Category: News

NEWSMAKER-UN envoy in Iraq scandal larger-than-life figure
By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 11 (Reuters) – Veteran U.N. official Benon Sevan,
embroiled in the Iraq oil-for-food-scandal, is a larger-than-life
figure who calls himself the most “politically incorrect person in
the U.N.”
Sevan, a Cypriot of Armenian descent, was chosen to direct the $67
billion program after a distinguished 40-year career with the world
body in which he was involved in some of the most intractable, and
often dangerous, world crises.
Sevan, 67, a big man with white hair and dark eyebrows, is admired by
colleagues for an ability to solve problems fast, his blunt retorts
and a store of anecdotes for all occasions, told in rapid-fire heavily
accented English.
“He has a heart as big as a cathedral” said one veteran U.N. official,
speaking on condition of anonymity.
All that made the sharp criticism against him this month by a
U.N.-appointed independent committee all the more painful for the
U.N. employees who knew him in the many jobs he held.
Sevan is accused by an investigation headed by Paul Volcker, the
former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman, of steering an oil contract
to a small Panama-registered trading firm in what the report called
“a grave and continuing conflict of interest.”
The inquiry, still investigating how Saddam Hussein subverted the U.N.
program, is also probing whether Sevan benefited personally from the
trade, which netted the firm involved $1.5 million.
Sevan, who had retired but is on a $1 year contract while the inquiry
continues, denies the allegations, saying he never “took a penny” and
was made a scapegoat in the anti-U.N. political climate in Washington.
“I think I’m not the only who was shocked by what we read in the
report,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said. “He has been here
working with many of us for quite a time and we had not expected
anything of the sort.”
Raised by an aunt in Cyprus, Sevan, who is married and has one
daughter, studied ancient Greek philosophy at New York’s Columbia
University before joining the United Nations in 1965.
In his long U.N. career he served in Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi,
Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia and Lebanon and in myriad jobs at U.N.
headquarters in New York, including security coordinator and Security
Council administrator.
SURVIVED BOMBING
In Iraq, he narrowly survived the bombing of U.N. headquarters in
August 2003, leaving the office of Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello,
the mission chief, to smoke a cigar minutes before the blast, which
killed 22 people.
It was left to Sevan to recite Vieira de Mello’s dying words — “Don’t
pull the mission out” — as his body was carried aboard a Brazilian
presidential plane at Baghdad airport for his last journey home.
Sevan’s 1988-92 term in Afghanistan included the pullout of Russian
troops in 1989. He persuaded Najibullah, president of the Soviet-backed
government, to step down in exchange for safe exit out of the country.
But Sevan was turned back by soldiers when he tried to take the
former president to the airport. Najibullah sought refuge in the
U.N. compound for four years until the Taliban broke in and hanged
him from a lamppost.
Sevan was named by Annan in October 1997 to run the oil-for-food
program under which Iraq, squeezed by international sanctions imposed
for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, was allowed to sell oil to buy goods
for its people.
“He was considered tough and unsentimental and knew the political
game,” said one envoy. Key Security Council members, like the United
States, went along with the appointment.
“People took it as a given he would do his duty,” said Samir Sanbar, a
retired U.N. assistant secretary-general. But Sanbar said the scandal
was a great disappointment for those who had devoted their lives to
the world body. “The only thing the U.N. has is its credibility. What
else do we have?”
02/11/05 11:49 ET

FROM AUSCHWITZ TO DARFUR
Bangkok Post – Thailand
Feb 13, 2005
In two years of mass killings and forced population displacements,
Sudan and its Arab Janjaweed militias have caused the deaths of over
200,000 Africans in the country’s Darfur provinces. Though existing
international law already provides both a relevant statutory definition
of genocide and a court to judge these crimes, needless semantic
disputes are hampering effective punishment and deterrence. Failure
to promptly bring those responsible before the International Criminal
Court (ICC) could render the international community helpless onlookers
_ and would further encourage such crimes.
Despite persistent reports of attacks on Africans in Darfur, military
intervention has been slow. The African Union peacekeeping force is
small. Guarding their own sovereignty, few African or Arab governments
will intervene in a regional Islamic state, or prosecute its crimes. US
intervention, with American forces extended in Iraq and elsewhere,
seems unlikely. Washington favours a genocide tribunal, in a special
court restricted to hearing the Darfur case. It opposes the new
permanent ICC, which one day might try US war crimes.
Differing definitions of genocide plague the legal response. A United
Nations commission, urging referral of the case to ICC prosecutors,
recently found that crimes against humanity and war crimes are
occurring in Darfur. The commission avoided charging Sudanese
government officials with genocide _ the most heinous crime against
humanity _ stating that “only a competent court” can determine if
they have committed “acts with genocidal intent.”
Meanwhile, the US government, the German government, the Parliament of
the European Union, the US Holocaust Museum’s Committee on Conscience,
and Yad Vashem, all accuse Khartoum of “genocide”.
Why this debate over the definition of genocide? Although the concept
of genocide preceded the invention of the term, the jurist Raphael
Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in his 1944 classic Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe. Warning of what we now call the Holocaust, he cited
previous cases, particularly the 1915 Armenian genocide perpetrated
by the Ottoman Young Turk regime. Lemkin thought that the term should
denote the attempted destruction not only of ethnic and religious
groups, but also of political ones, and that it encompassed systematic
cultural destruction as well.
The 1941-45 Nazi genocide of Jews and Gypsies constitutes not just
the most extreme case of genocide; it differs from previous cases _
the conquistadors’ brutality in the New World or nineteenth-century
Ottoman massacres of Armenians _ in an important respect: The Holocaust
was one of the first historical examples of attempted physical racial
extermination. On a smaller scale, this fate had already befallen a
number of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and Australia _
and later, the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia, and Tutsis in Rwanda
in 1994. By then, planned near-complete annihilation of a people had
become the colloquial meaning of “genocide”.
Yet the postwar United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of Genocide adopted Lemkin’s broader concept, which
encompasses the crimes in Darfur. Ratified by most UN member states,
the 1948 Convention defines genocide as acts committed “with the
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial,
or religious group, as such.” It includes even non-violent destruction
of such a group. While excluding cultural destruction and political
extermination, the Convention specifically covers removal of children,
imposing living conditions that make it difficult to sustain a group’s
existence, or inflicting physical or mental harm, with the intent to
destroy a group “as such”.
Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found in
1997 that the UN definition of genocide applies to the removals of
Aboriginal children from their parents to “breed out the color” _
as one Australian official put it in 1933. The law thus expands the
popular understanding of genocide. As in the case of Darfur, genocide
may fall well short of total physical extermination.
UN definition is best
While some scholars use the term more broadly, to include destruction
of political groups, the legal recourse now available to victims under
international law is a good reason to accept the 1948 UN definition. In
2003, Sudan acceded to the Genocide Convention (which the US ratified
in 1988). It is statutory international law, binding on 136 states. In
the past decade, UN tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda have prosecuted and
convicted genocide perpetrators from both countries. The Convention’s
definition is enshrined in the statute of the ICC, created in 2002
and ratified by 94 states.
The legal definition is broad in another sense, too. In criminal law,
the term “intent” does not equal “motive”. One of Hitler’s motives for
the construction of Auschwitz was to destroy the Jews directly, but
other genocide perpetrators have pursued different goals _ communism
(Stalin and Pol Pot), conquest (Indonesia in East Timor), “ethnic
cleansing” (in Bosnia and Darfur) _ which resulted in more indirect
cases. If those perpetrators did not set out to commit genocide, it
was a predictable result of their actions. The regimes pursued their
objectives knowing that at least partial genocide would result from
their violence: driving Muslim communities from Bosnia or Africans
from Darfur, crushing all national resistance in East Timor, imposing
totalitarian racism in Cambodia. When such policies, purposefully
pursued, knowingly bring genocidal results, their perpetrators may
be legally judged to have possessed the “intent” to destroy a group,
at least “in part”, whatever their motive. Such crimes are not the
same as the Holocaust, but international law has made them another
form of genocide.
The 1948 Convention also outlaws complicity, incitement, conspiracy,
and attempt to commit genocide. A government could commit those crimes
by facilitating an ongoing genocide against indigenous people. Darfur
may include such cases of official complicity with the Janjaweed
militia attacks. In colonial Australia, British authorities did not set
out to exterminate Aborigines, but some police and settlers did. Nor
did US federal officials adopt such a goal in California and the West,
though some state governments and bounty-hunting posses did. Yet courts
in both countries prohibited testimony by native people. Such official
policies and their deliberate, sustained enforcement facilitated or
resulted in the predictable genocide of a number of Aboriginal and
Native American peoples.
Complicity, discrimination, and refusal of legal responsibility to
protect threatened groups continued in the twentieth century. Even
after World War II, the UN Security Council failed to enforce the
1948 Genocide Convention until the crime recurred in Europe. By then
genocides had proliferated elsewhere. A few independent scholars
inspired by Lemkin had long been working to broaden understanding
of the phenomenon beyond the Holocaust. Most scholars now include
the Armenian, Bangladeshi, Cambodian, East Timorese, Guatemalan,
Sudanese, and other cases, along with those of Bosnia and Rwanda.
Attention has also turned to indigenous peoples. A German official
recently apologised to the Herero people of Namibia for Berlin’s
genocidal conquest of Southwest Africa in 1904-05. The United States
and Australia have yet to acknowledge earlier genocides against their
indigenous inhabitants, but now the Muslim Africans of Darfur have
a legal remedy.
After a century of genocide, resistance, and research on the
phenomenon, the world community has a legal definition, an
international statute outlawing the crime, and a court asserting
jurisdiction over it. The task now requires less definitional
disputation, more investigation, rigorous enforcement, and compensation
for the victims.
Unless either the Sudanese government invites the ICC or the UN decides
to send the case before the ICC there is risk that the Darfur crimes
will go unpunished. Lest international efforts to prevent genocide
disintegrate into empty talk, the ICC should be allowed to take up
the case of Darfur.
Ben Kiernan is the A.Whitney Griswold Professor of History
and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University
(). He is the author of “How Pol Pot Came to Power”,
and “The Pol Pot Regime” (Yale 2002, 2004). This article is reprinted
with permission from YaleGlobal Online ().

Armenian foreign minister meets UN, NATO officials at Munich conference
Regnum, Moscow
12 Feb 05
Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan has held a number of
bilateral meetings within the framework of the international security
conference in Munich.
The Armenian foreign minister has met UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan,
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Lithuanian Foreign
Minister Antanas Valionis, the German chancellor for foreign policy and
security issues, Bernd Mutzelburg, and the director of the political
department of the German Foreign Ministry, Michael Schaefer, the
Armenian Foreign Ministry’s press service has told Regnum news agency.
As was reported earlier, the foreign and defence ministers of
40 countries are taking part in the 41st security conference in
Munich. The main subjects of discussion are the nuclear programmes
of Iran and North Korea and the expansion of NATO’s role in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Russia is represented by Defence Minister Sergey Ivanov.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Boston Globe, MA
Feb 13 2005
Nominees have ties to Boston and the past
Up for Grammys: local artists and music with roots
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff
The nominations for classical Grammys used to be predictable — big
stars performing standard repertoire for the megalabels. For several
years, however, they have reflected changes in the industry: Now you
are as likely to see nominees that feature little-known repertoire
on independent or budget labels, played by exemplary musicians who
aren’t necessarily celebrities.
The current nominations draw attention to releases the general
music-loving public might not have encountered. That is certainly
true of two discs with strong Boston connections that appear
alongside Andre Previn’s Violin Concerto “Anne-Sophie” with the Boston
Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer and featuring his wife,
Anne-Sophie Mutter, as superstar soloist.
A Naxos disc in the Milken Archive series of American Jewish music,
“The Mirror,” which contains music by Boston composer Yehudi Wyner,
was nominated in two categories, producer of the year (David Frost)
and best small ensemble. In the producer category, Frost is up against
Manfred Eicher, founder of ECM records, and one of the records that won
him his nomination was a two-CD set, “Monodia,” music by the Armenian
composer Tigran Mansurian. “Monodia” was also nominated in the best
instrumental soloist category, where New England Conservatory faculty
violist Kim Kashkashian finds herself competing against Mutter. The
recording also chalked up a third nomination, in best classical
composition, where it is up against Previn’s concerto. Small world.
Wyner, 75, whose piano concerto receives its world premiere at the
Boston Symphony Orchestra on Feb. 17, is the son of Lazar Weiner,
the preeminent composer of Yiddish art song. The Naxos disc collects
three of his works on specifically Jewish subjects.
The title piece, “The Mirror,” comes from incidental music that
Wyner wrote in 1973 for a Yale Repertory Theatre production of a
play by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The play is about village life in
one of the small Jewish communities in Eastern Europe more than a
century ago. It is not an exercise in nostalgia for a vanished world,
though; it concerns institutionalized sexual repression, fantasy, and
demonology. The 13 short movements, arranged for concert performance,
are scored for a traditional Yiddish theater ensemble of four players;
there are also some songs, one of them charmingly sung by the composer,
as well as a bit of spoken narration.
This is appealing “roots” music, surveying idioms of the play’s
time and place, but not reproducing them. Singer’s play comes
from a deliberately skewed point of view, from a different time
and place. In his music, Wyner achieves a complementary tone and
texture: affectionate, critical, mystified, funny, and a little
terrifying. The klezmer clarinet part is played with virtuoso
abandon by Richard Stoltzman, and the prominent violin part is in
the capable and idiomatic hands of Daniel Stepner; Robert Schulz is
the percussionist. They are all prominent Boston-based players.
The disc is completed by “Passover Offering” (1959) and, from 1981,
“Tants un Maysele” (“Dance and Little Story”), both of them works
without irony or commentary, using traditional gestures but stretched
into a more contemporary harmonic language. The excellent performers
come from all over; the locals include cellist Ronald Thomas,
clarinetist Bruce Creditor, and, at the piano, the composer himself.
Mansurian, 66, is a leading Armenian composer. Like Wyner’s, his
is roots music, and Mansurian writes, “I’ve always tried to compose
works I myself can love.”
Mansurian has enjoyed a long association with Kashkashian, which
resulted in an earlier ECM CD (“Hayren”), and in the three works
composed for her on this disc: the concerto for viola and strings “.
. . and then I was in time again” (1995), “Lachrymae” (1999), and
“Confessing With Faith” (1998).
The work specifically nominated for the Grammy is the concerto;
the title comes from a phrase in William Faulkner’s novel “The
Sound and the Fury.” The 20-minute piece flowers out of an opening
gesture of five repeated notes. The music is melancholy, meditative,
and haunting; the style suggests the timelessness of Arvo Paert,
but with more density, intensity, and depth. There is dialogue of
several kinds between soloist and ensemble, but the viola dominates,
because to the soloist Mansurian entrusts highly personal questioning,
exploration, and reflection. Kashkashian plays with total instrumental
mastery and a harrowing emotional involvement. Christoph Poppen leads
the Munich Chamber Orchestra.
“Lachrymae” (“Tears”) is an eloquent duet for viola and saxophone,
instruments that share range with complementary timbres (Jan
Garbarek is the sophisticated saxophonist). “Confessing With Faith”
is a setting of seven prayers by a 12th-century Armenian saint,
Nerses. The Hilliard Ensemble intones them with simplicity and
sophistication; the viola part is both an extra, wide-ranging voice in
the ensemble, and a narrator/commentator like the Evangelist in a Bach
Passion. Filling out the disc is an earlier concerto for violin (1981)
that is more traditional; Leonidas Kavakosis the assured soloist.
Whether either of these recordings wins a Grammy or whether they
knock each other out of contention doesn’t really matter. Those who
discover them will find a bit of themselves there, for in exploring
the roots of others we gain new perspectives on our own.

The Toronto Sun, Canada
February 12, 2005 Saturday
EARLY EDITION
BOXERS IN TOUGH
MONTREAL
Canadian boxers Joachim Alcine of Montreal and Ian Gardner of Saint
John, N.B., both face tough ring tasks today.
Alcine (21-0) takes on hard-hitting Mexican Carlos Bojorquez (23-6-6)
in the feature 12-round match on an afternoon card at the Montreal
Casino. Two minor belts are on the line — Alcine’s NABA title and
the vacant WBC International title.
Gardner (18-1) faces Armenian-born German Arthur Abraham (14-0) at Max
Schmelling Hall in Berlin for the WBA International middleweight title.

ARMENIAN NEW CONSTITUTION NOT TO BAN DUAL CITIZENSHIP
PanArmenian News
Feb 12 2004
12.02.2005 14:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ There will be no item in the new Constitution of
Armenia, banning dual citizenship, stated Head of the Armenian National
Assembly Commission on State and Legal Issues Rafik Petrosian. He
emphasized that the draft of constitutional reforms says a special
law will regulate dual citizenship questions. It should be noted
that the referendum on constitutional reforms in Armenia is planned
at the beginning of summer 2005.

PanArmenian News
Feb 12 2004
FRENCH PARLIAMENT LEADER TO VISIT ARMENIA
12.02.2005 13:01
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ French Parliament leader Jean Louis Debre will
visit Armenia. The agreement on that was reached in the course of
a telephone conversation of Jean Louis Debre and Chairman of the
National Assembly of Armenia Artur Baghdasarian. The Armenian Speaker
thanked his French counterpart for raising the Armenian Genocide issue
in the course of his official visit to Turkey. Debre emphasized that
when speaking of the Armenian Genocide during the meetings with the
Turkish President and Prime Minister he emphasized the importance of
restoration of the historic justice.

Genocide Edited Out After Turkish Pressure
by: Clare Chapman
The Times Educational Supplement
February 11, 2005
Hundreds of history books have been recalled from German schools
after the state of Brandenburg agreed to remove a reference to the
“Armenian genocide” of 1915 following pressure from Turkey, which
refuses to acknowledge that it took place.
A reference to the genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians were
deported and murdered by the government of the Young Turks in
1915-1916, was included in history books in the east German state
in 2002.
Brandenburg was the first state to refer to this lesser-known genocide.
Turkey, which, until human rights reforms two years ago, threatened
to imprison anyone who said the genocide took place, has fought to
have the passage removed.
The cause of the dispute was the following sentence: “Disengagement
from war; extermination and genocide (for example the genocide against
the Armenian population of Asia Minor)”.
Thomas Hainz, regional education ministry spokesman, admitted the
ministry had removed the line from textbooks because of “international
diplomatic resentment”.
But he said that it had been “an independent decision”. He said
reducing the discussion of genocide to just one sentence involving
just one case “does not do the topic justice”.
The education ministry is now working on a new chapter that covers
genocide in a more “comprehensive context”.
Necmettin Altuntas, the Turkish embassy spokesman in Berlin, denied
any pressure had been put on the education ministry. “We wanted the
reference to be taken out of the school books because it was stated
as fact.”
He said many historians believe using the term genocide to des-cribe
what happened is incorrect. “Turkey does not deny that something
happened, but we have not been able to come to the conclusion that
it was a massacre.”
The move has angered historians. Micha Brumlik, director of the
Frankfurt Fritz Bauer Institute that deals with Holocaust history,
condemned the decision, saying there are “two political scandals”
involved.
One concerned Turkey, which for years refused to accept general human
rights standards and continued to deny responsibility for the genocide
of 1915. But the second concerned Germany and was far more serious.
“The authorities in Brandenburg have bowed to pressure from
diplomats. I find that shocking for our country,” Brumlik said.
Sven Petke, Christian Democratic Union general secretary, said he
now fears that “the propaganda ministry in Ankara” is dictating the
local curriculum.

IN THE OVERGROWN BEIRUT MARSHALLING YARDS, THE TRACKS ARE STILL
by ROBERT FISK
The Independent (London)
February 12, 2005, Saturday
THE IRRESISTIBLE ROMANCE OF A STEAM TRAIN SCARRED WITH THE BULLET
HOLES OF BATTLE;
With a spare hour on my hands before lunch in Lebanon this week, I
revisited the joys of my childhood, crunched my way across the old
Beirut marshalling yards and climbed aboard a wonderful 19th-century
rack-and- pinion railway locomotive. Although scarred by bullets, the
green paint on the wonderful old Swiss loco still reflects the
glories of steam and of the Ottoman empire.
For it was the Ottomans who decided to adorn their jewel of Beirut
with the latest state-of-the-art locomotive, a train which once
carried the German Kaiser up the mountains above the city where, at a
small station called Sofar, the Christian community begged for his
protection from the Muslims. “We are a minority,” they cried, to
which the Kaiser bellowed: “Then become Muslims!”
But that is another story. The locos went on chuffing up the
mountains until 1975 when the Lebanese civil war destroyed many of
the trains and much of the permanent way. Up in the Lebanese port of
Tripoli, there are some far bigger 0-8-0s (the configuration of steam
locomotive wheels), engines which were installed to pull trains
between the Lebanese seaport and the Syrian city of Hama. They, too,
are perforated by bullets – they had formed part of the Palestinian
front line against Syrian troops in 1983 – and their oil is still
bleeding from their gaskets.
When first I discovered them, I was in contact with that renowned
expert on Middle East steam, Rabbi Walter Rothschild of Leeds, who
immediately told me their story. They had originally belonged to the
pre-First World War Reichbahn and had been handed over to the French
as part of post- war Versailles reparations. The French Middle East
mandate had just been created and Paris sent their German gifts to
operate out of Lebanon. So these great steam behemoths, which once
pulled the middle classes of Germany from Berlin to Danzig, ended up
in a north Lebanese railway junkyard.
All my life, I have been fascinated by trains. My mother used to take
me down to Maidstone East station in Kent to watch the tank engines
pull their local trains in from Ashford or the old Second World War
Super Austerity class steamers – big, ugly beasts with a firebox the
shape of a squashed toilet roll – with a mile of rusting trucks in
tow.
Sometimes, she would take me one station down the line to Bearsted
where my father would be playing golf, the compartment – we travelled
first class – filling with smoke in the tunnel beneath Maidstone
prison, the old black-out curtains banging against the windows. For
days, I would stand on the platform of Tonbridge station and watch
the Battle of Britain class locos and the Merchant Navy class and the
Schools class (from which, I would later note, my own minor public
school, Sutton Valence, was rigorously excluded) as they pummelled
through with boat trains to Victoria or Dover.
The Golden Arrow, in those pre-Eurostar days, was the joy of every
loco- spotter, its cream and gold carriages hauled by an engine with
the British and French flags snapping from the boiler. We all held
that train lovers’ bible in our hands, Ian Allen’s loco-spotter’s
guide to engine numbers.
I used to think all this was a fetish until I realised how deeply the
railway system had permeated art. Turner was obsessed with trains.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina falls in love on a train journey, decides to
leave her husband on a railway platform and commits suicide by
throwing herself in front of a goods train. “And exactly at the
moment when the space between the wheels drew level with her … and
with a light movement, as though she would rise again at once, sank
on to her knees … something huge and relentless struck her on the
head and dragged her down on her back. God forgive me everything!’
she murmured.” Tolstoy even died in a railway station.
Part of Doctor Zhivago revolves around his flight from Moscow by
rail, his sight of Strelnikov’s revolutionary locomotive and his
subsequent trek back to Lara down a partially snow-covered track. The
film’s treatment of this is not as good as the book’s, where a female
barber warns Zhivago that he risks arrest with “all this talk of
special trains”.
The point, of course, was that all trains were “special”. My mother
took early colour film of 10-year-old Robert watching the big cream
and red “Trans Europe Express” – a diesel-hauled all-first-class
train – sliding into Freiburg station in Germany in 1956. But equally
special was a wind- up model steam loco which my father brought me
back from Germany where he had been aiding the post-war
reconstruction of Hamburg. Being German, it was so powerful that it
once flew off its English Hornby tracks, raced across the front hall
carpet, jumped the front door step of our home and struck out across
the drive, coming to rest under my father’s car.
When the Lebanese authorities briefly restored the coastal line from
east Beirut to the Crusader port of Byblos, I travelled its length in
the driving cab of a big Polish diesel. It pulled just one wooden
carriage – an import from the British empire’s Indian empire after
the 1914-18 war – and travelled at no more than 15 miles per hour
because the Lebanese, being Lebanese, insisted on parking their cars
on the track when they went swimming.
Despite the great liners of the world and the growth of air power,
leaders – especially dictators – loved trains. Hitler had his own
luxurious train, complete with mobile flak batteries. So did Goering,
and so did Himmler. And Tito. Soviet commissars loved trains. And
trains, of course, became accessories to murder. Turkish railways
carried thousands of Armenians to their places of massacre. European
trains carried millions of Jews and gypsies to their annihilation.
The steam train whistle which permeates D H Lawrence’s Sons and
Lovers had a quite different connotation as it drifted over the
snowfields around Auschwitz.
Somehow, airports never captured the magic of railway stations. Name
me an air version of Saint Pancras or the Gare du Nord or Grand
Central. But it was years before I grasped – I think – just what the
fascination of trains involves. It’s about the track, the rails, the
permanent way as much as the locomotives. At Edinburgh Waverley, you
can look at the twin rails and know that, with points and unwelded
track and occasional changes of width, those minutely shaped ramrods
of iron stretch unbroken from Scotland via the Channel Tunnel to
Turkey or Saint Petersburg or Vladivostok or – save for the Iraqi
insurgents who keep blowing up the permanent way – to Baghdad.
I suspect this sense of continuity appeals to us. An airliner might
fly a route but never through the same stretch of air. Nor does a
ship pass through exactly the same waters each voyage. But the train
will always travel – to an inch – along precisely the same journey as
it took yesterday or a hundred years ago, the same journey which it
will take next week and in a hundred years.
In the overgrown Beirut marshalling yards, the tracks are still
visible, maintaining a ghostly continuum with the past, reminding us
of the permanence of history and power and – in its worst performance
of industrialised murder – of death. Which is why, I suppose, trains
capture our imagination and fear from childhood to old age.

TURKISH LOBBY IN US KEEPS SETTING CONGRESSMEN AGAINST ARMENIANS
PanArmenian News
Feb 12 2005
12.02.2005 13:14
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ In the words of Congressmen supporting Turkey, who
wished to remain unknown, the Armenian lobby shows initiative for the
US Congress to pass a respective decision on the 90-th anniversary of
the Armenian Genocide, “however the White house will again come against
such a decision.” “We make every effort to convince our colleagues to
come against the Armenian initiative, as well as to note the importance
of the relations with Turkey for the US,” the Congressmen stated.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress