Category: News

The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia)
May 22, 2004 Saturday Final Edition
The bones talk, and she listens: Clea Koff writes a sobering account
of her encounters with mass murder
by: Tom Hawthorn
One murder is a crime. One hundred murders, or one thousand, or ten
thousand, or tens of thousands are also crimes, although the enormity
of the wrongdoing is so great, so unbelievable, that it becomes
possible for the perpetrators to lie and cover up, making accomplices
of many others.
Hitler, the mass murderer against whom other monsters are measured,
knew this well. Preparing plans for the extermination of the European
Jews, he notoriously dismissed concerns about future world opinion.
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
he said. Indeed, when recently Canada’s House of Commons belatedly
condemned those deaths more than eight decades after the fact, the
vote was denounced by the Turkish government and its supporters as
being misinformed and unhelpful.
For survivors and grieving relatives, the horror of murder is
compounded by denying the fact.
Bearing witness is an antidote to such sickness. So, the Holocaust
memoir becomes a genre because it is necessary to count as many
survivors and name as many victims as possible, if we are to take
seriously the solemn promise of “never again.”
Yet the past decade has provided a brutal wake-up for those of us
under age 65 who have wondered how the world could ignore the
deliberate and organized slaughter of so many people.
In Rwanda, political leaders squawked orders for mass murder over the
radio. In Serbia, otherwise decent people suspended disbelief and
accepted government propaganda denying the existence of mass graves.
In Canada, we tsk-tsked over news of the latest atrocities, our sense
of moral superiority once again affirmed.
Even as a teenager, Clea Koff knew the world’s atrocities demanded a
response from her. Raised in Africa, England and the United States,
this daughter of a Tanzanian mother and an American father, both
documentary filmmakers, quips that she learned about the
lumpenproletariat at the supper table before she knew about Bert and
Ernie on television. Fascinated by the nature of death even as a
girl, she collected dead birds and studied them as a prelude to
backyard burial.
Koff found inspiration for a career as a forensic anthropologist from
two sources: a TV documentary on bodies preserved in the ash from an
eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and Clyde Snow’s book Witnesses from the
Grave: The Stories Bones Tell, which describes efforts to find the
remains of the “disappeared” victims of Argentina’s bloody military
junta of the 1970s and ’80s.
“I had known for years that my goal was to help end human rights
abuses by proving to would-be killers that bones can talk,” she
writes in The Bone Woman, a compelling personal chronicle of months
spent rooting around in mass graves.
Koff was sent to Africa in 1996 with the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), a United Nations organization formed to
bring the killers to justice. (She also worked for ICTY, the tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia.) She works with the remains of murder
victims, of which there is no shortage. The violence in Rwanda was so
widespread that it quickly claimed some 800,000 victims, the vast
majority killed by hand, usually by machete. Imagine every man, woman
and child in Vancouver and Burnaby hacked to death, some left to rot
where they fell, others thrown into pits and covered with dirt.
Koff finds Rwanda a beautiful, verdant land, where the serene setting
of the church at Kibuye masks the horror inflicted and a menace still
not dissipated.
While some skeletons display wounds to the arms and hands, others
bear only the fatal blows.
“The absence of defence wounds gave my image of that massacre an
eerie calmness; did people take the blows as though taking the
sacrament?”
She finds herself smiling a lot in Rwanda, an incongruous reaction to
so horrid a killing field. “It is because I see not just death —
about which I can do nothing — but bones and teeth and hair, which I
can do something about …”
Bones offer clues as to age, sex, height, ancestry and cause of
death. Koff and her colleagues scrape away dirt until they uncover
remains, exchanging a pickaxe for a trowel for a pair of chopsticks
for the delicate task of flicking dirt from between finger joints.
A rational scientist, Koff uses a poet’s eye in describing her
discoveries, noting in one case how “the big toe phalange [is] chunky
like a baby carrot, the other phalanges more like small licorice
pieces, held in anatomical position by a sock because the flesh of
the foot has decomposed.”
Descriptions of much of her work are not for the faint of heart, so
those of you now eating breakfast may wish to skip a few paragraphs.
Koff copes daily with ammonia fumes from intestines, as well as
saponified remains, a state of decomposition in which skin remains
tender. “If you puncture it, something not dissimilar to cottage
cheese came foaming out …”
The smells of decomposition — “one being sharp and ripe, the other
thick and ‘hairy'” — permeate her clothing, scents she cannot avoid
even while eating lunch.
These horrors fuel the nightmares she duly records, yet an event she
witnesses causes her greater distress.
One fine evening, Koff dines al fresco on the shores of Lake Kivu
when her reverie is disturbed by a sickening sight: two desperate men
in the water being shot to death by uniformed Rwandan soldiers. “I
couldn’t conceive of which ‘side’ they were on, or which side we were
thought to be on, or, indeed, if there were any sides.”
Seeking explanation, she is told the dead men were insurgents from
Zaire. The information is useless, for she has no means of judging
its accuracy.
“I hated the impotence of not being able to do more than just report
the killings and I hated the fear I now felt for my own life, even
though the bullets hadn’t been directed at me or my teammates. And,
insult upon insult, I hated the fact I got to leave this place so
easily.”
The Bone Woman was written from Koff’s journal entries — a strength
in retelling the small incidents of her labours, a weakness when
recounting the petty disputes one expects among colleagues working in
such hostile and unpalatable circumstances. She dislikes the teasing
she endures from teammates after telling a Reuters reporter that she
says to the uncovered skeletons: “We’re coming. We’re coming to take
you out.”
Her complaint is so overshadowed by the enormity of these crimes
against humanity as to seem callow and naive. And yet her reaction
may be understandable, given that she’s someone who spends her 24th
birthday up to her elbows in viscera.
Koff also exhumes bodies from mass graves in the former Yugoslavia
(“where the people who committed the crimes we would be uncovering
were still at large”) at Cerska, Nova Kasaba and a rubbish pit at
Ovcara, where missing men from the hospital at Vukovar had been
dumped.
“These bodies, by their very presence, were dismantling years of the
perpetrators’ propaganda that the grave didn’t exist, that the
missing men were probably larking about in Italy, that a crime
against humanity hadn’t taken place five years earlier,” she writes.
Her work does not so much bring resolution to the crimes, by
uncovering the assailants and having them punished, as restore
humanity to those whose lives were taken. Long after the book is
closed, a reader remembers the woman in Rwanda with pink plastic
necklaces; the hospital patient who secreted his X-rays in his
clothing (for identification after death? because he believed he was
going to another hospital?); the boy in Kosovo whose grave held
marbles — child’s playthings and a reminder of our necessary outrage
at his murder.
Tom Hawthorn is a Victoria reporter who last reviewed Lloyd
Axworthy’s book, Navigating a New World.
GRAPHIC: Photo: Pierre Heuts, From the book the bone woman; Clea Koff
(right) in Kigali, Rwanda, with UN scientific expert Bill Haglund.;
Photo: THE BONE WOMAN: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth
in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo BY CLEA KOFF, Knopf Canada,
271 pages ($34.95)

CIS def mins to coordinate efforts on non-proliferation of WMDs
ITAR-TASS News Agency
May 21, 2004 Friday
YEREVAN, May 21 — The defence ministers of CIS countries backed an
initiative by the Russian Foreign Ministry to coordinate positions
of the Commonwealth countries on non-proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov who chaired the meeting, said
that meeting participants “unanimously backed proposals on concerting
positions of our countries on such a pressing international problem”.
Summing up meeting results, Ivanov noted that much attention was
given to the operation of the CIS United Air Defence System. He said
that “the adoption of a Targeted Programme for ensuring comprehensive
counteraction by armed forces of the Commonwealth countries to forces
and means of an air attack by a potential enermy will be another
important and efficient measure to improve multilateral cooperation
in this sphere. “Its draft was approved today and will be submitted
to the Council of the CIS Heads of Government,” the minister specified.
According to Ivanov, meeting participants adopted important decisions
on joint actions on training CIS armed forces in 2005, organizing
activities of collective peacekeeping forces of the Commonwealth,
raising security of flights of military aviation, creating a United
Communications System and improving cooperation in weather forecast
work.
The meeting was attended by all CIS ministers, apart from Turkmenistan
and Azerbaijan. Armenian President Robert Kocharyan received the
defence ministers on Friday. Ivanov who chaired the meetings, informed
the president of its results. He emphasized that decisions, taken at
the meeting, “will help to consolidate security and stability over
the entire space of the Commonwealth”.
Ivanov who arrived in Yerevan on a working visit, held talks on
Thursday with his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sarkisyan. “We have made
another important and practical step towards deepening Russian-Armenian
strategic partnership, security of our countries as well as maintenance
of peace and stability in Transcaucasia,” the minister said, summing
up the results of the meeting with his colleague.

Movements of anti-aircraft systems controlled in CIS – Ivanov
By Alexander Konovalov, Tigran Liloyan
ITAR-TASS News Agency
May 21, 2004 Friday
YEREVAN, May 21 — The CIS Council of Defence Ministers has not
discussed the control of movements of portable anti-aircraft systems
at its meeting in the Armenian capital Yerevan on Friday, Russian
Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov told reporters.
He explained that CIS presidents had made decisions on this matter
at their meeting in Yalta last autumn.
“We fulfil them,” he said.
“In accordance with these decisions, national authorised bodies for
exchange of information on the movement of the systems have been set
up or are to be set up in the CIS countries, except for Turkmenistan.”
“The Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation reporting
to the Defence Ministry has been formed in Russia to be in charge of
this question,” Ivanov said.
He said large-scale military exercises of CIS states would be conducted
in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in early August.
Russia will send to the exercises military transport, combat and
naval aviation, and permanent readiness troops.
Besides, exercises called West-Antiterror will be held in Moldova
at the end of June, engaging antiterrorist structures of Russia,
Ukraine Belarus, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

The Economist
May 22, 2004
U.S. Edition
Here today, where tomorrow?
Mr Putin keeps everyone guessing
ST PETERSBURG, May 2003. Historic buildings shone with freshly gilded
domes and new coats of paint. Mr Putin, having contrived to assemble
47 world leaders for a series of international summits to coincide
with the city’s 300th anniversary, was showing the world the former
imperial capital in its full glory.
It was the high summer of Mr Putin’s relations with the West. Over
three years, he had gradually sidelined Russia’s foreign-policy hawks
who pined for Soviet supremacy and mistrusted any rapprochement with
the former enemy. Thanks to his immediate declaration of solidarity
with George Bush after the September 11th attacks, America had turned
a blind eye to the uglier sides of his own regime, including his
characterisation of the war in Chechnya as part of the war on terror.
For months, the world’s most powerful men had been wooing Mr Putin to
use Russia’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council either to
support or to oppose an attack on Iraq. This presented him with a
dilemma: if he supported it, he would look like an American puppet,
but if he opposed it, America might bypass the UN, invalidating
Russia’s biggest remaining claim to being a global power. It never
came to a vote; the UN was sidelined anyway; but Mr Putin somehow
managed to stay on fairly good terms with everyone all the same.
However, since then a chill has set in. The Yukos affair, the Duma
election and the blatantly fraudulent presidential election in
Chechnya last October got foreign leaders to take fears about Russian
authoritarianism more seriously. The assassination earlier this month
of Chechnya’s president, Akhmad Kadyrov, made a mockery of Russia’s
claims that the situation there was “normalising”. The expansion of
NATO and the European Union right up to Russia’s borders revived old
disputes about visa rules, security and trade barriers. The roar of
NATO jets patrolling just outside Russian airspace is almost drowned
out by the grinding of teeth in the defence and foreign ministries.
Russia has been squeezed into a narrower space. Countries such as the
Baltics, which used to be under its thumb, are now members of the EU.
Countries such as Ukraine and Belarus, which Russia still considers
part of its backyard, are now Europe’s neighbours, and therefore its
concern. That has brought nasty surprises. When Russia last November
brokered a peace deal in Moldova that would have involved Russian
“peacekeeping” troops staying there until 2020, it expected no
resistance. But Moldova’s president, under pressure from European
leaders as well as from his own people (who had watched Edward
Shevardnadze being swept from power in Georgia only a couple of days
earlier), scrapped the deal at the last minute, infuriating the
Russian leadership.
Old assumptions have changed. The Partnership and Co-operation
Agreement that Russia first signed with the EU a decade ago had “an
integrationist goal”, says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in
Global Affairs. “It meant that Russia should gradually adopt EU
standards. But under Putin, Russia doesn’t want to become just like
Europe. It won’t have human rights as a priority. It doesn’t want to
be endlessly coming to agreements on things.”
In February the European Commission admitted that its strategy of
gradually integrating Russia, the fruit of one of the St Petersburg
summits, was getting bogged down. “Russian convergence with universal
and European values will to a large extent determine the nature and
quality of our partnership,” it observed pointedly.
Yet as it looks around its new, smaller Lebensraum, Russia sees that
the place has something cosily familiar about it: it is a lot like
the old Soviet Union. It may now be called the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS), but their independence goes only so far.
The Kremlin sends advisers to help its preferred candidates with
election campaigns. It vies with the growing American presence there,
using Russia’s remaining military bases and, in Georgia, loyal
statelets as levers.
Last September Anatoly Chubais, the head of the state electricity
firm, UES, said Russia should become a “liberal empire”, extending
its reach on the economic side. Though he was then campaigning for
his opposition party, SPS, his words have resonance in the Kremlin,
says Mr Lukyanov. As big Russian firms outgrow opportunities at home
they are increasingly venturing abroad, especially to countries where
Russian is still spoken.
The government is doing much the same. A preliminary agreement on a
single economic space for the CIS pushes Russia further from Europe’s
economic embrace (though it will take ages and may never happen at
all). Russia is unlikely to replace the Middle East as the West’s
main source of oil, but when Russia eventually builds a Far East
pipeline, it will forge closer ties with Asia. UES has bought
electricity companies in Georgia and Armenia, and Gazprom owns stakes
in firms all across the CIS and in much of Europe (see map, previous
page).
Yet strengthening its hold in the CIS does not mean that Russia is
withdrawing from the West. Mr Putin may not care what foreigners
think of the way he runs his country, but he cares a great deal about
its status in the world, and thinks these two things can be kept
separate (after all, they are for China). Now that Russia’s
Security-Council veto has lost its shine, he will concentrate on his
country’s prospective chairmanship of the G8 in 2006. He is expected
to try hard to get preliminary approval for WTO membership by then.
For that, Russia will have to negotiate with many countries, above
all with the EU over the price of the gas it exports there. There are
plenty of other shared problems, from drug-trafficking to terrorism
to migration, so the West will continue to have plenty of dealings
with Russia, as well as considerable leverage.
One way of using this wisely will be to show Mr Putin that his
approach to many of his domestic problems makes them the world’s
problems too. He believes that Russia needs a strong leader to
contain threats such as economic and political refugees, a decaying
army, terrorist breeding-grounds and epidemics spiralling out of
control. But the strength that enables the country to cope with all
this is also a weakness: at the moment too much depends on the man at
the top. A sudden jolt (a sharp economic downturn, a new outburst of
terrorist attacks, or any mishap that might befall Mr Putin himself)
could tip the country over the edge again. A more democratic Russia
would be a more stable one, and less worrying for the world in
general.
It does not help that people have trouble understanding what Mr Putin
himself wants for Russia. As examples such as the Yukos affair or his
dealings with the media show, he has an uncanny ability to keep
everyone guessing. Mikhail Fradkov, his new prime minister, was about
the only candidate that not a single political pundit had thought of;
and also the only one bland enough to leave a large question mark
over why he was chosen.
But now that Mr Putin is as much in control as he ever will be, the
next few months should provide a clearer indication of where he is
heading. Telltale signs will be whether he lets his reformist
ministers get involved in issues that have so far been the province
of the siloviki, such as military spending; how he brings the Yukos
affair to a close; whether he encourages the oligarchs to invest in
ways that help develop the economy rather than merely plug holes in
state welfare spending; and how he responds to his officials’ more
retrograde ideas (he recently softened a law restricting public
gatherings after an outcry against it).
In broad terms, though, Mr Putin’s agenda for Russia is clear: he
wants it to be a global power and an economic tiger, but also a
controllable, monolithic state where suggestions are welcome but
opposition is not. “Russia was not a democracy in the 1990s and it’s
not an autocracy now,” says Nina Khrushcheva, a professor at the New
School in New York. “Russia is a process, but we always insist on
labelling it as a finished product, as this or that, and then scold
it immediately if it doesn’t fit.”
Yet the 20th century had many such countries in transition, and many
of them stayed that way for decades before the system cracked and
democracy started to seep in: think of Mexico, South Korea, Malaysia,
Chile, Singapore. Russia is not what it was 13 years ago; it is not
what, 13 years ago, everyone hoped it would be today; nor is it
better or worse; it is simply what it is. And given how fast things
change there, tomorrow it might well be something completely
different.

Alone in Turkey Tom Payne praises a brave novel that makes us question our world
by Tom Payne
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
May 22, 2004, Saturday
In 2001, an extraordinary book called My Name Is Red appeared in
English. It’s impossible to recommend it without sounding eccentric –
you try urging a friend to read a Turkish novel, brimming with stories
within stories and Koranic dialectic, about murderous miniaturists
working in the court of Sultan Murat III in 1591. The novel is set
around the 1,000th anniversary of Mohammed’s journey from Mecca
to Medina, when Islamic reformers were railing against artists in
Istanbul. Its opening chapter is a monologue about a corpse, and the
story takes in points of view from other perspectives: Satan says
his piece, as does a horse, Death, a coin and the colour red.
Its translation brought its author, Orhan Pamuk, greater fame in the
West, and, for all the book’s violence, it could almost be read for
entertainment. The book showed Pamuk could do everything – jokes,
horror, plot, structure, erudition, love.
In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of
modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to
fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues?
The novel is set in Kars, in the far east of Turkey, close to Armenia –
the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1908 remains in the characters’
minds. For the three days of the story’s main action, the town
is cut off by snow, so, when a coup takes place, the world cannot
intervene. The local paper, the Border City News, has a circulation
of 320, and prints news before it happens. The residents watch TV
constantly, even when there’s nothing on, and most are paid to spy
on one another. There is a high rate of suicide among the town’s
young women.
Ka, a poet, wants to know why. Some say it’s because the women are
beaten at home; others say they are protesting because they can’t
wear headscarves in school. “Why did your daughter decide to uncover
herself?” an Islamist asks Kars’s director of education, before
shooting him. “Does she want to become a film star?” The Islamists
don’t know what to make of the suicides, since the Koran forbids the
faithful to take their own lives.
Throughout the book, Ka stops to write poetry (mostly taken from the
dialogue around him). He asks a woman he loves, “Do you think it’s
beautiful?… What’s beautiful about it?” As a writer, Ka is at odds
with the intrigues and fear around him. He is often blissfully happy,
and we learn that one poem’s theme is “the poet’s ability to shut off
part of his mind even while the world is in turmoil. But this meant
that a poet had no more connection to the present than a ghost did.
Such was the price a poet had to pay for his art!”
And yet the artists in the story are lethally relevant. When the
coup comes, it comes on the stage of a theatre; even as members
of the audience are being killed, people mistake the events for a
fantastic illusion. For a while, Kars is run by an ageing actor who
regrets that he’s never played Ataturk. Even Ka, who is mistrusted
for being too Western, becomes integral to the action.
At one point, Ka reflects on the writers he’s known who have been
lynched by Islamists, and it’s a reminder that writing Snow has been
an act of bravery, too. It’s an unexpected sort of bravery, though,
because Pamuk has made great efforts to enter the Islamists’ heads.
The effect is like meeting the possessed anarchists in Dostoevsky –
these alternative views of the world find full expression, and make
us question our own.
If Pamuk wrote about real situations and tried to find sympathy with
true terrorists, more readers would be alarmed than already have
been. But he tailors the terrorists to his requirements – the most
seductive of them, Blue, hasn’t killed anybody and dotes on puppies.
The author’s high artistry and fierce politics take our minds further
into the age’s crisis than any commentator could, and convince us of
every character’s intensity, making Snow a vital book in both senses
of the word. Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel
Prize was invented.
Snow by Orhan Pamuk tr by Maureen Freely
436pp, Faber & Faber, pounds 16.99
T pounds 14.99 (plus pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870 1557222

CIS states study possibility of joining efforts on air defense
Associated Press Worldstream
May 21, 2004 Friday
YEREVAN, Armenia — Twelve former Soviet republics are studying the
possibility of creating a united system of air defense to protect
the region, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Friday.
“This is a vital system, and it has proved so in exercises held
recently,” Ivanov said in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, which hosted
a meeting of defense ministers from the Commonwealth of Independent
States.
He gave no further details.
The CIS, comprised of 12 former Soviet republics, was set up after
the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union to encourage cooperation between
the countries. However, those efforts have largely been hamstrung by
regional squabbles and fears of Russian domination.
Ivanov said that the ministers also discussed ways to expand military
technological cooperation and upcoming military exercises. In August,
the CIS militaries are planning exercises in the Central Asian nations
of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Ivanov said.

PRESS OFFICE
ARMENIAN CHURCH OF NORTH AMERICA WESTERN DIOCESE
3325 North Glenoaks Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91504
Tel: (818) 558-7474
Fax: (818) 558-6333
E-mail; [email protected]
Webiste:
COMMUNIQUÉ
Mr. And Mrs. Walter And Laurel Karabian
Donate Valuable Artifacts
To The Western Diocese
We are pleased to announce to the faithful of the Western
Diocese that Mr. and Mrs. Walter and Laurel Karabian have donated the
following precious manuscripts and miniature artifacts to the newly
established Diocesan Museum.
– Four Miniatures from a Gospel Book on Paper (Possibly Crimea,
17th Century)
The Presentation in the Temple with Simeon holding the Christ Child with
Mary and Joseph; the Raising of Lazarus; the Transfiguration; St. Luke
in his study writing the Gospel
– Four Full-Page Miniatures from an Armenian Gospel Book on
Paper, By the Artist Toros Sarkaway, ^ÓThe Deacon^Ô (Tabriz, 1311)
Two leaves, each with full page miniatures, includes self portrait and
signature of Artist.
– Four Gospels, in Armenian, Written by the Scribe Georg
(Istanbul, 1376)
Decorated manuscript on paper, 271 leaves
– Psalter, in Armenian, Manuscript on Vellum (Armenia, ca. 1453)
Contains fragments of the Gospel of St. john, from the 17th or 18th
century
– Four Gospels, in Armenian, Written by the scribe Boghos
– Four Gospels, in Armenian, Written by the scribe Mkrtich
(Armenia, 17th Century)
– Four Gospels, in Armenian, Manuscript on Paper (Caesarea, ca.
1743)
– Encyclical from the Catholicos Epremlst Jorageyc I to Sir
Robert Porter (Constantinople, April 15, 1820)
Letter with decorative border in silver and gold ink, with the personal
seal of the Catholicos in the middle.
We would like to extend our heartfelt appreciation and
gratitude to Mr. and Mrs. Karabian for their generous donation of the
precious items to the newly established Diocesan Museum.
Adrienne Krikorian, Esq. represents
Western Diocese at
Eastern Diocesan Assembly
Diocesan Council member Adrienne Krikorian, Esq. recently represented
the Western Diocese at the 102nd Assembly of the Delegates of the
Eastern Diocese, sponsored by St. Gregory the Illuminator Armenian
Church in White Plains, New York. Ms. Krikorian was warmly received as
a guest of the Eastern Diocese by His Eminence Khajag Barsamian and the
delegates of the Assembly.
On Friday, April 30, 2004 Ms. Krikorian participated in educational
roundtable discussions with the clergy and delegates on the theme topic
of Stewardship. The discussions proved informative and useful as the
Western Diocese has recently reorganized its Stewardship program and is
preparing to embark on a campaign of Stewardship in the coming year.
On Friday evening Ms. Krikorian attended a delicious buffet mezza/dinner
and a delightfully entertaining program sponsored by St. Gregory the
Illuminator Church in White Plains. Performances by talented Armenians
entertained guests well into the evening, and were followed by a dessert
buffet prepared by the parishioners.
Ms. Krikorian delivered greetings to the Assembly on Saturday May 1 from
His Eminence Hovnan Derderian. She spoke to the delegates about the
Western Diocese’s year of growth and reorganization following the
election of His Eminence. She congratulated the 102nd Assembly on the
purchase of its new Ararat Youth and Retreat Center, and encouraged the
delegates to support the budding leadership of Armenian youth, who she
stated are the future of the Church.
Ms. Krikorian attended sessions of meetings of the Assembly and the
Women’s Guild. The common goals and missions of the two Dioceses gave
Ms. Krikorian an opportunity to share ideas with leaders of the Eastern
Diocese, and to bring back similar input for the Western Diocese
Diocesan Council.
A gala banquet ended the Assembly on Saturday evening, including
entertainment by the Shushi Dancers of St. Vartan Cathedral, and the
presentation of awards to Rabbi Arthur Scheier and Armenian author
Vartan Gregorian.
Ms. Krikorian attended Badarak on Sunday at St. Gregory the Enlightener
before returning to Los Angeles. On behalf of the Western Diocese Ms.
Krikorian extended her thanks and gratitude to his Eminence, the
delegates of the 102nd Assembly of the Eastern Diocese, and the
parishioners of St. Gregory the Illuminator for their warm reception.
DIVAN OF THE DIOCESE
May 22, 2004
Burbank, California

FRENCH PRESIDENT HAILS AZERI LEADER’S DECREE PARDONING PRISONERS
ANS TV, Baku
22 May 04
French President Jacques Chirac has sent a letter to his Azerbaijan
counterpart Ilham Aliyev, welcoming the pardoning decree signed on
10 May and praising Azerbaijan’s integration into Europe. Praising
Ilham Aliyev’s move, the French president said that France is always
ready to assist the country in continuing this policy and developing
a plural society. (Indistinct sentence)
You are paying great attention to integration into the European
Union. I witnessed this once again during your visit to Brussels,
end quote.
The letter also says that this integration will further strengthen as
a result of progress on settling the Nagornyy Karabakh problem. The
resumption of the dialogue between you and the Armenian president
under the aegis of the OSCE Minsk Group, as well as between the two
countries’ foreign ministers is a hopeful sign, the French president
said in his letter. This report was disseminated by Azartac news
agency.

AZATUTYUN BROADCAST INTERRUPTED
A1 Plus | 22:23:53 | 21-05-2004 | Politics |
Broadcast of Azatutyun radio station, having broadcasting hours on
state-owned Public Radio, about the opposition rally was interrupted
just after the broadcaster said the live report from the correspondent
on the scene is expected in five minutes.
Music was heard on the radio channel till the very end of Azatutyun
broadcasting time. The Public Radio broadcaster said Azatutyun’s
newscast was interrupted because of satellite connection problems.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Azeri daily warns against “ousting” Turkey from region
Zerkalo, Baku
21 May 04
The chairman of the Armenian National Assembly, Artur Bagdasaryan,
and Turkish Speaker Bulent Arinc held a meeting during the Council of
Europe conference of parliament speakers in Strasbourg. The meeting in
Strasbourg, which was the first one in the history of the Armenian and
Turkish parliaments, was devoted to the need to establish diplomatic
and parliamentary relations between the two countries, the Armenian
parliament press service reported.
[Passage omitted: The Turkish speaker said that Turkey might consider
the issue of establishing diplomatic relations in response to Armenia’s
positive steps regarding the Karabakh conflict]
We have to note that there is coldness in relations between Baku and
Ankara. Individual circles in Azerbaijan have lately been pursuing a
policy aimed at weakening Turkey’s position in the region and first
of all in the eyes of the Azerbaijani public. Experts believe that
this phenomenon is very dangerous, first of all for Baku. In this
case, Azerbaijan actually loses Turkey, which is the country’s only
support in the international arena. Ankara played a key role in saving
Azerbaijan, and ousting Turkey from the region will undoubtedly play
into the hands of Armenia and Russia in the region.
It should be stressed once again that an open anti-Turkey campaign has
actually been launched in Azerbaijan. It should have been foreseen
that sooner or later this will cause a negative response by the
political circles in Turkey. It will be a kind of catastrophe for
us if the number of people interested in breaking off relations with
Azerbaijan increases in Turkey’s government structures. Anti-Turkish
propaganda in Azerbaijan cannot remain unanswered for a long time.
One should not forget that Washington and Ankara are strategic partners
and NATO allies and that the process of gradually ousting Turkey from
the region might lead to the ousting of the USA and Europe from the
region as well.
We have to point out that the absence of the Azerbaijani MPs from
the 29 April debates of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of
Europe [PACE] on the Turkish Cypriot community triggered a negative
response in the Turkish political circles and led to coldness in
Azerbaijani-Turkish relations. Everyone expected that this would lead
to events of a larger scale.
The scandal reached its apogee when the head of the Azerbaijani
delegation said that the Azerbaijani MPs did not attended the debates
deliberately.
Now, the Turkish speaker has let us know that Turkey’s friendship
credit is not endless.