Author: Vardanian Garo

US FLAGS DEEP INTEREST IN EX-SOVIET COUNTRIES

Peninsula On-line
Sept 4 2008
Qatar

Baku// The United States and Russia squared off over the Caucasus and
Central Asia yesterday as US Vice President Dick Cheney said Washington
had an "abiding" interest in vital regions once dominated by Moscow.

Speaking in the oil-rich former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, Cheney
said: "President Bush has sent me here with the clear and simple
message for the people of Azerbaijan and the entire region. "The
United States has a deep and abiding interest in your well-being
and security."

Cheney said access to energy resources there and in Central Asia was
a top concern for Washington.

"Energy security is essential to us all and the matter is becoming
increasingly urgent," Cheney said after meeting Azerbaijani President
Ilham Aliyev. "We must work with Azerbaijan and other countries in the
Caucasus and Central Asia on additional routes for energy exports,"
he said.

Cheney’s comments came a day after Russian Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin sealed a new gas pipeline deal in Uzbekistan.

They were a clear signal that Washington did not intend to allow
Moscow to regain the unchallenged control over the politics and
natural resources of the Caucasus and Central Asian regions.

Cheney was due to travel today to Georgia for a meeting with that
country’s beleaguered, US-backed President Mikheil Saakashvili.

The head of Russia’s powerful presidential Security Council criticized
Cheney’s tour, saying his real goal was to trade US support for
energy supplies in the region, and to make sure these countries had
governments sympathetic to Washington.

"Cheney, during his visits to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine, will
try to instill in them confidence that they will receive support of
the US, and (he) will do it in such a way that the US will continue
to wield influence on them," Nikolai Patrushev said during a visit
to neighbouring Armenia.

The US Embassy in Baku said Cheney yesterday met with local
representatives of British Petroleum and Chevron who briefed him on
their "assessments of the energy situation in Azerbaijan and the
broader Caspian region — especially in light of Russia’s recent
military actions in Georgia."

FOREIGN INVESTMENT TO ARMENIA KEEPS SOARING OVER H1
by Venla Sipila

World Markets Research Centre
Global Insight
September 1, 2008

According to data from the Armenian National Statistical Service,
net inflow of foreign investment to the Armenian economy over the
first half of 2008 totalled $515US.1 million, ARKA News reports. This
marks an increase of 65% year-on-year (y/y). Further, it was reported
that FDI made up $352US.7 million of the total. A share of 43.1%
of total foreign investments (and 62.9% of FDI) was allocated to
the utility sector, while also the communications sector and air
transport attracted significant amounts of investment. Russia was
by far the most important investor country, followed by Argentina,
Lebanon and the United States.

Significance:With over 68% of total foreign investment consisting of
FDI for the whole of the first half of the year, this share increased
in the second quarter, as the share of FDI in the first quarter of
the year had been reported at 55%. Despite making a relatively modest
share of total investment, FDI has in recent years been instrumental
in financing Armenia’s current-account deficit, thus reducing the need
for Armenia to borrow. FDI inflows have also notably supported Armenian
foreign currency reserves, which provide Armenia with adequate import
cover and means for any exchange rate stabilisation needs. However, in
order to keep attracting increasing amounts of FDI, Armenia needs to
progress further with its structural reforms. Economic restructuring
is needed in order to diversify the economy and to strengthen the
export earnings capacity.

TOOLS TEST DEBUNKS ‘DUMB NEANDERTHALS’ THEORY
By E.J. Mundell

U.S. News & World Report
althday/2008/08/27/tools-test-debunks-dumb-neander thals-theory.html
Aug 27 2008
DC

Technological inferiority didn’t spur their demise, researchers say

TUESDAY, Aug. 26 (HealthDay News) — Homo sapiens’ long-extinct
cousins, the Neanderthals, weren’t the slow-witted losers in the
evolutionary race they’ve been made out to be, new research suggests.

The finding comes after scientists used Stone Age methods to recreate
and use the respective flint tools favored by each species.

"In contradiction to a 60-year assumption in archaeology, we’ve
managed to show that Neanderthal stone tool technologies are no less
efficient [in a number of respects] than Homo sapiens’ stone tool
technologies. This suggests that Neanderthals did not go extinct
because of inferior intellect or technology," said study author
Metin I. Eren, a graduate student in archaeology at the University
of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and in anthropology at Southern
Methodist University, in Dallas.

His team published its findings in the Aug. 26 issue of the Journal
of Human Evolution.

"I think this [study] is very important, in that it is helping move
Neanderthals out of that dark box that they have traditionally been
confined to," said Jeffrey Laitman, an anthropologist and director
of anatomy at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York City. "They
are not just dumb, limited versions of ourselves, but highly advanced,
very intelligent cousins. Different does not mean inferior."

The Neanderthals evolved in Ice Age Europe and are believed to have
been a distinct species from Homo sapiens, who evolved in Africa and
only later spread northward about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.

To survive in the cold European climate, Neanderthals evolved to be
stockier and more robust than modern humans; they also had slightly
larger brains, bony ridges over their eyes, flattened, elongated
skulls and larger noses. The last Neanderthals died out about 28,000
years ago, and experts believe there was a 10,000-year period where
both species co-existed in Europe.

But why did the Neanderthals disappear? For most of the history of
modern anthropology, experts have assumed that Neanderthals were
simply outsmarted by the newcomers arriving out of Africa.

"There’s been a longstanding historical bias against the Neanderthals,
in any number of categories — technological prowess, hunting prowess,
intelligence, reproductive abilities and success," said one expert
in Neanderthal culture, Daniel Adler, an assistant professor of
anthropology at the University of Connecticut. "The roots of this
go back to the nineteenth century, and it’s taken us a long time to
shake this bias," he said.

Over the past few decades, however, the pendulum has swung back in
favor of the Neanderthals, and numerous studies, including Eren’s,
"have put a whole bunch of nails in the coffin of this idea,"
Adler said.

In their study, Eren’s team used a process called flint knapping to
create stone tools, just as Neanderthals or Homo sapiens would have
done tens of thousands of years ago. "Flint knapping is essentially
chipping or flaking certain types of stone — flint, chert, obsidian —
that have predictable fracture patterns," Eren explained.

At about the time Neanderthals went extinct, they favored a broader
stone tool archaeologists have called a "flake." On the other hand,
Homo sapiens of the time were busy creating a narrower tool, dubbed the
"blade." For most of the 20th century, anthropologists assumed that
the blade was a technological advance over the Neanderthals’ flake.

"This assumption was published in all the textbooks but has never
been tested thoroughly," Eren said. Therefore, his team decided to
create both tools from scratch and then pit the flake against the
blade in terms of efficiency and utility.

The result: No clear winner. In fact, in some instances, the
Neanderthals’ flake worked slightly better than the Homo sapiens’
blade, Eren said.

So, the "intellectual advantage" theory of why modern humans survived
and Neanderthals did not has taken yet another blow, the experts said.

Adler pointed out that, for a period of time much earlier in their
history, Neanderthals and even pre-Neanderthals had also used
"blades," so the technology certainly wasn’t new to them. "In fact,
I just started excavating a site in Armenia this summer that has
blades from 200,000-400,000 years ago," he said.

However, it’s possible that sharing a distinct type of tool might
have served a social purpose that gave Homo sapiens a survival edge,
Eren said. He theorizes that the shared "blade" technology may have
drawn the species together culturally into larger and more cohesive
groups. It’s well known that, by the time of the Neanderthals’ demise,
Homo sapiens greatly outnumbered Neanderthals in Europe. In fact,
even at their peak population, fewer than 10,000 Neanderthals lived
across the whole of Europe and Central Asia, Adler said.

"It is [also] hypothesized, sometimes, that the reproduction levels
of Homo sapiens were much higher than that of Neanderthals," Eren
noted. "This might have resulted in Homo sapiens simply outpopulating
the Neanderthals out of existence."

OPPOSITION PROTESTERS DETAINED

AZG Armenian Daily
28/08/2008

Local

Police detained several young men at the scene of an ongoing
opposition sit-in in Yerevan on Tuesday as they sought to prevent
its participants from placing new anti-government posters and other
agitation material there. All of them were released later in the day,
"Azatutyun" radio-station reported. The police used force on Monday to
remove stands with pictures of detained oppositionists and opposition
posters from a section of the city’s upscale Northern Avenue where
dozens of supporters of former President Levon Ter-Petrosian have been
camped since early July. Law-enforcement officials cited complaints
lodged by the owners of street buildings and shops. Eyewitnesses told
RFE/RL that riot police detained at least four opposition supporters
on the spot after discovering pro-Ter-Petrosian graffiti painted
on the floor. "Three of our young men have just been dragged away,
and another ran away. I don’t know if they caught him," one of the
protesters, Yelizaveta Tarverdian, said, crying. "How can they do
this?" "We asked the police to explain why they are taking away the
guys but there was no reply," she said. Colonel Aghasi Kirakosian,
deputy chief of Yerevan’s police department, explained the detentions
as he spoke with protesters shortly afterwards. "We must clarify who
wrote this," he said, pointing to the "Levon president!" inscription
written on the pedestrian boulevard’s tiled floor. "Why should this
section of Northern Avenue not be clean?" said Kirakosian. "So clean
this up and we’ll clarify things and free the lads."

RADICALLY NEW SITUATION IN THE REGION
Lilit Poghosyan

Hayots Ashkhar Daily
26 Aug 2008
Armenia

Political Scientist Alexander Iskandaryan introduces his viewpoints
regarding the consequences of Georgian-Osatian military clash and
the possible developments.

"Russian people will leave Georgia, I mean Georgian territory without
South Osatia and Abkhazia. But it is a big question when it will
happen, in three months, three weeks or during six months. Anyhow
there will be no Russians in Potty, Senaky and even Gory.

The situation is different 15 km from South Osatia. It is very
difficult to overestimate the significance of this sector, because this
is the section linking different South Osatian regions. Anyhow from
the point of view of the long term, in my view hardly will the Russian
troops stay in that sector; sooner or later they will be withdrawn.

On the other hand it is evident that after those events
Georgia will never become pro-Russian, no matter who will be its
President. Anti-Russian dispositions will not be annihilated there. On
the contrary they will become stronger and the Russians won’t have
warm feelings towards the Georgians. Today the Georgians are shocked
but it will pass.

Meanwhile in Georgia especially in Tbilisy certain patriotic movements
are noticed. Certain destabilization is also possible but I hope it
will not last long. God willing Georgian people will find strength
to get rid of the consequences of the five-day war and restore the
practically exhausted country. They need years for that.

"What key conclusion can we draw from the "Georgian scenario"?

"In my view it is clear for everyone that in the visible future the
military solution of the issue is really unrealistic. The settlement
of the issue by means of negotiations is also unacceptable because
South Osatia and Abkhazia will never agree to it.

And by the way Nagorno Karabakh (because parallels are unavoidable
here) everyone understands what’s going on. A country that ranks
first in terms of its military potential, that has 30 times increased
its military budget during the recent years, and the army of which
is being trained by the "most professional" instructors fighting
terrorism in some minutes dispersed everything.

If those who took decision before the war were aware of the
ineffectiveness of the war, political scientists and analysts,
they understand that the consequences of the war are not directly
proportional to the military trainings and money spent on the
armaments.

"YOU’VE GOT TO GO", THE WORLD SAYS, YET AGAIN
By David Matsaberidze

The Messenger
Aug 25 2008
Georgia

The international community remains actively concerned by developments
in Georgia. Several high ranking US and EU officials have visited
the country, expressing their hope that Russia withdraws from the
country. They have stated that the situation as of August 6 should be
immediately restored, and the internationalization of the peacekeeping
process has been set as the priory short term target.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband expressed his concern over
what he said was Russia’s failure to completely live up to its pledges
on pulling back troops from Georgia. Miliband said that reports of a
Russian military pullback looked like "a step forward". But he added:
"I remain deeply concerned that Russian forces have not withdrawn to
the… position as agreed. It is imperative that Russian forces fully
and speedily implement and abide by the commitments that it (Russia)
has made."

The German Government said on August 23 that Russia had yet to
fully comply with the commitments it had undertaken in the six-point
ceasefire accord. "The [German] government expects Russia to complete
the withdrawal immediately in accordance with the six-point plan signed
by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and pull back its troops to the
lines [held] before the outbreak of hostilities, as was agreed," German
government spokesman Thomas Steg stated. In a separate statement,
Steg also said that Chancellor Merkel had proposed that the EU hold
"a neighbourhood conference" for Georgia. The German weekly magazine
Der Spiegel said Merkel’s idea would see the neighbouring countries of
Armenia and Azerbaijan participate in the conference, but not Russia,
Reuters reported.

Richard Lugar, a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
is paying an official visit to Georgia. The Senator held meetings
with Georgian senior ministers and Members of Parliament from both
the opposition and ruling parties. Lugar has already held a meeting
with Georgian State Minister for Reintegration Temur Iakobashvili.

The Senator discussed the Georgia crisis and ways to resolve
the conflict with Russia with Georgian Prime Minister Lado
Gurgenidze. After official negotiations, Richard Lugar met IDPs who
fled from their homes in the Shida Kartli and Tskhinvali regions
during the Russian military aggression.

Spokesmen for the White House also said on August 23 that Russia had
yet to fully comply. "Putting up permanent facilities and checkpoints
are inconsistent with the agreement," White House spokesman Gordon
Johndroe said. "We are in contact with the various parties to obtain
clarification." Finnish Foreign Minister and OSCE Chairman-in-Office,
Alexander Stubb, also declared the French-brokered ceasefire to be
under serious threat. After the meetings with Georgian Foreign Minister
Eka Tkeshelashvili and the State Minister for Reintegration Temur
Iakobashvili, Stubb stated that "the world should use all available
resources to ensure the fulfillment of the ceasefire agreement and the
pullout of Russian forces from Georgia". Mr. Stubb said 20 military
monitors would arrive in Georgia to observe the process of the
withdrawal and report the OSCE about the implementation of the truce.

In the light of this French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged his Russian
counterpart Dimitry Medvedev to remove Russian troops from the west of
Georgia, in particular from Poti and Senaki. Sarkozy said that OSCE
international peacekeepers will be placed in the region, as agreed
with his Russian counterpart. Russia however has released a response
arguing that Sarkozy has misinterpreted the Russian position, as Russia
has only expressed its readiness to cooperate with the OSCE and allow
international monitors to operate in the so-called "buffer zones".

All of these statements prompted Georgian and Western ministers to
blame Russia for violating the French-brokered pullout agreement. The
foreign media is still actively talking about a Georgian-Russian
conflict. There are already analytical articles about the current
situation. Some Russian press releases express the opinion
that in the long-term perspective Russia is the loser in this
confrontation. Analysts admit that if not in Tskhinvali, war would
have broken out in Kodori anyway. Today there is unified opinion in
the West that Russia has to comply with the obligations it took on when
it signed the ceasefire agreement, a unity created by this conflict.

Two US Democratic Congressmen have now arrived in Tbilisi and held
negotiations with the President of Georgia. The U.S. Congress has
stated that it is ready to help restore the civil infrastructure in
Georgia. Howard Berner and George Miller visited Parliament as well,
where they met with Chairman of Parliament David Bakradze. They once
again confirmed the US’s strong support for Georgia’s territorial
integrity. Congressmen have underlined once again that the primary
and most important step in conflict resolution is the withdrawal of
the Russian army from Georgian territory.

Ukraine has become more active and sensitive towards developments
in Georgia. President Yushchenko recently agreed an increase in the
state’s defence budget, at the same time confirming the possibility
that Ukraine could play a decisive role in peacekeeping operations
in Georgia’s conflict regions, as Georgian Parliament Speaker Davit
Bakradze announced at the briefing held after the meeting with his
Ukrainian counterpart, Konstantin Eliseev. Eliseev reiterated Ukraine’s
support of the Georgian Government and announced that Ukraine was
prepared to provide humanitarian aid to Georgia. Ukraine has already
sent 24 tonnes of firefighting equipment and ammunition to Georgia.

On August 21, the UN Security Council failed to make a decision on
a Russia-submitted resolution on Georgia. Russian Ambassador Vitaly
Churkin vetoed the draft resolution proposed by the West and tried to
convince member states to approve a Russian draft. Churkin stated that
the main objection of some Security Council members was the absence
of Georgia’s "territorial integrity" in the draft resolution. He
explained that the document copied the six principles of the peace
plan for Georgia agreed by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and
his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy, whereas US Ambassador to the
United Nations Alejandro Wolfe called for the resolution to include
"territorial integrity" as one of its provisions as all previous
documents on Georgia had done.

NEWS, COMMENTARY AND THE EXERCISE OF JUDGMENT
David Judson

Turkish Daily News
Aug 25 2008

As readers of the Turkish Daily News are aware, we correct our
inevitable errors and omissions in a timely basis, usually on this page
above the standing policy statement "Getting it right." Sometimes
we have to go beyond just setting the record straight, however,
to a restatement of our policy and values. This is one of those times.

So this column is first a correction and an apology to Richard
Giragosian, a guest whose essay Friday was drastically changed. It
was just one word, inserted by a copy editor. But it was a word at the
core of unresolved disputes between many Turks and Armenians and thus
the change was drastic. Giragosian said "genocide." We edited that to
"alleged genocide." While the change reflected prevailing sentiment
at this newspaper, it also violated our rules on the treatment of
commentary.

The journalistic navigation through this set of linguistic shoals
is always difficult. And at the TDN we face many such challenges
every day. We are unusual if not unique among Turkish newspapers
in that we publish in English. But that is not all that sets us
apart. Unlike many newspapers, we do not have an "agenda," nor do
we seek any specific outcome in the many deep debates that define
Turkish society. International readers are an important constituency,
but we are not a "newspaper for foreigners." In fact, a majority of our
readers are Turks who obviously come to us for reasons other than the
English language. In one sense, our job is simple: a concise snapshot
of Turkey each day. But in another sense our job is quite complex,
for the picture is always one of many hues.

As much is subjective, no memo on guidelines or rulebook can entirely
suffice. Intelligent judgment that reflects our broader values,
by each and every reporter and editor, is the only policy with a
chance of success. So it is worth a bit of ink and newsprint to again
share the reasoning that defines our policy on news, translation and
commentary, in particular for our new readers and new staffers of
whom we have quite a few.

Striving to reflect views of all sides

I will get to the anatomy of the error. But first let me share
a little about the TDN. As I say, it is a complex newspaper, in
a complex country at a complex time of history. On the editorial
side, we have about 50 staffers who are as remarkable for the depth
of their education as they are for the breadth of their worldviews
and backgrounds. This is no accident. Enabling Turkey’s stories to
be told by authentic voices is at the heart of the mission I have
sought to articulate at the newspaper; that we are succeeding is,
I hope, self-evident. Each day we also rely heavily on the expansive
resources of our corporate parent Hurriyet, the flagship of the
Dogan Media Group, and our sister newspaper Referans, the national
business daily. We subscribe to two domestic news agencies and
four international news agencies. As with all good newspapers, we
also collaborate with an ever-expanding network of informal partners
ranging from the Turkish Policy Quarterly to the Slovak Foreign Policy
Association to the Athens daily Kathimerini to make this portrait
of diversity even more so. I have remarked on a number of occasions
that we are perhaps the only newspaper in the world where Mahmud
Ahmadinejad or George Bush or Vladimir Putin or Raul Castro could
pop into the newsroom and quickly find a sympathetic face ready to
take him to lunch. People usually think I am kidding. I am not.

Each day this tiny and hyper-diverse team casts its literal and
figurative net broadly. About mid-day, what began as an information
gathering marathon transforms to a news production sprint of
translation, editing, final phone calls, rewrites and headlines. In
the news environment in which we work, of war and imminent war on a
variety of borders, of intense ideological competition at home, of
bare-knuckle politics, of social transformation at breakneck speed,
the task can be daunting. It works only because of hundreds of judgment
calls made by everyone at each step. These are judgments made in the
context I seek to describe.

So what is the context that binds a team in the exercise of
judgment? It is a commitment to democracy. It is a commitment to free
expression. It is a commitment to playing it straight. I do not ask
the practitioners at the TDN to feign a lack of conviction on views or
principles they hold dear; I do insist on transparency and candor so
that we can collectively maintain balance and fairness. We strive not
just to reflect the views of "both sides" but to reflect the views of
"all sides." Our reporter Ekrem Ekinci, a philosophy graduate, helped
me out the other day in a chat where I was to trying to articulate
this. Our work at the TDN, he suggested, is less a pursuit of the
"objectivity" offered up in journalism school curriculum than it is
a pursuit of the "enlarged mentality" advocated by Immanuel Kant,
the ability to perceive and understand perspectives different than
your own without surrender of your own beliefs.

So, for example, we don’t take an editorial position on the issue
of "minorities" in Turkey which classes Armenians, Greeks and Jews
as statutory minorities but does not acknowledge such distinctions
for Kurds, Alevis, Assyrians and many others. We do, however, have a
standing explanatory "box" on the history of this issue and the 1923
Lausanne Treaty that started it all. This runs next to stories where
this terminology comes up.

Wording on religious and ethnic issues

Readers are used to seeing the sourcing above stories "TDN with wire
dispatches." Commonly, stories that we derive from other media sources
will not be as complete as our standard demands. Sometimes it is an
extra phone call to the subject of the story; sometimes it is a bit
of background or context that we add. And we routinely eschew language
common in other media that could be seen as disparaging. You will not,
for example, find a reference to "Arab capital" in the TDN’s business
pages but rather its national source, be it Kuwait or Saudi Arabia
or Dubai. A writer once insisted that it was legitimate to describe
a Russian billionaire as a "Jewish oligarch." Not unless the story is
about his donations to a synogogue. Religious or ethnic adjectives in
front of the noun are fine only when they are relevant to the subject
matter. That writer no longer works at the TDN.

And when it comes to that debate of how to describe the events in the
murderous final days of the Ottoman Empire, we avoid in translation
"sözde" or "so-called" to modify Armenian claims of genocide. A
"so-called" genocide connotes disparagement, an "alleged genocide"
denotes the current state of legal and historical debate. This is
the kind of sensitivity, judgment and "enlarged mentality" that we
try to bring to the news pages. And the news is often radically edited.

Different scale for editorial pages

The editorial pages require judgment on a different scale. For here our
license is more restricted. Our constraints include Turkish press law,
standards of decency and a wariness toward recklessness. We endeavor to
clean up the basic elements of grammar when necessary and sometimes
edit for necessary brevity. But as our standing statement reads,
"few views are unwelcome on the pages of the TDN." We will, upon my
judgment or that of another editor, include a disclosure in the case
of controversial claims by a guest columnist that go starkly against
prevailing views: "The views expressed above are the author’s own and
do not reflect the views of the TDN," is the note we will add. But
we do not ever, under any circumstances, change the direct meaning
or intent of commentary. We might well reject it in its entirety. But
if we run it, respect to the author’s views is fundamental.

Do we always execute these goals of judgment without
flaw? No. Sometimes we fail which means we start anew. And on Friday
this values-based policy ran aground. We violated this trust with
our readers.

"I have watched with interest your coverage of Armenia and
Armenian-Turkish affairs. All to the good. However, Richard
Giragosian’s piece today ‘Armenia and the new Turkish proposal’
while otherwise worthy has the word "alleged" in reference to the
Armenian genocide of 1915," wrote a reader in Montreal, Richard
Elliot. "Mr. Giragosian has confirmed that his original text did not
contain the word "alleged" and that the TDN added it without consulting
him and without disclosing in the paper that the word was not in the
original text. This is unethical from a journalistic point-of-view. It
also casts doubt on the TDN’s willingness to publish opinions not
in conformity with the official Turkish position. Finally, it causes
embarrassment to Mr. Giragosian, a respected analyst and commentator
who has taken the risk of being published in a Turkish paper, who
must now explain that his text has been altered substantively."

Mr. Elliot could not be more right. We could not be more wrong. We
apologize. And now, our values restated, we go back to work.

–Boundary_(ID_OxqGqGeNArWw7hvU1avBsw)–

ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE: WE DO NOT DENY GENOCIDE
Abraham H. Foxman National Director

Wicked Local
defamation-league-we-do-not-deny-genocide/
Aug 25 2008
MA

With the appointment of a new boss for the New England region of
the Anti-Defamation League, the question of whether his organization
effectively denies the Armenian Genocide is again front and center.

On Friday, the ADL released another statement on the Armenian
Genocide. Readers, please take a look.

At least one Armenian-American advocate has found the statement
"disingenuous" on these grounds: The letter does not address the
fact that the ADL lobbies against Congress calling the deaths of 1.5
million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks "genocide."

No Place for Hate Date: August 22, 2008

Through our partnership, communities have implemented thousands of No
Place for Hate® activities, which have engaged tens of thousands of
Massachusetts residents. Additionally, No Place for Hate® training
has provided cities and towns with the framework and the support to
respond to hate crimes when they do happen. Our network of No Place
for Hate® communities is critical to building a welcoming, inclusive
and safe Massachusetts for all residents.

We are deeply concerned by ongoing questions about our organization’s
position with regard to the Armenian Genocide. ADL has never denied
the tragic and painful events perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire
against the Armenians, and we have referred to those massacres and
atrocities as genocide. All of ADL’s anti hate programs classify
genocide as the ultimate crime against humanity.

There is simply no basis for the false accusation that we engage in
any form of genocide denial, and we believe this characterization of
ADL crosses the boundary of acceptable criticism and falls into the
category of demonization.

It is our sincere hope that this clarifies our position, and that we
can continue to work together to bring this awareness and education
to communities throughout the Commonwealth.

–Boundary_(ID_h8aDHphA1iwOOIyHVCgY Rw)–

A BRIEF HISTORY OF: FORMER SOVIET REPUBLICS
By Gilbert Cruz

TIME
Aug 21 2008

Since the breakup of The Soviet Union in 1991, its former republics
have attempted to take different political directions. Most came
together in the Commonwealth of Independent States (C.I.S.), which
is still led by Russia. The Baltic nations joined NATO and the
European Union in 2004–a course Ukraine and Georgia have flirted
with recently–while the resource-rich Central Asian republics have
remained largely loyal to Moscow. But after the invasion of Georgia,
former members of the U.S.S.R. face an inescapable truth: you can’t
run from geography. Try as they might to move closer to Europe,
many are now nervously eyeing a resurgent Russia on their borders.

EASTERN EUROPE

1. BELARUS 2. UKRAINE 3. MOLDOVA Russia has held a grudge against
Ukraine since the 2004 pro-democracy Orange Revolution. Belarus has
kept particularly close ties with Moscow, while Russian troops are
currently stationed in a semidetached Moldovan territory.

THE CAUCASUS

1. GEORGIA 2. ARMENIA 3. AZERBAIJAN A vital region for the West, which
has high hopes for an oil pipeline through Azerbaijan. George W. Bush
visited ally Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia in 2005. Tiny Armenia,
which borders Turkey and Iran, readily accepts Russian protection.

CENTRAL ASIA

1. KAZAKHSTAN 2. UZBEKISTAN 3. TURKMENISTAN 4. KYRGYZSTAN 5. TAJIKISTAN
These states are wedged between Russia and China. Several are
resource-rich and endure varying levels of autocratic rule; a few
have let NATO use land for bases.

THE BALTICS

1. ESTONIA 2. LATVIA 3. LITHUANIA Thriving, technologically advanced
democracies with prickly relationships with Russia. Estonia blames
Moscow for major cyberattacks in 2007.

SERZH SARGSYAN PRESENTS HIS CONDOLENCES TO SARKOZY

Panorama.am
14:48 21/08/2008

President Serzh Sargsyan has sent a letter of condolences to
Nikolas Sarkozy in connection with the death of 10 french soldiers
in Afghanistan.

The letter says. "Mister President, learning the tragic news of
the death of French soldiers, on behalf of Armenian people and on
my behalf I present my sincere condolences to the relatives of the
departed and whole French people. Admit my sincere compliments."