Category: News

Canadian MPs Recognize ‘So-Called Armenian Genocide’
ZAMAN Online
04.23.2004
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Ottawa, Ankara
The Canadian House of Commons followed in the footsteps of France and
Switzerland, reportedly approving a motion to recognize the ‘so-called
Armenian genocide’.
Despite Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham’s stern objections on the
ground that the motion would elicit negative reactions from Turkey,
which is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, the motion
was approved by a vote of 153 to 68.
True to Graham’s warning, Ankara harshly condemned the passage of the
motion. Ankara said that Canadian politicians are responsible for all of
the negativities stemming from the decision.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a statement rebuking the Canadian
House of Commons for classifying the tragic incidents between Turks and
Armenians in 1915 as “genocide”. It was emphasized that parliaments are
not obliged to reach judgments about debatable periods of history. Such
matters are best left to historians, not politicians.
Elsewhere, Graham in a letter he sent to the representatives, voiced his
concerns about the “extremely negative outcomes” the motion would cause.
After the approval he reported that the Canadian government maintains
its viewpoint on the issue, which Graham had made public on June 10,
1999. Graham also pointed out that motions are not binding on the
government.
In his letter to the Canadian deputies, Graham writes:
“Our government is in consensus with the members of parliament regarding
the tragic incidents that took place in 1915-1923. Canada had condemned
a broad range of exile and massacres against hundreds of thousands of
Armenians, had made a call for Turkish and Armenian communities to
contribute to regional stability and have continued to encourage them
towards reconciliation and peace.”
On the other side, Turkish Embassy Undersecretary in Canada, Fazli
Corman, pointed out that many Canadian companies are competing to be
awarded Turkish tenders. He then said, “Our relations with Canada have
been deeply harmed after such a decision.”

A1 Plus | 20:11:06 | 23-04-2004 | Politics |
NEW TIMES PARTY BECOMES ANOTHER VICTIM OF POLITICAL HARASSMENT
New Times party leader Artak Yeghiazaryan was arrested in Armenian town of
Armavir near his home.
Two hours later he was charged with insulting policemen and sentenced to
five days in jail.
The party says the illegal arrest of Yeghiazaryan is a politically motivated
step and condemns persecution of political activists.

The Daily Star, Lebanon
April 23 2004
Examining efforts to stop genocide
Some wonder if international treaties are enough
The US is singled out for particular criticism in its renouncement of
the International Criminal Court convention
By Leila Hatoum
Special to The Daily Star
The international community must go beyond judicial commitments and
processes in order to prevent genocides.
That was but one of the arguments raised Thursday at the start of a
two-day international conference on “Genocide, Impunity and Justice,”
organized and held by the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia.
“What is the use of all the treaties and institutions … if the
powerful do not abide by [them]?” said Nawaf Kabbara, professor of
political sciences at the Balamand University.
“Justice is determined by the powerful, but in the power game, the
dominant emerges, but he is not necessarily the best,” he said.
The conference was meant to coincide with the anniversary of the
Armenian genocide which took 1.5 million lives.
“The 20th century was an age of genocides,” said Catholicos Aram I,
in his opening speech, despite ” significant and encouraging
development.”
This was the result of numerous international declarations for human
rights, including the establishment of the International Criminal
Court (ICC) in 1998, he said.
According to him though, the international community “failed to
respond immediately in Rwanda, which led to disastrous repercussions.
While in Kosovo, thousands of human beings were saved because of a
preventive action.”
Aram also pointed out that the punitive approach is an essential
factor for the restoration of justice, which only happens when the
rights of the victim are fully recognized and adequately addressed.
“Why can’t the International Criminal Court bring governments or
nations to justice?” asked Aram.
He added that the punitive approach should be followed by retributive
justice. This means that victims should be compensated, truth should
be revealed and responsibility accepted.
Information Minister Michel Samaha, who delivered President Emile
Lahoud’s address, said that the Ottoman state took the lives of 1.5
million Armenians in the massive genocide it carried in the early
20th century to eliminate Armenian culture .
However, the “Armenian people were able to survive, and rebuild their
country,” said Samaha. As for refugees, “they were able to mingle
with the countries they fled to and contribute to their development,”
he added.
Louis Joinet, magistrate at the Court of Cassation in France, and the
rapporteur of UN special sub-commission on human rights, spoke of the
natural humanitarian movement towards impunity and justice.
“There has to be a right to know individually and collectively where
and when genocide took place. (There also has to be) a right to
achieve justice,” said Joinet.
He added that “good justice” is never quick, and that he prefers
reconciliation through pardon.
But according to Joinet, the question is who should be pardoned? He
pointed out that no one was willing to claim responsibility for such
actions, as France did for the massacres in Algeria years after they
had originally occurred.
Ninan Koshy, ex-human rights professor at Harvard University, said
that back in the 1920s there was no definition of massacre until
Rafael Lemkin, a linguistics student in Poland, gave it the name
genocide.
Koshy also said that the ICC is hampered by legal loopholes, such as
its inability to look into crimes that took place before the court
came to force in July 2002.
Another threat was manifested by the US, as Koshy pointed out when he
explained that the US was still looking to avoid responsibility for
its actions.
“May 6, 2002, the Bush administration renounced US ratification of
the Rome treaty that formally established the ICC,” said Koshy.
He added that on August 3, 2002, the US declared it would use
military force if necessary to liberate any American or any citizen
of an allied country that was held by the ICC – a move dubbed as the
Hague Invasion Act.
“What would the US do? Bomb the Hague?” Koshy said.
;article_ID=2708&categ_id=1

The Daily Star, Lebanon
April 23 2004
Hogasapian requests change in date for Industry Day
Beirut MP Jean Hogasapian urged the Lebanese Industrialists’
Association to change the date of the Industry Day from April 24 to
another date as it coincides with the commemoration day of the
Armenian genocide.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ArmeniaNow.com, 23 April 2004
Hell Night: A victim’s story of police brutality
By Zhanna Alexanyan
ArmeniaNow reporter
Ani Kirakosyan is 22. She will not let us take her photograph, because she
is afraid. By her accounts of what happened to her during a police crack
down on Armenia’s political opposition, her fear is justified.
Ani got a degree in journalism at Yerevan Pedagogic Institute and after
graduation was offered a job collecting information for the online magazine
of the Republic party.
On the evening of April 13, Ani was in the headquarters of the party. It is
oppositional leader Aram Sargsyan’s office, but Ani is not a member of the
party and says she is apolitical. For her, the work is a job, not a passion.
Police raided the office where Ani works during a sweep of oppositional
members ordered by authorities on a night when hundreds were attacked with
water canon, percussion grenades and beaten by police with batons.
At about 2 a.m., police reached the Republic party headquarters near the
Opera House.
First, police took away the men in the office. Then they came back for the
women. Ani was one of 13.
“We switched off the lights and were waiting,” says Ani. “I was terribly
afraid. When police officers began beating a woman under our window, I
approached the widow as I decided to help that woman. But at that very
moment they began fiercely knocking at our door.”
One man was left in the office, Artak Zeinalyan a disabled veteran who lost
his left leg in the war in Karabakh. He tried to intervene when police came
in, but was pushed to the floor.
“They were cursing us and roughly dragging us into a car,” Ani recalls.
“There was an elderly woman with us who was feeling very bad. We asked them
to at least let her go but they refused.”
When Ani asked: “Where are you taking us?” A policeman replied: “I don’t
know. Somewhere, where we find spare place.”
Lockup was at a premium that early Tuesday morning as an estimated 400
arrests were made. More would follow.
The women were taken to the Erebuni Community Police Department. Ani was
questioned by an officer named Grigor Mitoyan.
“First, Mitoyan entered the room with four or five policemen then a
high-ranking policeman came and everybody stood,” Ani recalls. “I was
sitting and watching. I didn’t know what would happen next. He approached me
and kicked me: ‘Stand up, I say!’ I stood up and he began kicking my legs,
belly and hitting my face with his hands. I was crying but I didn’t say
anything. He was cursing us using profanity toward me. I was so scared that
I urinated on myself.”
Ani says she was beaten for about 10 or 15 minutes by an officer named
Poghosyan. One of the women in the group identified him as Kamsar Poghosyan,
deputy head of the department.
When that officer left the room, other officers gave Ani water and warm
clothes.
“I asked what I did and why he beat me? He could have had a daughter of my
age. Policemen told me that nobody beat me and it was only my imagination.”
In a few minutes she heard shouts and curses coming from a corridor. The
policemen quickly took away the warm clothes and water from Ani. At that
moment head of Erebuni Community’s Police Department Nver Hovhannisyan
entered the room.
“I don’t remember, at that moment I was standing . . . He came at me in a
fury and was kicking me. I urinated on myself three times. I dropped on my
knees, I was crying: ‘What have I done, why are you beating me?’,” Ani says.
“You were at demonstration, I saw you there,” she recalls the head of police
saying. “You were standing in the front rows. So you wanted to change the
president?”
“I told him he mistook me for someone else,” Ani says. But he continued to
kick my back and belly.”
Ani says the department chief threatened that “he would bring all his
policemen and they would rape me or he would arrest me”.
One of the 13 women, Oghide Harutyunyan, was taken to police department with
her 19-year-old daughter. They were kept in the department for 36 hours, in
separate places.
Harutyunyan, 45, has a degree in law. She previously held the rank of major
in the Ministry of Defense.
She says she tried to defend the women by telling police of their rights.
She says a policeman told her: “Don’t you live in Armenia? The law is at the
top. We do whatever we are told to do.”
>From a floor above her, Harutyunyan heard screaming and feared it was her
daughter. (She and her daughter were also beaten by Hovhannisyan, she says.)
“I could clearly hear horrid yells of a girl coming from the third floor. I
didn’t know whether it was my daughter crying or someone else. Later I knew
it was Ani Kirakosyan,” Harutyunyan says.
When Hovhannisyan left the room (according to Ani, he was beating her longer
than the deputy head) Ani continued to cry loudly. One policemen asked her
not to cry so loudly. “If he hears you crying, he’ll return and beat you
again,” the policeman said.
Eventually, police took Ani to the Erebuni Medical Center.
In a waiting room one of the nurses saw bruises on the girl’s legs and back.
The nurse asked Ani if she had fallen.
“I said I was beaten in the police department,” Ani says. “A doctor, who was
present during the conversation, interrupted the nurse and was treating me
roughly. I saw an investigator waiting in the lobby.”
Ani, afraid that she had passed out during the worst of her experience,
asked to be examined by a gynecologist. She was denied.
She was examined by sonogram, then asked to pay 5000-6000 drams (about
$9-$11), however, Ani said she had no money with her.
She was discharged, but not given documents of her examination.
“I never knew what had happened with me,” Ani says. “They said everything is
ok but their faces said completely different things to me.”
(Ani is currently recovering at home. She suffers acute abdominal pains and
doctors say her internal organs are bruised.)
When Ani left the hospital she saw her parents and relatives waiting at the
entrance. However, an investigator didn’t allow her to talk with them and
again she was taken to Erebuni Police Department.
After spending 15 hours in the Police Department seven women were gathered
in one room. “All of them were beaten but not so much as I was,” Ani says.
“There was a woman among them, who was also beaten very fiercely. All of us
were crying.”
At 7 p.m. five women, including Ani, were let go.
When Ani tried to find out why only five had been set free policemen told
her: “Because you are not guilty”.
Editor’s note: Twice during the preparation of this article, ArmeniaNow made
attempts through police department officials to verify the claims of women
in this article. We told a police spokesperson that allegations were being
made, and that members of the department should be given an opportunity to
respond.
Sarkis Martirossyan, Head of Operations at Erebuni Police Department
“categorically rejects the fact of women being beaten” at the department.
Press and Public Relations Department of the Republic of Armenia Police
Mushegh Kroyan told ArmeniaNow: “If these women were subjected to acts of
violence, then let them go to the law. It is natural that policemen of
Erebuni Police Department will not confess that they had beaten them.”
—

Criminal case opened over attack on Armenian politician
Noyan Tapan news agency
23 Apr 04

YEREVAN
The investigations directorate of the central police department has
instituted criminal proceedings into the beating of a member of the
political council of the Armenian Socialist Forces and the Union of
Intellectuals, Ashot Manucharyan. An investigation is under way,
circumstances are being clarified, the press service of the Armenian
Police has told a Noyan Tapan correspondent.
Ashot Manucharyan was beaten up near the office of the council of
elders of the forum of intellectuals at about 1300 [0800 gmt] on 22
April. As a result, Manucharyan received severe injuries and was taken
to the Nor-Nork emergency hospital where he was operated on. Doctors
assess his condition as non-life-threatening and stable.
The criminal case was instituted under Article 113 of the Armenian
Criminal Code “premeditated damage to health of medium severity”.

Armenian, British foreign ministers discuss Karabakh in London
Mediamax news agency
23 Apr 04

YEREVAN
Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan and British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw discussed prospects of settlement of the Nagornyy
Karabakh conflict in London on 22 April.
The Foreign Ministry press service told Mediamax today that Vardan
Oskanyan and Jack Straw had also discussed the situation in the South
Caucasus and Armenia’s relations with its neighbours. The sides also
touched upon the latest developments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry press service reported that “during the
meeting, the British side said that it backed the inclusion of the
three South Caucasus countries in the [EU’s] Wider Europe – New
Neighbourhood policy”.
During the meeting, Vardan Oskanyan invited Jack Straw to Armenia.
On 22 April, the Armenian foreign minister also met Sir Brian Fall,
Britain’s special representative in the South Caucasus, and Terry
Davis, rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of
Europe on Nagornyy Karabakh, in London.

Jailed Azeri officer might be extradited after court ruling – Hungarian
official
ANS TV, Baku
23 Apr 04

[Presenter] An Azerbaijani embassy will open in Budapest by the end of
this year, the Hungarian deputy state secretary for foreign affairs,
Jeno Boros, has told ANS. The Hungarian diplomat did not rule out the
extradition to Azerbaijan of Ramil Safarov, Azerbaijani army officer
charged with murdering an Armenian officer.
[Correspondent, over video of Jeno Boros speaking to journalists
outdoors] In an interview with ANS, the Hungarian deputy state
secretary for foreign affairs, Jeno Boros, said that the trial of
Azerbaijani officer Ramil Safarov, who is charged with killing an
Armenian officer in Hungary, would be held strictly in line with this
country’s laws and without politicizing the issue. Boros did not rule
out Safarov’s extradition to Azerbaijan.
[Jeno Boros, in Hungarian, with superimposed translation into Azeri]
Safarov’s extradition to Azerbaijan is impossible since there is no
agreement on extradition between Azerbaijan and Hungary. The
prosecutor’s office is still investigating the case. It will be sent
to court in the near future. The Azerbaijani officer might be
extradited after a court ruling. The date of the trial has not been
set yet.
[Correspondent] According to the Hungarian official, Ramil Safarov
might not serve his prison term in Budapest.
[Passage omitted: reported details]

Skinheads attack Armenian boy in central Russian town
Ekho Moskvy radio, Moscow
22 Apr 04

Skinheads have attacked an 11-year-old Armenian boy in Kostroma
[central Russia].
The Internet publication Grani.ru quoted local television as saying
that several young men waited for the boy in front of a local food
store and when he came out splashed some petrol over him and set him
alight.
The child’s clothes caught fire and his face and hands were slightly
burnt. Fortunately passers-by quickly put the fire out.
The boy was given first-aid treatment in hospital and then went home.
Witnesses to the incident said that the attackers looked very much
like skinheads, their heads were shaved and they wore black
uniform-like clothes. The attackers managed to get away.
[When commenting on the incident in an interview with Ekho Moskvy
radio at 1236 gmt on 22 April, Ara Abramyan, the chairman of the World
Armenian Congress, said that measures taken by Russian authorities to
counteract manifestations of nationalism have brought no results.
“Skinheads should be outlawed, otherwise they remain unpunished and
this brings about new crimes,” he said.

A1 Plus | 21:04:37 | 23-04-2004 | Politics |
ARMENIAN PARLIAMENT SPEAKER IS DEMOCRACY DEVOTEE
Armenian national Assembly Speaker Arthur Baghdasryan convened a news
conference today to state he reiterated his stance against persecutions. He
also voiced condemnation at the criminal case instigated against the Justice
alliance.
He said he was also opposed to criminal charges brought against
General-Lieutenant Vagharshak Harutyunyan. Political issues should be solved
only on political field, he said.
Answering journalists’ questions about the April 13 violence against
peaceful demonstrators, Baghdasaryan said neither National Assembly nor the
coalition government was empowered to put pressure on the law enforcement.
The law enforcement bodies are under the president’s direct control, he
says.