Category: News

Asia Times, Hong Kong
Aug 7 2004
Muqtada stirs new storms
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE – The recent series of attacks on Christian churches in
Iraq that left 12 people dead and scores injured have drawn Iraq’s
Christian minority into the insurgency, and an exodus of Christians
from Iraq to countries such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Australia
can be expected.
Meanwhile, Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr – whose supporters are said
to be behind the attacks on Christians – on Thursday declared a
“revolution” against US-led forces in Iraq. This followed a truce of
two months and led immediately to fighting in the holy city of Najaf
and other Shi’ite areas that claimed the lives of at least 50 Iraqis
and an American soldier, and brought down a US helicopter.
The fighting continued on Friday, with US military forces conducting
a second day of air strikes in Najaf. Aircraft bombed positions held
by Muqtada’s Mehdi Army as American soldiers and Iraqi security
forces advanced on the insurgents.
In the attacks on Christians, a wave of well-coordinated bombs ripped
through four churches in Baghdad and two in Mosul last Sunday. Aimed
at having maximum impact, the attacks coincided with the evening Mass
when worshippers would be present in the church in large numbers.
The attacks are the most significant on the community since the fall
of the Saddam Hussein regime 15 months ago. Individual Christians
have been attacked over the past year, but those were more in the
nature of vigilante violence or moral policing by Islamist groups.
Several Christian storeowners have been victimized – some have had
their shops burned and others have been sent letters threatening them
with death. And some have been killed. But these acts of violence and
threats have to do with the fact that most shops selling alcohol or
Western music cassettes in Iraq are owned by Christians.
These latest bombings are said to be the work of supporters of
Muqtada as part of the larger strategy of Islamic militants seeking
to create an Islamic society in Iraq. Their violence is aimed at
enforcing an Islamic code of behavior, including the wearing of the
veil by women and a ban on alcohol.
Several Iraqi Christians have been kidnapped over the past year. This
again has to do with a general perception in Iraq that the Christian
community is wealthy. But not all Christians are, and some of those
who have been abducted have not been able to raise the enormous
ransom demanded by their kidnappers.
Because of their religion, and the fact that many Iraqi Christians
speak English or have relatives abroad, there is also a perception
that Christians are pro-American and that they are supporters of the
US occupation of Iraq. This perception has proved costly to the Iraqi
Christian community.
Some of the Christians who have been murdered over the past few
months are believed to have been working with the occupation force,
providing intelligence or simply providing services as launderers,
interpreters, supplying groceries and so on.
The Iraqi Christian community, concentrated around Baghdad and in the
northern cities of Kirkuk, Mosul and Irbil, is one of the oldest in
the world. The 800,000-strong Christian community constitutes 3% of
Iraq’s population. Most Iraqi Christians belong to the Chaldean
denomination. Other denominations include the Assyrians, who
constitute a sizable section, Catholic and Orthodox Syriacs, as well
as Catholic and Orthodox Armenians.
The Christian community in Iraq has not suffered general persecution
as such. But it has been at the receiving end of violence from time
to time, usually in periods of transition. In 1932, for instance,
when Iraq gained independence from the British Empire, hundreds of
Assyrian Christians were slaughtered by the Iraqi military. Their
villages were destroyed, their houses, shops and churches burned. The
Assyrian Christian collaboration with the British colonial power is
said to have triggered the violence.
Iraqi Christians consider themselves generally well treated under
Saddam’s largely secular rule. Some Christians even rose to top
positions in government – former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz is
one example. The Saddam Hussein government is also said to have kept
anti-Christian violence under check. But as part of the “relocation
programs”, which sought to create Arab majorities near strategic
oilfields, Christians, too, suffered. Christians living in the
oil-rich areas were among the communities that were forced to move
out. But Christians did not suffer the kind of persecution that the
Shi’ites or the Kurds did. The Ba’ath Party did not consider the
Christians as threatening and so allowed them considerable religious
freedom in return for their political submission.
The exodus of Christians from Iraq grew in the 1990s, especially
after the Gulf War and the imposition of sanctions thereafter.
According to a 1987 census, there were about 1.4 million Iraqi
Christians compared with about 800,000 today. The fall of the Saddam
Hussein government last year, the weakening of the generally secular
atmosphere, the growing Islamization and the spread of lawlessness
has prompted hundreds to flee.
All Iraqis are suffering on account of the deteriorating security
situation in the country. Iraqis irrespective of their religion have
been targets of violence by insurgents and the occupation forces.
What has led to the heightened feeling of vulnerability among the
Iraqi Christians now is that a sizable section of the Iraqi militants
view the US-led coalition as a Christian crusade and Iraq’s Christian
community as its supporters and collaborators.
Analysts have blamed the recent church bombings on groups with links
to al-Qaeda. They point to similar church bombing by outfits linked
to al-Qaeda in the Philippines, Indonesia and Pakistan as evidence of
this trend.
Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Tawhid and Jihad, which
has al-Qaeda links, has emerged as the foremost suspect for the Iraqi
church bombings. The aim was not only to heighten terror among
Christians and deepen divisions in Iraqi society (as part of an
effort to destabilize society) but also to undermine the US-appointed
interim government. The attacks might also have been aimed at
inflaming anger among President George W Bush’s supporters in the US
Christian Right.
While the coalition forces might be more favorably disposed toward
Iraqi Christians, members of the community have suffered, as have
Iraqi Muslims, on account of random searches, bombings, food and
power shortages, and the daily humiliation that the coalition forces
mete out to Iraqis. At the same time, the Christians are viewed as
collaborators with the “crusader forces”, making them vulnerable to
violence from Iraqis. As the movement for the Islamization of Iraq
gathers momentum, their religious rights – and more worryingly, their
personal survival – is likely to come under further threat. Clearly,
this community is caught in the crossfire.
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent researcher/writer based in
Bangalore, India. She has a doctoral degree from the School of
International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi. Her
areas of interest include terrorism, conflict zones and gender and
conflict. Formerly an assistant editor at Deccan Herald (Bangalore),
she now teaches at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

Tehran Times
Aug 8 2004
Tabriz To Host 12th Int’l Iran-Tabriz Exhibition
TABRIZ (IRNA) — The 12th International Iran-Tabriz Trade Exhibition
is to open in this northwestern province on Wednesday, the
exhibition’s general manager, said.
Some 844 domestic companies and 15 foreign countries from Turkey,
China, Armenia, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, Italy, France, Sri
Lanka, Spain, Holland, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and
India will be participating in this seven-day exhibition, Habib
Mahuti told IRNA on Saturday.
Leather, home appliances, foodstuff, chinaware, motor oil, paraffin,
various steel products, calculators, automatic doors and computers
will be among the items that will be showcased in the trade fair.

The Times Higher Education Supplement
August 6, 2004
Young Turks Who Set Stage For The Century Of Slaughter
by: William Rubinstein
The Burning Tigris: A History of the Armenian Genocide. By Peter
Balakian. Heinemann 473pp, Pounds 18.99. ISBN 0 434 00816 8
The 20th century has often been called the century of genocide, and
the first of its genocidal horrors, at least in the Western world,
was the Armenian genocide of 1915. Carried out by the Turkish
Government and its allies among the local populations of northeastern
and central Turkey against its own citizens, it anticipated many of
the enormities made familiar to the world in the Nazi genocide of the
Jews a quarter of a century later. In some respects, the Armenian
genocide provides an archetype for most subsequent state-sponsored
mass killings down to Pol Pot and beyond.
The Armenian genocide originated among the ultra-nationalist
extremists of the Committee for Union and Progress (the CUP), also
known as the Ittihad (Union), or, more popularly, the “Young Turks”,
who had seized power in the Ottoman Empire in 1908. Originally a
broadly based modernising movement, its Turkish majority became ever
more committed to extreme Turkish nationalism, entailing the
elimination of most Armenians and Greeks from the Turkish economy.
Their extremism was accentuated by the progressive loss of territory
suffered by Turkey in the Balkans and elsewhere up until 1914. In
1915, during the First World War, extremists within the CUP took the
smokescreen provided by the war as their opportunity to eliminate
most of the Armenians in Anatolian Turkey. At least 600,000 Armenians
perished – other estimates are far higher – often in ways and
circumstances that directly anticipated the Nazi Holocaust.
Many thousands were deported in sealed boxcars to remote desert
areas; many were machine-gunned in pits at the edge of towns. For one
of the first times in modern Western history, this slaughter spared
no one, not even women, children and the elderly, who are normally
protected to a certain extent in wartime. (On the other hand,
conversion to Islam spared the lives of some, while many Armenian
women wound up as Islamified wives or concubines of Turks.) This
harrowing story has attracted a growing literature in the burgeoning
and controversial field of “genocide studies”, but Peter Balakian’s
work is perhaps the first general account of the Armenian genocide
intended for a literate mass audience; it is clearly meant to
parallel the many popular accounts of the Holocaust, regularly
drawing analogies with the Nazi genocide.
Among its many merits are a full discussion of the appalling
persecutions endured by the Armenians in the decades before 1914, and
of the not-inconsiderable efforts of the Western democracies,
particularly the US, to publicise their fate and relieve their
suffering. This work is likely to become the best-known book on the
Armenian genocide. Balakian, professor of humanities at Colgate
University in New York state, is one of a growing number of
historians of Armenian descent who have assessed and publicised the
tragedy of their people. The work includes harrowing photographs of
the 1915 genocide that beggar belief.
Granted all of this, one must also point out that much about the
Armenian genocide of 1915, as diabolical as it obviously was, can be
interpreted in a somewhat different light compared with the sequence
of events typically set out in recent accounts of this event. First,
it seems clear that there was no pre-existing plan among Turkish
leaders to exterminate the Armenians, as is now frequently suggested
by many scholars. The last Ottoman Parliament, elected in 1914 just
before the outbreak of the war, saw 14 Armenians elected among its
259 members, exactly the same number as in the previous Parliament,
elected in 1908. Early in 1914, both the Armenian and Greek
communities in Turkey – the Greeks also being targeted by Turkish
extremists – carried out extensive and successful negotiations aimed
at guaranteeing their existing percentages in future Ottoman
parliaments. At this stage, a number of Armenians were major figures
in the CUP movement, for instance Bedros Halacian, the public works
minister. The contrast between this and the situation of the Jews in
Nazi Germany, ostracised from day one, is self-evident.
It was also plainly the case that Turkey did not start the First
World War and could not have foreseen the course of catastrophic war
declarations and mobilisations that unfolded in mid-1914. Indeed,
Turkey remained neutral for the first three months of the conflict,
declaring war only on October 19, 1914. In fact, most Turkish elite
opinion was originally pro-British rather than pro-German, with
Britain traditionally seen as the Ottoman Empire’s protector, and
arguably only the extraordinarily inept handling of the situation by
the British Government – something for which it has received
insufficient criticism – prevented Turkey from joining the Allies
rather than the Central Powers, with profound consequences.
>From October 1914, however, Turkey found itself at war with Russia.
Turkey’s nationalist extremists saw its Christian Armenian minority
as likely to be a subversive force working for Russia. Turkey then
proceeded to invade the Russian Caucasus, with disastrous results,
leading, in late November 1914, to a Russian counter-invasion of
northeastern Anatolia, which resulted in its seizure of much of the
area. Many Armenians supported the Russian drive against the hated
Turks. That Russia had successfully invaded northeastern Turkey in
1914-15 is obfuscated and camouflaged in the most recent accounts of
the Armenian genocide.
It was at this point, in the spring of 1915, that the CUP Government,
now dominated by extremists, decided forcibly to transfer its
Armenian population in northeastern Anatolia to the southern part of
Turkey. This forcible transfer was carried out with the utmost
brutality and inhumanity, and certainly included the deliberate
murder of tens of thousands of Armenians, by the nationalist
extremists who controlled the Turkish Government as well as their
henchmen among anti-Christian Muslim fundamentalists, Kurds and
criminals recruited especially to carry out the transfers as brutally
as possible.
The genocide occurred when the very existence of Turkey was certainly
threatened by its enemies, creating a mood of panic where murderous
fanaticism became the order of the day. While the parallels with the
Holocaust are clear, there were obvious differences as well: most
killings by the Nazis occurred in Poland and Russia, which Germany
had invaded largely for ideological reasons, the persecution of the
Jews being at the very core of Hitler’s world-view. In contrast,
Turkey inflicted slaughter on its own people while being invaded.
It is also no coincidence that the Armenian genocide occurred during
the First World War. The profoundly destructive effects of that
conflict led to the triumph of extremist, genocidal ideologies whose
impact was arguably not made good until the fall of Communism 75
years later.
William D. Rubinstein is professor of history, University of Wales,
Aberystwyth.

The Times Higher Education Supplement
August 6, 2004
No Victory In The Peace To End Peace
by Annette Becker
The Origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger
H. Herwig. Cambridge University Press, 537pp, Pounds 45.00 ISBN 0 521
81735 8
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War
at Sea. By Robert K. Massie. Cape, 865pp, Pounds 25.00 ISBN 0 224
04092 8
The Great War: An Imperial History. By John H. Morrow Jr. Routledge,
352pp, Pounds 25.00 ISBN 0 415 20439 9
The First World War: A New Illustrated History. By Hew Strachan.
Simon and Schuster 350pp, Pounds 25.00. ISBN 0 7432 3959 8
Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War. By Nicholas J.
Saunders. Berg, 254ppPounds 50.00 and Pounds 15.99. ISBN 1 85973 608
4and 603 3
The great diplomat and historian George Kennan, who celebrates his
100th birthday this year, called the First World War “the great
seminal catastrophe of this century”. Certainly, from beginning to
end it was a tragedy, in which different ages of war came together:
the old way of fighting with industrial-scale killing, soldiers and
home front populations who consented to their nation’s cause together
with the victimised civilians of invaded and occupied territories. At
the time, it was thought that the horror culminated on the
battlefields of Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli. Then the 1915
Armenian massacre (called retrospectively genocide after the
industrial mass killing of the Jews during the next war) came to play
a significant role in the way people thought about the savagery of
the 20th century as a whole.
The Great War has come to be studied more and more as a laboratory of
horror. These books follow this pattern, bringing different ages of
historiography to the intellectual field. Some of the books stick,
sometimes brilliantly, to the old way of telling stories, and offer a
history of military events led by presidents, emperors, prime
ministers, generals and diplomats, without mentioning ordinary
people, mentalities and representations; others look at public
opinion and war culture – from the culture of mobilisation and
sacrifice to that of rejection; some try to take in the twists of
race and gender; and some speak of a total war – or more accurately a
totalising war – using the tools of total history.
Writing this review in summer 2004, on the 90th anniversary of the
outbreak of the war in August 1914, it seems more important than ever
to understand its origins. There has long been talk about the
discrepancy between this war’s causes and the infernal tragedy it led
to. Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig, who argue persuasively that
this discrepancy is false, have asked 11 authors to address the
question of causes. Although the book is sometimes a good summary of
the diverse known explanations, the attempt to synthesise is
difficult, probably because the various contributors have tried to
answer country by country, and are not always the best specialists in
the countries they describe; it is surprising to see an exclusively
English bibliography in a discussion about France or Italy, for
example.
Drawing on research carried out over the past 20 years, the book
ignores earlier archives – strange for a book published by Cambridge
University Press that aims to be a textbook. Moreover, if historians
today widely accept the argument about a universal fear of aggression
at the time, and consequently the need to attack to prevent attack,
the book still prompts the question: are the usual suspects the real
suspects? Must we go back to Sarajevo and the Black Hand, back to
Gavrilo Princip, back to the escalation of the third Balkan War into
a European war?
Asking why the war started is not enough. The question belongs to a
dated historiography, where it was logical first to blame the enemy,
then war itself. It is the “how” that we need to explore. The process
of decision-making by rulers is one thing, but what of the process
that leads people to go to war, and to continue it for weeks, months,
years? Now that historians have nearly killed the idea of “1914
enthusiasm” – except when it refers to “Gallant little Belgium” and a
few members of the elite among the various aggressors – the real
historical task is to explain how it was resolved to go to war for a
short time, then to hold on for such an incredibly long time amid all
its horrors. How was it possible for the people involved to consent
to this and to suffer so much and to go on suffering when they were
more and more convinced of the absurdity of their sacrifice?
At least Robert Massie, a popular historian since the publication in
1992 of his Dreadnought, the story of the arms race between Britain
and Germany between 1890 and 1914, claims not to explain but to tell
a story. With Castles of Steel, he prolongs his story of the British
and German navies at war. He follows every ship and every submarine,
forgetting no section of engine or cannon, nor any of the men who
served in them, from the admiral to the last seaman; he sits with
Winston Churchill in the War Room at the Admiralty, and knows
everything about Admiral Holtzendorff sending in his U-boats in a
last gamble to win the war by starving Britain into surrender.
This is not a history that asks hard questions about the conflict but
it is, nevertheless, highly researched. The theme is particularly
fascinating because during this war – paradoxically considering the
fantastic arms race described by Massie in his book – there was
nearly no real naval battle, except at Jutland. But unlimited
submarine warfare led to the declaration of war by the US and,
ultimately, to the defeat of Germany. While the Allies did not secure
the victory at sea, it was because they did not lose at sea – notably
as a result of the convoys they organised – that they were able to go
on feeding their war effort and their populations when the Central
Powers could not because of the blockade.
A blockade was an old-fashioned way to win a modern armed conflict
involving the entire world, beginning with the colonies. If Hamilton
and Herwig treat the old imperialist mono-causal reason offered for
going to war with contempt, it does not mean that once the war was
engaged, the colonies played an insignificant role – on the contrary.
It is this story that John Morrow tells in The Great War: An Imperial
History. His argument is that to be a great power in 1914 you had to
have colonies, and that Germany wanted to be as great as Britain and
France. Indeed, Germany lost because of this lack of colonies – a
thesis again arguing for the success of the blockade. But the
colonial question became more complicated – with racism, social
Darwinism and eugenics probably the “fittest” winners of the war.
These surfaced again in the next war, when Nazi Germany would look
for vital space in Eastern Europe – another method of colonisation –
with brutal consequences.
The First World War was global from the start, three years before the
US entered the conflict. As Morrow says, “Prior to August 1914,
Europeans had presumed to control the world; they were now to learn
that they could not control themselves.” The “European civil war” was
not understood as such at the time, since everything was seen in
terms of race; there was nothing civil – nothing shared with the
enemy – about it.
While Morrow’s overall thesis is perfectly accurate and well put, his
book does not entirely keep the promise of its title and
introduction. Morrow is an excellent military historian who follows
quite strictly the war’s events on the various fronts, revealing the
colonial effort in troops and economics, but his is not a full
“imperial history”. Such a book – putting together the prewar
colonial practices of the European aggressors and the war racism of
Germany as seen, for example, in the September 1914 manifesto of 93
German intellectuals – is still to be written.
The text describes how the Germans’ horror of British and French
colonial troops, combined with supposed Russian inferiority, was used
both to hide German atrocities on the Western Front and to give
simultaneously a war aim to the German populace. Morrow is right: the
Great War was a war of race, a war of the self-appointed “superiors”
against the “inferiors”, and they all needed the “inferiors” to win.
Because Germany had very few colonies and did not engage colonial
troops on the European fronts, it used racist propaganda to overcome
what it lacked and show the inferiority of the enemies. It probably
worked enough to pour the poison of racism into Europe for a very
long time, a Europe already infiltrated by 19th-century race
classifications and colonial atrocities.
Hew Strachan forgets none of these points in his book The First World
War.
It was published as the companion to a Channel 4 series. But it is
much more than that. This Oxford historian has been able to put the
most recent scholarship into a clear and readable form, while using
research from his three-volume work, of which the first volume, To
Arms – also the title of the first chapter of this book – was
published in 2001. The two other volumes will follow soon. The book
is also extremely well illustrated, thanks to Gregor Murbach, who did
the research for the television series.
The match between one of the major international experts on the Great
War and a historian of photography skilled at discovering new and
fresh resources – especially in beautiful autochromes – has been
perfect; the subtitle, “A New Illustrated History”, is entirely
accurate. This is not a coffee-table picture book, but a work of very
serious scholarship, in which photographs and text enhance each other
and give meaning to the whole enterprise. In one photograph, a little
girl in Reims looks tenderly at her doll near two rifles and a
haversack, left as if by accident. It looks similar to C. R. W.
Nevinson’s famous painting, Taube, except there is a light of hope in
the photograph; Nevinson’s child is dead. Another photograph depicts
two mutilated soldiers on their beds, with bandages covering their
legs; the war turned them into mummies.
The autochromes show the poppies of Flanders’ fields in all their
beautiful and horrifying red. The choice of colour photos also
highlights the presence of colonial troops. The front photographers
took numerous photographs of the Senegalese, Indian and Indo-Chinese
soldiers and workers – probably because they were exotic for those
who had never been to Africa or Asia; Strachan and Morrow share the
thesis about globalisation of war even before it was total.
Black-and-white photos are also all extremely well chosen, with some
that will be new to readers. An Austro-Hungarian soldier smiling
behind the gallows of a “traitor”, for example, reveals the extreme
brutality and cruelty of the Eastern Front, including the brutality
against civilians – something often overlooked both at the time and
by historians. It is the attention to every front, including an
interesting chapter called “Jihad” about war in the Ottoman Empire
and the extermination of the Armenians, that adds value to Strachan’s
book.
If the home fronts are treated a little marginally in the first
chapters, they come into their own with the blockade and its
consequences for the Central Powers and, ultimately, for the outcome
of the war and engagement of the next. The author states very well
the series of contradictions involved: “The Second World War
irrevocably demonstrated that the First World War was not, after all,
the war to end all wars. But it also enabled posterity to have it
both ways. It venerated the writers who condemned the war of
1914-1918 but at the same time condemned those who embraced
appeasement, the logical corollary.” On top of the millions of dead
and wounded, on top of the grief and mourning, on top of the
destruction of the old political order and national boundaries, the
First World War had broken old illusions and brought new ones: no
more universal rights – or universal anything – more than a “victory
without peace”, a “peace without peace”, or, as a British officer
quoted by Morrow stated in 1919, a “peace to end peace”. What was
left were conflicting memories and their counterparts, silence and
forgetting.
By his unique ability to mix anthropology and the study of material
culture, Nicholas Saunders has invented a field that attempts to look
for and explain all kind of traces of the war fronts. The name Trench
Art appears a little restrictive, but it is how curators and
collectors refer to these front relics. With his book, Saunders
proves that through sites commemorating battlefields, and the home
front, through the objects touched, created and discarded by
societies at war, the anthropologist can get to the roots behind the
thinking of aggressor societies. The objects speak of a time that
seems near yet remote, of people who are nearly our contemporaries –
our grandparents, our great-grandparents – yet are at the same time
distant. Further, he helps us to understand other wars and the entire
scope of violence and suffering in modern times. Going beyond George
Mosse’s idea of the trivialisation of war through kitsch objects, he
proves that these front or home-front productions are, in a way, the
essence of modern war: the more you produce, the more waste you have;
the more people are engaged in war, the more they carve metal, wood,
stone or bone, to fight against boredom or express their love for
their families or their gods and their desire, in times of hardship,
to live.
It is a fascinating book that puts the Great War at its centre, with
its “unimaginable technologies of destruction”. The author includes a
few pages on earlier and later conflicts too: the picture on the
jacket shows a Vietnam War sculpture called “dressed to kill” – a
“beautiful” woman of steel with bullets for hair. Trench art could be
seen and studied today as a category of “Raw Art”; the surrealist
Andre Breton already considered the rings he saw soldiers polishing
at the front amazing. Another of the book’s pictures shows a
metalsmith decorating an artillery shell case fired by the Bosnian
Serbs into the city of Sarajevo during the war of 1992-1995. Does the
name sound familiar? Take a look back at June-July 1914.
Annette Becker is professor of modern history, University
Paris-X/Nanterre, France, and a director of L’Historial de la Grande
Guerre, Peronne, Somme.

The Times (London)
August 7, 2004, Saturday
Bridget Riley’ first solo show
by: Joanna Pitman
Ida Kar made some of the most brilliant artist portraits of the
Sixties.
This contact sheet of her session with the then 31-year-old Bridget
Riley, taken in 1962, is among her best.
Riley had been invited by Victor Musgrave, Kar’s husband, to do her
first solo show at his gallery, Gallery One. Monica Kinley,
Musgrave’s second wife, recalls how ahead of its time the work was.
“Victor gave Bridget Riley her first really serious show. Her work
was extremely challenging and avant-garde in those days and Victor
found it very interesting. Victor was very good at picking artists
with potential to show in his gallery. Many of them were at the start
of long and important careers.”
Born Ida Karamian of Armenian parents in Tambov, near Moscow, in
1908, Kar was educated at French lycees in Cairo and Paris. She took
up photography with her first husband, Edmond Belali, and worked in
Cairo as a surrealist photographer under the name Idabel. She met
Victor Musgrave in Cairo and moved to London in 1945. She lived and
worked in Soho, photographing London’s bohemia, including every new
and important writer and artist from Doris Lessing to T.S. Eliot,
from David Hockney to Margot Fonteyn. She had a solo show at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1960, in which she showed large prints of
French and British artists. She died in 1974.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Associated Press Worldstream
August 7, 2004 Saturday 8:25 AM Eastern Time
Nagorno-Karabakh warns Azerbaijan against military solution
YEREVAN, Armenia
A top military official in the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave on Saturday
warned Azerbaijan against using military action to try to regain
control over the territory.
“If military activity began, Azerbaijan would suffer serious losses,”
said Movses Akopian, head of Nagorno-Karabakh’s army headquarters.
Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, has
been de-facto independent since its Armenian-backed forces drove out
Azerbaijan’s military in 1994. Despite a cease-fire, the two
countries continue to face off across a demilitarized zone, and
shooting occasionally erupts. No final settlement has been reached,
and the conflict continues to aggravate economic troubles and
threaten unrest in this already volatile region.
In recent months, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliev has repeatedly
expressed frustration with the decade-long stagnation over the
enclave and has raised the prospects of military action.
“There is no point in paying any attention to threats from Baku (the
Azerbaijani capital) about a military solution to the Karabakh
problem,” Akopian said.
Earlier this week, Nagorno-Karabakh launched a 10-day military
exercise that Azerbaijan warned could further hamper peace process.

RESIDENTS OF VILLAGE OF TSIKHISJVARI, BORZHOMI REGION, GEORGIA PROTEST
AGAINST CONSTRUCTION OF BTC OIL PIPELINE
YEREVAN, AUGUST 4. ARMINFO. Residents of the village of Tsikhisjvari,
Borzhomi region, Georgia, have blocked Bakuriani-Tapatskhuri road, as
a token of protest against construction of BTC oil pipeline, A-INFO
reports.
According to the source, the heavy lorries of British Petroleum have
considerably damaged part of the road, with majority of water
supplying pipes having been destroyed. As a result, the roads to the
village occurred to be flooded. Besides, BP lorries damaged the local
bridge. In their turn, talking to the residents, BP representatives
promised to restore the damaged road and the bridge.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

VICE SPEAKER OF ARMENIAN PARLIAMENT MEETS WITH SYRIAN ECONOMY AND
TRADE MINISTER
YEREVAN, AUGUST 4. ARMINFO. Vice Speaker of the Armenian Parliament
Tigran Torossyan and Syrian Economy and Trade Minister Hassan al Rifai
discussed today the deepening of business relations between Armenia
and Syria.
Torossyan said that Armenian-Syrian relations will stably develop
irrespective of the current developments in the region. He said that
economy and trade are very important spheres of cooperation for the
two countries. Torossyan said that Armenian-Syrian interparliamentary
cooperation is actively developing and expressed hope that numerous
Armenian-Syrian agreements will be implemented. The sides should also
cooperate in international organizations and Armenia can provide Syria
with support and expertise in the matter. Torossyan stressed the
importance of the Armenian-Syrian intergovernmental commission which
started its work in Yerevan Tuesday.
Al Rifai high appreciated Armenian-Syrian relations and said that the
work of the Armenian-Syrian intergovernmental commission will be
effective for both countries. He said that cooperation should be
developed by specific programs. Al Rifai said that Syria continues
economic reforms and has been observing steady economic growth in the
last three years. He presented the legal improvements that are most
beneficial for investing and economy development.
Present at the meeting were also Armenia’s Agriculture Minister and
the Armenian co-chairman of the above commission David Lokyan and the
two countries’ ambassadors.

CONSTRUCTION WORKS WORTH A TOTAL OF $1.2 MLN TO BE STARTED IN SYUNIK
REGION OF ARMENIA
YEREVAN, AUGUST 4. ARMINFO. At the beginning of 2005 the Fund of
social investments of Armenia will begin implementation of
construction works in Syunik region of the republic worth a total of
$1.2 mln. Head of State Town-Planning Inspection of Armenia Sevada
Hayrapetian informed ARMINFO.
According to him, the package of necessary documents will be ready in
the last quarter of the current year. This fund will be directed to
construction of schools, engineering networks and buildings in the
region, as well as to repair of houses of culture. Besides, this year
Armenian government has allocated 13.5 bln drams for construction of
schools and social-economic projects in different regions of the
republic. Ministry of Town-Planning of Armenia is the owner of works
worth a total of 1.5 bln drams in 24 establishments.

MODERNIZATION OF FOIL-ROLLING PLANT ARMENAL IN ARMENIA WILL BE
COMPLETED IN MIDDLE OF 2005
YEREVAN, AUGUST 6. ARMINFO. Modernization of the foil-rolling plant
Armenal in Armenia will be completed in the middle of 2005. The plant
belongs to the Russian Aluminum JSC, Minister for Trade and Economic
Development of Armenia Karen Chshmarityan said at a press-conference
today.
He said that modernization was initially planed to be completed within
11 months (by th end of November, 2004, as the minister said), but
then, the plant’s owner asked prolongation of the terms for 5-6
months. The minister said that in conformity with the specified data,
the cost of the investment program grew to $70 mln as against $34 mln
earlier announced by Rusal. Chshmarityan said that the increase in the
investment volume is connected with purchase of additional
equipment. He added that orders for $17 mln will be placed at
enterprises in Armenia and negotiations with them are currently in
process. The minister connected the protraction of the terms of the
investment program’s implementation with lack of an agreement between
the plant’s owner and the General Contractor, the German company
“Achenbach,” which won a tender for modernization of Armenal in
December.
It should be noted that Armenal’s output in 2003 totaled 21 bln drams
($37,1 mln), which is 3.1 times more than the indicator of the
previous year. The plant manufactured 10.5 thous tons of products in
the period under review, which is twice more than in 2002. Armenal has
been suspended since the end of December, 2003 for
modernization. Armenal CJSC was founded in May, 2000, on the basis of
Kanaker Aluminum plant (KanAZ) as a JV with participation of the
companies Russian Aluminum and “KanAZ” OJSC. Since Jan, 2003, 1003 of
Armenal’s shares belong to the Russian Aluminum JSC.