hoc Committee in Echmiadzin which aimed
at summing up the results of the Committee’s work and specifying the last
recommendations of the ad hoc Committee to the 9th congress of the WCC.

Associated Press Worldstream
April 14, 2005 Thursday 8:35 PM Eastern Time

90 years after start of ‘Great Slaughter,’ Armenians still seek
recognition of genocide

MIKE ECKEL; Associated Press Writer

YEREVAN, Armenia

At 102, Gulinia Musoyan is still horrified when she thinks of what
happened to her as a child in Ottoman Turkey – rousted from her home
in the middle of the night, forced to trudge shoeless for days
through the desert alongside thousands of others, with the weak
killed or left to die in the blazing, rocky wastelands.

Ninety years later, the suffering endured by Musoyan and hundreds of
thousands of other Armenians is gaining sympathy worldwide, but not
the judgment sought by the victims and their descendants: that the
mass slayings of up to 1.5 million Armenians be declared a genocide
carried out by Turkey, which the Turks vehemently deny.

For Armenia and its diaspora, there is only one way to describe what
happened – “Mets Eghern,” the Great Slaughter.

Armenians demand that Turkey take responsibility for a
state-sponsored, premeditated attempt to liquidate this minority
people in the Ottoman Empire over four years starting in 1915.
Despite the passing of decades, Armenians say the issue must be
resolved, and they’re pressing the European Union to make Turkey’s
acknowledgment of genocide a condition for EU membership.

“The first tragedy is when you cause this atrocity. Second is when,
after 90 years, you don’t accept this tragedy,” said Nikolai
Hovhanisian, a scholar at the Armenian Academy of Sciences. “The
Armenians want their own Nuremberg.”

While some Turks have wavered in their views, officialdom has not.
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has called the genocide charge
slanderous. And Deniz Baykal, a leading opposition politician, said:
“We cannot accept these allegations Turkey won’t be held responsible
for something we never did.”

—

Armenia once was a vast kingdom, extending from the Black Sea to the
Caspian, but by 1915 it had been subjugated and divided – parts of it
absorbed into Russia and others into Ottoman Turkey. As the Ottoman
Empire disintegrated among the blood and smoke of World War I,
Turkish nationalism soared and Armenians were regarded as potential
subversives. The Muslim Ottoman rulers feared the Christian Armenians
were siding with the Christian Russia of Czar Nicholas II, the enemy
of German-allied Turkey in the war.

On April 24, 1915, the Young Turks regime that was in power in
Ottoman Turkey ordered hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and
cultural leaders arrested in Constantinople, now Istanbul. Many
eventually were killed, and Armenians mark the date as Genocide
Remembrance Day.

Violence spread through Armenian regions in eastern and southern
Turkey.

Musoyan, 12 at the time, recalled that fearful rumors of attack –
“Those who will cut you will come” – circulated for months in her
village of Kessab along the Mediterranean coast north of Latakia in
present-day Syria.

Finally, soldiers came in the middle of the night, Musoyan said. By
daybreak, they had gathered some 6,000 Armenian women, children and
weak or older men and started driving them out of town, “like
beasts.”

“It was hot, the sun beat down on us, we were thirsty and they gave
us nothing to drink, we had only the bread we took from home,” she
said.

“The Turkish soldiers used whips and sabers to beat us. Those who
were too weak to keep up were killed or left for the dead,” she said.

Musoyan said it took days – maybe a week – for her, her older sister,
her younger brother and her mother to arrive at the town of Hamah,
Syria, some 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Kessab.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were driven across the Syrian
desert to Deir ez-Zor, near the present-day border with Iraq, where
Armenian activists say many were slain or died of hunger and disease
in concentration camps.

Others managed to flee eastward, across the Araxas River into
Russian-held Armenia.

Varazdat Harutyunian, 95, says he and his family fled to Echmiadzin,
the town that is the seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church. He
remembers an endless procession of burials as thousands of people
died of cholera and hunger; in a cool basement near the cathedral
“bodies were stacked like firewood,” he said.

Turkey acknowledges many Armenians were killed, but says the numbers
are exaggerated and the victims died in civil unrest, not as a result
of genocide.

—

Huge numbers of Armenians fled to other countries, notably the United
States, France and Lebanon. But the tragedy of 1915-19 links the
far-flung diaspora communities and the Armenians still in their
historic homeland; it is a grim counterpart to the bright pride that
Armenians take in their unique alphabet, love of literature and
traditions of hospitality.

“The memory sits in every Armenian’s subconscious,” said Sonia
Mirzonian, vice director of the Armenian National Archives. “If
you’re Armenian, you can immediately see the fear and understanding
in any other (Armenian) you meet.”

Historian Ashot Melkonian, with the Armenian Academy of Sciences,
said the genocide is a prism through which the Armenians perceive
many events. For instance, the devastating 1988 earthquake that
killed 25,000 Armenians is often described as a genocidal cataclysm,
he said.

Armenians largely see the six-year war over the Armenian enclave of
Nagorno-Karbakh in Azerbaijan as a conceptual extension of Turkish
genocide, and broadly refer to the Muslim Azeris as “Turks.”

But although the deaths loom large for Armenians, they’ve received
comparatively little attention elsewhere. Historical evidence was
scattered and political considerations may have dampened
investigative energy.

The Armenians’ tragedy garnered wide attention in Europe and the
United States in the early 1920s. But it fell from notice as the
Great Powers redrew the postwar borders of the collapsed Ottoman
Empire and Russia convulsed in revolution and civil war.

Following World War II, as Turkey allied itself with the West against
the Soviet Union, Ankara was able to keep the issue dormant.
Armenians under Soviet rule could not openly discuss the events until
1965 when Moscow allowed the construction of a massive granite
memorial in Yerevan.

Richard Hovannisian, an Armenian historian at the University of
California, Los Angeles, called the lack of full understanding of the
Armenians’ plight “amnesia” or the “subversion of memory” – owing to
the complex politics following World War I and Turkey’s keystone
position in Cold War politics.

Armenia gained independence in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet
Union, but the country has long languished due to the loss of
subsidies from Moscow, the war over Nagorno-Karbakh and the border
blockade by Turkey – Azerbaijan’s ally. Much of Armenia’s wealth now
comes from the support of the diaspora.

Now, Genocide Remembrance Day is observed annually on April 24 with
processions and speeches in Armenia and diaspora communities. A
growing number of countries – including France, Russia and Greece –
have officially acknowledged the killings as genocide. The United
States, which has one of the largest populations of expatriate
Armenians, has not – in large part, Armenians say, because Turkey is
a vital NATO ally it cannot afford to offend.

However, some scholars in Turkey and elsewhere say evidence is
accumulating that supports Armenians’ contentions.

Roger Smith, a genocide scholar and professor emeritus at the College
of William and Mary in Virginia, said a “convergence of evidence” now
supports a planned genocide.

“There is ample documentation of the genocidal intent of the Ottoman
authorities,” agreed Taner Akcam, a Turkish-born history scholar who
teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Akcam also said more Turks are coming to re-examine the events 90
years ago because they’ve become more interested in their own history
as a result of growing democratization and freedom of speech.

“Every day more intellectuals … publicly deplore the mass killing
of the Armenians,” Akcam said. “People want to know what really
happened. You cannot suppress this in a continuous way. The Turkish
people want to know.”

The Telegraph, UK
April 15 2005

Men jailed over ‘Thatcher plot’ are being starved to death in jail,
claims Amnesty

By Christopher Munnion in Johannesburg
(Filed: 15/04/2005)

Foreigners alleged to be part of a coup plot linked to Sir Mark
Thatcher are among dozens of inmates facing death by starvation in
Equatorial Guinea, Amnesty International said yesterday.

Authorities in the notorious Black Beach prison reduced the daily
food ration in December from a cup of rice to one or two bread rolls.
But since February prisoners have been without food for up to six
days at a time.

“Many are extremely weak because of torture or ill-treatment and
because of chronic illnesses,” said Kolawole Olaniyan, the director
of Amnesty’s Africa programme. “Unless immediate action is taken,
many of those detained there will die.”

Some receive food only from relatives who hand it to the prison
guards. In the past six weeks, however, relatives, lawyers and
consular officials have been denied access to the alleged
mercenaries.

The men are Armenians and South Africans alleged to have been the
advance party of a group of mercenaries led by Simon Mann, a former
British SAS officer. The group of 70 was arrested in Zimbabwe as its
aircraft landed to pick up arms. Mann was jailed for seven years,
reduced to four, and the rest, mostly apartheid-era special forces,
to lesser terms.

Nick du Toit, a former South African special forces soldier and
allegedly the leader of the Equatorial Guinea advance party, at first
admitted taking part in the coup attempt but withdrew his statement
claiming it was extracted under torture.

He was jailed for 34 years after what Amnesty and other international
observers condemned as a grotesquely unfair trial. Thatcher was
arrested at his Cape Town home in connection with the Equatorial
Guinea plot which was uncovered and reported to the governments
involved by the South African intelligence service.

Lady Thatcher’s son denied any knowledge of the coup attempt, saying
he had agreed to purchase a helicopter for the group. He later
pleaded guilty to helping to finance the mission and was fined
£265,000 and given a four-year suspended jail term by a South African
court. He has left South Africa having agreed to co-operate with
investigators “in any way I can”.

Ricardo Nfube, Equatorial Guinea’s second deputy prime minister,
accused Amnesty of tarnishing his country’s image. “Prisoners are not
going hungry,” he said. “We have assured their basic rights.”

RFE/RL Armenia: Yerevan Appears Unmoved At Turkey’s Genocide-Study Offer
Thursday, 14 April 2005

By Jean-Christophe Peuch

Yerevan showed little response today after Ankara’s proposal to conduct
a joint investigation into the mass killings and deportations of
Armenians during World War I. Turkish leaders yesterday suggested that
both countries set up a joint commission of historians to determine
whether the massacres carried out between 1915 and 1917 constituted
genocide. Armenia insists it will continue to seek international
recognition and condemnation of what it says was a deliberate attempt at
exterminating an entire people. RFE/RL correspondent Jean-Christophe
Peuch reports.

Prague, 14 April 2005 (RFE/RL) — Armenia today reacted coolly to
Turkey’s initiative.

In comments made to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service, presidential spokesman
Viktor Soghomonian said Yerevan had still not been officially notified
of the Turkish proposal.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamlet Gasparian, in turn, said Armenia would
not agree to any initiative that aims at questioning the genocide issue.
`I cannot say what Armenian authorities will decide and how they will
react when they get this [proposal], but let me remind you that there
have been such calls before to set up a commission of historians to
determine whether there was genocide,” he said. “Armenia has once and
for all said that the genocide issue is not a subject for debate.’

Addressing the Turkish Grand National Assembly on yesterday in Ankara,
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul called upon Armenia to accept the
creation of a joint commission of historians. He added that Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had already sent a letter to that effect
to Armenian President Robert Kocharian.

Gul said a positive Armenian response would contribute to improving
relations between Ankara and Yerevan. The two countries severed
diplomatic ties 12 years ago in the midst of the Armenian-Azerbaijani
war over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Talking to reporters in Yerevan shortly before Gul’s speech, Armenian
Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian said, however, that his government will
continue to seek recognition — including from Turkey itself — of the
massacres as genocide.

`With regard to the protection of human rights, we have the moral right
and the moral obligation to be on the front line today,” Oskanian said.
“The world expects us to take adequate steps in that direction. We must
be on the front line, seek recognition of the genocide and, because we
are a people that already went through this, discuss ways to prevent
[other] genocides.’

Gul had made it clear last week that Turkey should prepare what he had
described as a `counter-strategy’ as Armenians worldwide prepare to
commemorate the 90th anniversary of the 1915-17 tragedy on 24 April.

So far, only a few governments and national parliaments have recognized
Armenia’s genocide claims. Those include France, Russia, Lebanon,
Uruguay, Switzerland, Greece, and Canada. The European Parliament and a
number of U.S. states have also recognized the slaughtering of Ottoman
Armenians as stemming from a systematic policy of extermination.

Turkey is very much concerned the U.S. Congress may follow soon. Ankara
has recently enlisted the support of an American historian, Justin
McCarthy, to reject the Armenian genocide claims.

Addressing Turkish lawmakers last month, McCarthy reportedly argued that
the mass killings of Armenians were the result of war operations, not of
a deliberate, government-sponsored policy. Reuters at the time quoted
the U.S. expert as accusing world politicians of using the genocide
claims to hinder Turkey’s bid for European Union membership.

Gul yesterday accused Yerevan and the Armenian diaspora of working
relentlessly to undermine Turkey’s image:

`[We are] confronted with a very well-organized campaign, which makes
use of every opportunity to discredit Turkey,” Gul said. “This organized
campaign against our country is based on bias, prejudice, slander,
exaggerations, and distortions that were fabricated nearly one century ago.’

Most Western historians estimate that at least 1 million Armenians were
slaughtered during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. They argue the
massacres — which followed the slaughter of at least 200,000 Greeks —
were part of a deliberate policy by the ruling Committee of Union and
Progress to exterminate the empire’s largest remaining Christian community.

The Unionists, also known as the Young Turks, ruled over the Ottoman
Empire from 1912 through the end of World War I.

A few of those CUP leaders believed to have ordered and supervised the
1915-17 massacres were later executed by Armenian commandos.

Although some Unionist officials were tried by Ottoman courts after the
war for their participation in the slaughter, the genocide issue remains
taboo in today’s Turkey.

All the successive nationalist governments that have taken over from
Ottoman rulers have persistently refused to recognize the genocide claims.

If Turkish leaders admit to the killing of tens of thousands of
Armenians, they maintain the deaths were the result of either war
operations or interethnic strife, not of a genocidal policy. They also
say as many Muslims — mainly Turks and Kurds — were killed during
those years.

Addressing lawmakers of the ruling Justice and Development party,
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan yesterday said his country was not afraid
of confronting its past:

`Medicine has yet to invent a remedy for those who do not want to open
their eyes to history,’ Erdogan said.

Yet, all those who, in Turkey, challenge the official version of the
1915-17 events face potential troubles.

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk recently caused uproar for saying in a
February interview with Switzerland’s `Tagesanzeiger’ magazine that 1
million Ottoman Armenians had been slaughtered during World War I.

Although Pamuk did not refer to the massacres as `genocide,’ some
Turkish newspapers accused him of `treason.’ Also last month, a
high-ranking government official in Turkey’s Isparta Province ordered
copies of Pamuk’s books to be seized and destroyed.

In his address to parliament yesterday, Gul said Turkey will formally
ask British lawmakers to reject as `baseless’ a collection of eyewitness
accounts of the massacres. The accounts sustain the view that Ottoman
Armenians were slaughtered systematically.

Known as the `Blue Book,’ those accounts were collected by historian
Arnold Toynbee and published by the British parliament in 1916. They
have served as a major source on the Armenian massacres.

(RFE/RL Armenian Service correspondents Anna Saghabalian and Nane
Adjemian contributed to this report from Yerevan.)

(Caption: “Most Western historians estimate that at least 1 million
Armenians were slaughtered during the final years of the Ottoman Empire.”)

I-NewsWire Press Release
April 14 2005

UNICEF praises Armenian progress towards a protective environment for
all children

UNICEF has hailed Armenia’s ratification of the Optional Protocol to
the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of
Children in Armed Conflict and ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms
of Child Labour. Both were signed by President Kocharyan today after
being cleared by the Armenian National Assembly on 21 March 2005.

i-Newswire, 2005-04-14 – `The ratification of these two international
instruments paves the way for the implementation of the country’s
ten-year National Plan of Action for Children. It is a key step in
ensuring a `protective environment’ for Armenia’s children,’ says
Sheldon Yett, UNICEF Representative in Armenia.

The Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed
Conflict raises the minimum age for direct participation in
hostilities to 18 years from the minimum age of 15 years specified in
the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It also raises the age of
mandatory recruitment to the armed forces from 15 to 18 and the
minimum age for voluntary recruitment to 15 years.

‘Hundreds of thousands of children are being exploited in conflicts
throughout the world,’ says Yett. `Through the ratification of this
protocol, Armenia pledges to ensure that children in this country
will never have to face the prospect of actively participating in
hostilities, consequently spending the rest of their lives scarred by
conflict.’

The Optional Protocol on Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict
has been ratified by 89 countries, including Armenia.

ILO Convention 182 calls on the parties to the Convention to take
immediate actions to remove all children below 18 from labour that is
detrimental to their health and dignity.

UNICEF estimates that 250 million children worldwide are engaged in
child labour. Many are working in horrific conditions, working in
mines, working with chemicals and pesticides and working with
dangerous machinery.

`They are everywhere, but they are invisible,’ says Yett. `They are
toiling as domestic servants in homes, labouring behind the walls of
workshops and kneeling in the mud of the world’s fields.

`Child labour reinforces a cruel cycle of deprivation. On one hand it
is symptomatic of widespread poverty. On the other hand, because
child labour usually keeps children out of school, in poor health and
exposes them to psychological and physical abuse, it reinforces this
poverty by keeping yet another generation from fulfilling its
potential.’

The new labour code of Armenia adopted earlier this year is largely
consistent with ILO Convention 182 and other international
instruments regulating child labor.

`UNICEF is working with the Government of Armenia to ensure that all
children have access to quality education,’ says Yett. `But we also
need to work actively at community level so that children and parents
see school as a better immediate option than work.’

Armenia is the 154th country to ratify ILO Convention 182.

On 19 March 2005 the Government of Armenia ratified the Optional
Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of
children, child prostitution and child pornography.

****

UNICEF established its presence in Armenia in 1994. UNICEF is
mandated by the United Nations General Assembly to advocate for the
protection of children’s rights, to help meet their basic needs and
to expand their opportunities to meet their full potential.

For further information, please contact:
Emil Sahakyan, Communication Officer, UNICEF Armenia
Tel: ( 374 1 ) 523-546, 566497,580-174
E-mail: [email protected]

AZG Armenian Daily #065, 14/04/2005

Economy

AZERBAIJAN TO PARTICIPATE IN BLACK SEA BANK’S ANNUAL GATHERING IN YEREVAN

The 7th annual meeting of the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank (BSTDB)
managers will be held in Yerevan, June 5-6. Minister of finances and economy
of Armenia, Vartan Khachatrian, and secretary general of the BSTDB,
Charalabos Tsarughas called a press conference yesterday on this occasion.

Vartan Khachatrian informed that the annual meeting will consist of two
parts: the business congress will be held on the first day and the session
of the Bank managers on the second day. He also said that the Black Sea Bank
together with the Izmirlian Foundation carries out a program supporting
small and average business in Armenia. Both sides have assigned $2 million
for the program. Several other programs are in preparatory stage.

Charalambos Tsarughas gave a brief survey of the Bank’s history; it opened
in 1999, the center is in Istanbul and 11 countries took part in its
foundation. Within the member states, the Bank finances projects in the
spheres of energetics, small and average business, trade and transport. The
minister of finances and economy represents Armenia in the Board of Managers
and deputy president of the Central Bank in the Board of Directors.

The Greek official said that organizations participating in the annual
meeting — European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, World Bank —
will learn about the region’s, particularly Armenia’s, peculiarities in
economics. The Black Sea Bank will introduce its strategy designed for
Armenia. The sphere of small and average business will be highlighted as
initial one.

The second part of the event will deal with the conditions and opportunities
for financing the small and average business. Issues of financial market
will be discussed at the third part of the meeting with the participation of
not only Armenian bank representatives but also representatives of foreign
financial organizations.

Being asked about Azerbaijan’s participation in the annual meeting,
Charalambos Tsarughas said that he does not think that any of the member
states should opt out of the meeting. He assured that Azerbaijan took part
in Bank’s meeting in Yerevan 2 years ago and will participate this time,
too. He stated that the organization accentuates business issues.

Vartan Khachatrian added that the BSTDB annual meeting is to be held under
patronage of President Robert Kocharian and that the Azeri delegation’s
safety and full participation is guaranteed.

By Ara Martirosian

PRESS OFFICE
Armenian Holy Apostolic Church Canadian Diocese
Contact; Deacon Hagop Arslanian, Assistant to the Primate
615 Stuart Avenue, Outremont Quebec H2V 3H2
Tel; 514-276-9479, Fax; 514-276-9960
Email; [email protected]
Website;

Ottawa – April 2005 marks the 90th anniversary of the first genocide
of the twentieth century, the Armenian Genocide of 1915. As in the
case of the atrocity of genocide, committed against the Armenian
people, other crimes against humanity and civilization have occurred
“again and again.” To mark this important date in history, the
Diocese of the Armenian Orthodox Church of Canada, will hold an
Ecumenical (all Christian churches) and Interfaith (all faiths)
Service, on Friday April 15, 2005, 7:30pm in Ottawa, Canada.

This Commemoration will be held at Notre Dame Cathedral in Ottawa. The
Archbishop of Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Ottawa His Eminence Marcel
Gervais will be the keynote speaker. Church and Interfaith leaders are
invited to participate in this ceremony. The services will be
dedicated to the remembrance of victims of all genocides. The
commemoration is open to the public.

In addition to the multi-faith prayers, the commemoration service will
feature performances of ancient Armenian ecclesiastical music of world
famous Armenian Church hymns sung by a choir consisting of 60 members
from the St. Gregory the Illuminator Armenian Cathedral Choir.
Despite advanced age and frailty, some of the remaining Genocide
survivors and their immediate family indicated their desire to
participate and will be present if their health permits at this
historic commemoration.

Federal, provincial and municipal politicians, as well as
representatives of foreign governments posted in Canada will be
attending the service.

Honorable Ed Broadbent, Member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre will be
the Guest Speaker, for the service. “The massacre of Armenians in
1915 was a clear undisputed act of genocide. While it is hard to
imagine anything worse than war, genocide is because people are
selected for systematic murder not for what they have done or for the
territory they occupy – but simply for who they are,” said Broadbent.

The ecumenical service in Ottawa is part of a Canada-wide
commemoration campaign organized by the Canadian Diocese of the
Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church in association with religious
figures of many denominations and faiths. Similar interfaith services
will be held in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.