Author: Vardapetian Ophelia

"KILIKIA" TO UNDERGO AN ORDEAL

A1+
[02:27 pm] 16 June, 2006

On June 18 "Kilikia" Yerevan will play with "Dinamo" Tbilisi within
the framework of the first qualifying phase of the Intertoto Cup. In
the current championship of Armenia "Kilikia" has gained only 9 points
in 9 matches.

At present Ashot Barseghyan is the coach of the team.

Three players of "Pyunik" – Valeri Alexanyan, Rafayel Nazaryan and
Arthur Voskanyan have been included into "Kilikia" in order to support
the team.

As for "Dinamo", the Georgian club mainly comprises 20-23-year-old
players. Two Brazilian legionaries have been included into the
Georgian team at the eleventh hour. "Dinamo" was the third in the
Georgian championship.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union this is the fourth match
between Armenian and Georgian teams. The previous three were won by
Armenians. We hope that this time "Kilikia" will not break the custom.

By the way, the second match will take place on June 25 in Tbilisi.

Conference on the role and future of education in Armenia to be held
in Yerevan

ArmRadio.am 17.06.2006 11:45

At the initiative of the Institute of Human Rights and Democracy a
civic conference on "The role and future of education in Armenia for
the development of democratic, fair and solidary statehood" will be
held in Yerevan.

RUSSIAN CAUCASIAN INSTITUTE OF DEMOCRACY HOLDS A ROUND TABLE IN YEREVAN

Panorama.am
16:55 15/06/06

The Armenian branch office of Russian "Caucasian Institute of
Democracy" has organized a round table discussing Russian regional
policies in 90s and today.

Many experts, including renown in Armenia Sergei Shakariants,
Ashot Yeghiazaryan, Igor Muradyan, Sevak Sarukhanyan participated
in the round table. Present was also Oleg Hairapetov who is adviser
to Russian president staff on international and cultural relations
with foreign countries. Hairapetov is in Armenia at the invitation of
Armenian branch office of the Fund and delivers lectures at Linguistic
University after Briusov.

WHAT TURKS ARE WATCHING
By Richard Morgan

Slate

Jun e 14 2006

A new wave of anti-American pop culture.

Allies aren’t supposed to behave like this. In Turkey-a stable
secular Muslim democracy that’s practically European-the country’s
biggest-budget-ever movie, Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, is preparing to
hit shelves on DVD and is scheduled for a U.S. theatrical release this
summer. Based on a television series that has been a record-breaking
hit for four seasons, it’s a military thriller about an elite
Turkish intelligence officer who near-single-handedly smites a group
of reckless U.S. soldiers who make Abu Ghraib look like a Sunday
picnic. The film, which received some press coverage in the States,
is only part of a wave of anti-American pop culture that’s sweeping
the country.

Valley of the Wolves: Iraq starts off factually enough, with a
depiction of a July 4, 2003, incident in which around 100 soldiers
from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade stormed the barracks
of a Turkish special forces office in Iraq, arresting 11 Turks who
allegedly were planning to assassinate the Kurdish governor of the
oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The Americans not only handcuffed the Turks
but also forced hoods over their heads and held them in custody for
more than two days. The U.S. government later apologized, explaining
that its soldiers couldn’t tell the difference between Turks and Iraqi
insurgents because the Turks were not in uniform. Turkey didn’t buy
it, and this blockbuster is the payback.

As the flick takes a sharp turn toward fiction, one of the 11 Turks
in the 2003 debacle commits suicide to regain his warrior honor. His
suicide note is sent to Polat Alemdar, the Turkish intelligence
officer who stars in the Valley of the Wolves television show.

Alemdar heads to Iraq to find U.S. Special Forces Cmdr. Sam William
Marshall (played by Billy Zane), who, in his role as a self-described
"peacekeeper of God," is busy leading a massacre of machine-gun fire
on unsuspecting civilians at an Iraqi wedding. Survivors are sent to a
facility where a Jewish-American doctor (played by Gary Busey) pulls
out human hearts with Mengelian apathy and sells them to aristocrats
in London, New York, and Tel Aviv. When one of the American soldiers
expresses concern that a truckful of Iraqi civilians are packed in too
tight to breathe, a fellow soldier stops the car and bullet-soaks the
trailer and its human cargo. "I was making sure they could breathe,"
he quips, pointing to the holes in the truck.

The snide James Bond tone isn’t totally out of place. This is, after
all, a movie, where the American soldiers-in their black tank tops
and cutoff khakis-look more like characters from video games like
Street Fighter. And the dialogue is cartoonish, Western capitalist
chest-thumping. In one scene, Alemdar asks Marshall: "Isn’t the boss
of American soldiers the American capitalism?" Marshall counters: "The
United States has been paying for your nation for the past 50 years. We
send you the elastic for your panties. Why can’t you produce anything?"

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently called
the film "pure fiction." But when Turkey’s speaker of parliament,
Bulent Arinc, attended a premiere of the movie in Ankara, he said it
was "a great film that will go down in history." When asked whether
the movie meshed well with reality, Arinc told Anatolia, the state
news agency: "Yes, exactly."

Naysayers and diplomats can say that Valley of the Wolves: Iraq is
just one film, but it’s also part of a larger pop-culture trend that
has taken root ever since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003,
a hugely unpopular war in Turkey, which borders Iraq. All last year
Turkish bookstores were hard-pressed to keep the best-selling novel
Metal Storm on shelves. The novel, written like one of Tom Clancy’s
international potboilers, depicts a U.S. invasion of Turkey in March
2007. Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are characters, although
the U.S. president is a nameless, nap-loving warmonger who defers
most of his decision-making to fellow members of Skull and Bones. In
the book, whose title is America’s name for its invasion, the U.S.
military swiftly bombs then overtakes Ankara and Istanbul (the U.S.
president, who is also deeply evangelical, aims to restore Istanbul
to its Christian Byzantine glory). It’s like a nightmare version of
Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Americans’ motive is Uncle Sam’s lust for the country’s rich
borax supply (Turkey is home to 60 percent of the world’s borax, a
mineral used in weapons, radiation shields, and space technology). In
the second phase of its invasion, Operation Sèvres (named after the
World War I treaty in which the West gutted the Ottoman Empire),
the United States creates a Kurdish state and lets longtime Turkish
enemies Greece and Armenia ravage what’s left of the country. A
lone Turkish secret agent counters by stealing a nuclear weapon and
vaporizing Washington. First published in December 2004, the book
has surpassed 150,000 copies sold-unheard of in Turkey. "This novel
is not just another conspiracy theory; it’s a possibility theory,"
Orkun Ucar, one of the book’s authors, told Al Jazeera.

This wave of anti-American Turkish pop culture is so widespread
that it has been the sole topic of its own Senate foreign relations
committee hearing; Turkey is, after all, a key NATO ally. But if the
senators aren’t interested in reading Metal Storm, watching Valley
of the Wolves: Iraq, or listening to the Turkish rock group Duman
(sample lyrics: "What kind of excuse is this? You’re after oil again")
here’s a simpler explanation of what’s going on in Turkey: It’s not
all that dissimilar to what’s going on in the United States.

Anti-Turkish pop-culture references turn up in, for example, episodes
of 24, which started last season with a Turkish national kidnapping
the secretary of defense; or The West Wing, in which an international
incident centered upon Turkey’s beheading of a woman accused of having
sex with her fiance. (Turkey, one group pointed out, doesn’t have a
death penalty anymore and hasn’t executed anyone since 1984.)

Or maybe the memories go back further than that. During a recent
vacation to Istanbul, I did hear one complaint more than a few times,
a long-lingering wound to their national pride: the hugely popular 1978
American film Midnight Express, which was nominated for six Oscars and
won one for its writing. In it, Billy Hayes, an American tourist jailed
for smuggling hashish, tells a Turkish court, "For a nation of pigs,
it sure seems funny that you don’t eat them! Jesus Christ forgave the
bastards, but I can’t! I hate! I hate you! I hate your nation! And I
hate your people! And I fuck your sons and daughters because they’re
pigs! You’re all pigs!" So perhaps one good movie deserves another.

Not that all this is about visceral bitterness; culture-especially
pop-is by nature a knot of influences with everything becoming a
fad sooner or later. "For years, we, the people of this area, Turks,
Arabs, Iranians, Russians, or people further away, such as Vietnamese
and Chinese, were always characterized as bad in Hollywood movies,"
Bahadir Ozdener, one of the writers for Valley of the Wolves: Iraq,
told me. "We are accustomed to this, we do not show any social
reactions to this, and we just watch them as movies and place them
in our movie archives. We think that democratic societies should get
accustomed to being shown as bad people because of what they have
done." Widespread Turkish antagonism toward America may just be a
bit of nationalist whimsy, the way Americans occasionally haze their
French allies. It’s not like we actually despise the French … oui?

Richard Morgan is a freelance writer in New York and a contributing
editor at Topic magazine.

–Boundary_(ID_wEfJvbPXAFWgh3HMqL5xnA)- –

RUSSIA CONTINUING WITHDRAWAL OF BASES FROM GEORGIA

Interfax News Agency
Russia & CIS Military Newswire
June 14, 2006 Wednesday 10:16 AM MSK

Akhalkalaki

Fourteen vehicles carrying 78 tonnes of ammunition left the 62nd
Russian military base located in Georgia’s Akhalkalaki for Armenia,
the base’s headquarters told Interfax.

"A convoy of 14 vehicles left the base for the Armenian community
of Gyumri today to supply the 102nd Russian military base stationed
there. The convoy is at the border with Armenia now," a headquarters
source said.

On Tuesday, three Kamaz trucks carrying 28 tonnes of ammunition also
left Akhalkalaki for Gyumri, he said.

"Another convoy of 15 vehicles will follow the same route tomorrow,"
he said.

Preparations for dispatching one more train carrying military materiel
from Akhalkalaki to Russia are underway, the source said.

"The train should leave on June 20. It will pass through Azerbaijan’s
territory," he said.

A total of eight trains have withdrawn military materiel from the two
Russian bases in Georgia in 2006. Five of them delivered military
equipment from the 62nd base in Akhalkalaki back to Russia and the
other three from Batumi to Armenia.

The Russian military bases are supposed to be completely withdrawn
from Georgia by the end of 2008.

GYUMRI IN FIRST PLACE BY UNEMPLOYEMENT INDEX

Noyan Tapan
Jun 14 2006

GYUMRI, JUNE 14, NOYAN TAPAN. 19,700 unemployed persons are currently
registered at the Gyumri territorial job center. 16,111 of them
have the status of an unemployed. Gyumri is in first place among
Armenian cities by the unemployment index. Many of local residents,
who graduated from 1-2 higher educational institutions in the Soviet
time and have all necessary professional skills, are out of work
today. Former directors and engineers have become traders.

Misak Hayrapetian, who worked as a mechanization expert at the
former Lenshintrest for many years, now sells newspapers to support
his family.

"Previously I worked with pleasure, but now jobs are hard to come
by, so I have to sell papers and lottery tickets," he said, adding
that this occupation does not bring a stable income. "Everything
has changed, prices have gone up, only human life has remained the
cheapest thing," he noted.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) considers persons engaged
in such activities as the working poor who constitute nearly half
of the world’s working population. According to ILO’s estimates, in
order to reduce their number, states must create 43 mln jobs annually.

ARMENIAN PARLIAMENT RATIFIES TRANSPORT AGREEMENT WITH GEORGIA

Armenpress
Jun 13 2006

YEREVAN, JUNE 13, ARMENPRESS: Armenian parliament has ratified today an
agreement on Automobile Communication Between Armenia and Georgia. It
was signed in Tbilisi on April 25 of 2006.

The agreement exempts Armenian and Georgian traffic of customs
payments when they travel through the other’s territory. It also
exempts transit traffic to these countries form customs payments. This
means for example, that a Georgian citizen or a company can cross the
Armenian border by a truck or car without paying customs and other
payments and move freely across Armenian and vice versa. Also trucks
bound for Georgia, for example, from Iran, enjoy the same right.

The agreement, however, has some provisions concerning transportation
of hazardous materials which must be reconciled in advance. Armenian
transport and communication minister Andranik Manukian, who presented
the agreement to lawmakers, said it is aimed at developing cooperation
between Armenia and Georgia.

OUTRAGE AS KARUA, ALI REASSURE ON ARMENIANS
By Maxwell Masava

Kenya Times, Kenya
June 11 2006

POLICE Commissioner Maj-Gen Hussein Ali yesterday spoke on the
controversial deportation of Armenian brothers and reassured Kenyans
that the fate of the duo was sealed.

He said a report into their stay and activities in the country will
be made public once investigations are complete but explained that
they would never be allowed back into the country either on transit
or as destination.

And Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister Martha Karua asked
Kenyans to remain calm as the government investigate the activities
of the Armenians.

Ali’s remarks, two days after the deportation of the Artur’s alongside
their five accomplices came as leaders and several organizations,
including Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims (SUPKEM) the Anglican Church
of Kenya (ACK) and the African Independent Pentecostal Church of Africa
(AIPCA) continued to express outrage over the hurried expulsion and
demanded an explanation from government.

The police boss denied reports that the two brothers, Artur Sargasyan
and Artur Margaryan, had been temporarily expelled alongside five of
their accomplices to cover-up investigations into their activities
in the country.

And speaking in Nakuru, Karua said no stone would be left unturned
in establishing the true motives of the Armenians. And in another
development, a manager at one of the night spots where the Artur’s
loved hanging out denied reports that they had gone without paying
their bills at the club. The manager at Smokeys Restaurant within
Parklands, further refuted claims that a city businessman who was
also an agent of the brothers, Raju Sanghani, had stepped in to settle
the bills before the two and their accomplices were deported.

But speaking for the first time since the deportation of the Armenians,
Maj-Gen Ali said investigations on where they got everything they had,
including luxurious cars, assortment of firearm, military and police
uniforms and police identification cards, would be made public.

His remarks came as an assistant minister for Immigration and
Registration of Persons, Annania Mwaboza instructed the Kenya
Ports Authority management and the police to verify the contents
of a container belonging to the two brothers and currently said to
detained at a Mombasa port.

Although Mwaboza directed that the container passes through security
inspection procedures, an anonymous source at KPA inspection unit
denied yesterday that they were holding any container belonging to
the Armenian brothers. Mwaboza said passports and other permits found
in Artur’s possession were issued wrongly and said any information on
the two brothers ought to be published to dispel further speculations.

SUPKEM and Anglican church demanded a government statement over
the hurried deportation as AIPCA Archbishop Samson Gaitho said the
deportation revealed clearly that there was a cartel in government
playing underhand deals at the expense of the nation’s security.

A statement issued by the SUPKEM chairman, Professor Abdulghafur
El-Busaidy said the drama at the Jomo Kenyatta International airport
where the two brothers threatened to shoot Customs officials was of
serious magnitude than terrorism fears implanted into the minds of
Kenyan population.

Head of the Anglican church in the country, Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi
said the security of the country must not be taken for granted and
called on the government to explain the security lapse at JKIA.

Speaking in Nakuru at the ACK Cathedral Parish of Good Shepherd,
Nzimbi said the government must always remain accountable to its people
and added that relevant ministries should respond to questions being
asked by Kenyans.

Mwaboza and Information assistant minister Koigi Wamwere expressed
dismay that the two had been deported without facing criminal
charges. They insisted that the two were not above the law.

Two Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) legislators urged President Mwai
Kibaki to sack ministers and top government officers implicated in
the Armenian saga to redeem the country’s image.

Kisumu Rural MP, Prof Anyang Nyongo and his Rangwe counterpart Philip
OKundi said the saga surrounding the Artur brothers has not only dented
the country’s image internationally but has exposed it to terrorism.

Muhoroni MP Ayiecho Olweny charged that the Artur’s were brought
into the country in order to eliminate perceived enemies of the
government. Without specifying who brought the two brothers, Olweny
claimed they were brought in to target Langata MP Raila Odinga and
other critics of the government from within.

BLACK SEA FORUM SEEKING ITS RATIONALE
By Vladimir Socor

Rompres, Moldpres, Interfax-Ukraine, AzerTaj, June 5, 6
Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
June 8 2006

Russia snubs summit of Black Sea leaders Presidents Traian Basescu of
Romania, Vladimir Voronin of Moldova, Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine,
Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, Robert Kocharian of Armenia, and
Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan were joined by senior officials from the
United States, Turkey, Bulgaria, and international organizations
at the inaugural session of the Black Sea Forum for Partnership and
Dialogue on June 4-6 in Bucharest.

A Romanian initiative, the Forum is tentatively meant to hold annual
presidential-level summits — the venues rotating among participant
countries — and thematic or sectoral-cooperation meeting during
those annual intervals. The Forum is not meant to create new regional
institutions, but rather to turn into a regular consultative process
among countries of the extended Black Sea region (defined as including
the South Caucasus to the Caspian Sea) and between this group of
countries and international organizations such as the European Union.

Russia refused to send a delegation to the Forum; instead, it merely
authorized the ambassador to Romania, Nikolai Tolkachev, to sit
in as an observer, without taking part in discussions or signing a
concluding document. Moscow had turned down the Forum initiative as
soon as Bucharest announced it last December: Russia’s Ministry of
Foreign Affairs publicly deprecated the proposed Forum as redundant,
duplicative of existing cooperation frameworks, and apt to siphon
off limited resources from those frameworks (Interfax, December
13, 2005). From that point on and practically until the Bucharest
session’s eve, Russia turned down entreaties to join the Forum as a
participant and to send an official delegation on a ministerial or
some other decent level.

Officially, Moscow maintains that existing cooperation frameworks
such as the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) and the joint naval
activity Black Sea Force (Blackseafor) are adequate in themselves as
well as the only possible basis for deepening regional cooperation.

Tolkachev reiterated this position to local media during the summit,
thus in effect sniping at the Forum from the sidelines. Moscow finds
BSEC and Blackseafor to its liking because it can dominate them jointly
with Turkey and can also use them to promote Russian objectives in
the region.

There is, however, a broader political message in Russia’s dismissive
attitude toward the Forum: It suggests, first, that it is not for
“lesser” countries to take major regional initiatives on their own that
are not worked out with Moscow; and, second, that no regional project
can be successful without Russia’s participation — a proposition that
has almost become reflexive in Black Sea diplomacy and that Moscow
tries to reinforce by distancing itself demonstratively from the Forum.

Nevertheless, Forum organizers hoped until the last moment to secure
a decent-level Russian representation at the founding session as well
as participant status for Russia in the Forum down the road. This
consideration loomed large in shaping the summit’s agenda in a way that
would not risk irritating Moscow. In this regard, the Forum summit
duplicated (instead of learning from and avoiding) the experience of
the December 2005 summit of the Community of Democratic Choice (CDC)
in Kyiv. There, President Viktor Yushchenko’s forlorn hope (tied to
the electoral campaign) to induce Russian President Vladimir Putin to
visit Ukraine trumped the CDC’s own democracy-promoting goals and made
for a bland, irrelevant agenda at that summit. Similarly in Bucharest,
the shadow of absentee Russia weakened the Forum’s agenda and raised
unnecessary question marks about the rationale of this initiative.

Energy transit and the secessionist conflicts — those uppermost
policy issues in the extended Black Sea region — seemed almost lost
among a wide variety of issues on a kaleidoscopic agenda. Several
participating heads of state did not avoid addressing the conflicts.

Thus, Saakashvili described the latest claims by Russia-sponsored
secessionist movements to legitimacy through a “democratic referendum”
as a “cannibal-style democracy”: It involves the violent seizure
of a territory, ethnic cleansing, despotic rule, and criminality,
all of which is then to be crowned by a referendum and claims for
international recognition on such a basis, Saakashvili noted.

For his part, Voronin criticized the draft of the Forum’s concluding
declaration for failing to identify the external source and sponsor
of the secessionist conflicts: Resolving the conflicts will not be
possible if the external factor is not identified with the necessary
clarity, Voronin observed. Aliyev declared that Azerbaijan’s
territorial integrity would not be subject to negotiations; while
Kocharian characterized Karabakh as a “classic case of secession
through self-determination” — a formulation seemingly in line with
Moscow-led recent attempts to provide a “model” for post-Soviet
conflict resolution. Aliyev and Kocharian held five hours of
inconclusive talks, including a working dinner with Basescu, during
the two days of the Bucharest summit.

Yushchenko’s speech harked back to the 2005 CDC, although that
initiative does not seem to have survived its birth. He also urged,
as he had then, Black Sea countries to co-invest in a project to
build a massive industrial center and transport hub at Donuzlav on
Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, without providing specifics; and he called
for coordination among Black Sea, Caspian, and Baltic countries in
addressing energy problems. Yushchenko held a news conference for
Ukrainian journalists, presumably dealing with deepening instability
back home, and prompting the local press to complain of being excluded.

Aliyev’s speech, delivered extemporaneously, stood out for reflecting
the political stability and bright economic prospects of Azerbaijan,
possibly the most successful among the region’s countries at
this stage. The speech exuded quiet confidence in the strategy of
evolutionary political and economic reforms on parallel tracks and
the advance of Azerbaijan from a regional to a global role in energy
projects.

THEY KILL EVERYONE, INCLUDING THE RUSSIANS

A1+
[09:00 pm] 07 June, 2006

“The manifestations of fascism appeared in Russia after the defeat of
the Soviet Union”, said NA Deputy Speaker Vahan Hovhannisyan referring
to manifestations of race discrimination in Russia.

“Russia suffered a defeat in the cold war. The ideological defeat
was that communism proved to be ideologically empty; the Soviet Union
collapsed and Russia lost territories which later became its enemy.

The economic defeat was that the whole economy of the Soviet Union
collapsed, and the fact that Russia continues to survive is conditioned
by the natural resources and not by the development of the economy”,
Vahan Hovhannisyan said.

According to him, the skinheads who speak about the Aryan spirit and
the purity of the blood know nothing about fascism. “If for example
Mussolini or Franco who were the founders of fascism appeared in the
Russian Underground, the skinheads could beat them too as they do not
differ from the Armenians in the color of their skin. So the basis of
such violations is not ideological; it is simply the frustration of
the society expressed through such horrible acts”. Vahan Hovhannisyan
thinks that Russia does not combat against these phenomena properly. As
for the attitude of the Armenian authorities, he is not aware of it.

In an interview to “A1+” deputy of the Russian State Duma Alexander
Dzasokhov noted that he treats the Armenians living both in Armenia
and out of it with deep respect. “I have many Armenian friends. Every
death is a tragedy, but it does not refer to Armenians more than to
other nations. The Armenians living Russia are part of our history. We
also have many Armenian professionals in the Law enforcement agency.

We must join our efforts in order to prevent suchlike cases in
future.”

According to Alexander Dzasokhov, today the Russian authorities resort
to every possible measure in their combat against the skinheads. “This
tendency is not only against the Armenians. It happens to everyone,
and a great number of Russian fall victim to the skinheads too. So
let’s fights against this phenomenon together.”