Category: News

Boston Globe, MA
April 4 2004
OFF TO ARMENIA:
For 26 Lexington High students, it will be a unique spring break,
touring Armenia and performing several concerts. Several of the
school’s Madrigal singers and concert choir members leave April 14
for New York City, where they will fly to Moscow and then travel on
to Armenia. “I can’t tell you what they’ll come home with, but it’s a
completely different experience than anything they’ve seen in the
world , starting with the architecture, the language, the customs,
the weather,” said Peggy Hovanessian, a parent who has coordinated
much of the trip and whose daughters, Manneh and Naris Ghazarian, are
going. Brian O’Connell, the school’s choral director, will accompany
the group to Armenia. The students are packing two suitcases each,
one of personal belongings and one filled with clothing, musical
instruments, toys, and gifts to give away there.

Los Angeles Times , CA
April 4 2004
Putting Broken Georgia Back Together Again

Saakashvili must navigate political minefields while reviving the
economy.
By Rajan Menon, Rajan Menon is Monroe J. Rathbone professor of
international relations at Lehigh University.
NEW YORK – Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had better savor
his party’s overwhelming victory in last Sunday’s parliamentary
elections, because his chances for similar triumphs as he tackles his
country’s serious and longstanding problems are clouded.
For openers, his government doesn’t control much of the territory
over which it has nominal jurisdiction – and hasn’t since 1992.
Abkhazia, the northwestern segment of Georgia’s Black Sea coast, is,
in effect, independent. The Abkhaz, a predominantly Muslim Caucasian
people that, with Russian help, broke away from Tbilisi more than a
decade ago, maintain a special relationship with Moscow and are
wedded to outright independence. Saakashvili is determined to regain
Abkhazia, as are most Georgians, especially the thousands who were
expelled from the region. Clashes between Abkhaz and Georgian forces
routinely puncture a tenuous cease-fire overseen by a predominantly
Russian-dominated contingent. Peace talks have been fruitless.
Abkhazia remains a flashpoint and a symbol of the precariousness of
Georgia’s political equilibrium.
Another slice of Georgia’s Black Sea coast, which includes the port
of Batumi, runs through the dissident region of Adzharia, whose
indigenous people are predominantly, albeit nominally, Muslim, a
legacy of several centuries under the Ottoman Empire. The local
strongman, Aslan Abashidze, rules with scant regard for the central
government in Tbilisi. He hasn’t sought full-fledged independence
largely because he already possesses its attributes: a constitution,
control of local revenues, a police and militia, and unchecked power.
But Adzharia is a crisis-in-waiting. Earlier this month, Abashidze
banned Saakashvili from entering his fiefdom, then relented after the
Georgian president imposed an economic blockade. The incident
highlighted the fragility of Georgian unity. Bringing Adzharia under
Tbilisi’s control won’t be easy because Abashidze has independent
economic resources, an extensive patronage network and connections to
Russia, which maintains a military base at Batumi.
A similar situation prevails in South Ossetia. The Georgia
government’s writ doesn’t hold in the region, and Russia exercises
considerable leverage there, not least because the Ossetians are a
nation divided by state boundaries: Russia’s republic of North
Ossetia holds open the dream of unification for Georgian Ossetians –
and for Georgians the nightmare of political disintegration.
Saakashvili’s most formidable challenge, then, is to reunite Georgia
– or at least prevent its fragmentation.
Another more urgent, but also more doable challenge is to revive
Georgia’s economy. Despite respectable rates of growth in the last
several years and low inflation and little foreign debt, the
country’s gross national product is still only 40% of its 1989 level.
About the same proportion of people live below the poverty line, and
pervasive corruption and persistent doubts about Georgia’s ability to
remain whole have made foreign investors leery.
But two pipelines – one carrying oil from the Azerbaijani port of
Baku to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, the other transporting
natural gas between Baku and the Turkish city of Erzurum – are under
construction, and their transit revenues will be a significant and
steady source of income, or so Georgia hopes. But political chaos
could undo both economic ventures, and not only because of Abkhazia,
Adzharia and South Ossetia.
The durability of the Saakashvili’s political alliance with Zurab
Zhvania, the prime minister, and Nino Burjanadze, the parliamentary
speaker, is uncertain. There are no strong personal or political
bonds uniting the three. In the weeks before the elections, members
of Zhvania and Burjanadze’s Democrats, which united with
Saakashvili’s National Movement for the parliamentary vote, were
unhappy that the president’s party insisted on getting most of the
spots on the party list. While Saakashvili remains immensely popular,
murmurs about an imperial presidency, his dislike of press criticism
and the inexperience of his top lieutenants have surfaced.
The bigger question concerns the political opposition. Eleven
parties, most of them tiny and chaotic, contested Sunday’s elections.
To qualify for representation in parliament, a party had to win at
least 7% of the overall votes. Some opposition parties complained
that the high threshold would freeze them out; three, including the
Citizen’s Union, the party of former President Eduard A.
Shevardnadze, boycotted the vote; and since the elections, complaints
have arisen about irregularities that put the opposition parties at a
disadvantage. The problem is that parties left outside the political
system may choose to disrupt it.
Then there is Russia, which is determined to keep Georgia within its
orbit. Ever since its independence, Georgia has battled to break
Russia’s grip, and Saakashvili will not stop that struggle. To
diminish Russia’s leverage and create stability and prosperity, he
will have to continue Shevardnadze’s policies of more trade with and
investment from the West, as well as solidifying political and
strategic ties with Europe and the U.S. The pipelines, Georgia’s
participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Partnership
for Peace and continuing American training for Georgian
border-security forces are examples of such efforts.
Russia, which views the South Caucasus, the larger region of which
Georgia is part, as its historic sphere of influence, has plenty of
strings to pull. Thousands of Georgians work in Russia, and their
remittances are vital for many Georgian families. Moscow can impose
travel and employment restrictions on Georgians, and has done so in
the past. Georgia owes Russia $157 million (for Georgia, a
considerable sum) in unpaid debts, and Moscow has used debt
rescheduling as both carrot and stick. Georgia’s economic problems
and its dependence on Russian energy have enabled Moscow to link the
resumption of gas supplies to an agreement on the debt. This is a
matter of simple economics and shrewd accounting; it is also an
object lesson to Georgia on the necessity of taking Russia seriously.
Moscow has military sources of influence as well. Russian troops
remain stationed at Batumi and Akhalkalaki, the predominantly
Armenian region in the south of Georgia and talks to negotiate a
schedule for closing the bases have stalled. Russia insists that it
needs until 2014 to complete the closures, and, despite reaping a
windfall from surging oil prices, also says that it needs help paying
for the relocation of its troops. The bases give Moscow leverage on
important issues.
Georgia wants to join NATO. Russia wants it to declare neutrality or,
preferably, to align with Moscow. The bases act as an impediment to
Georgian membership in NATO. While the possibility of Georgia
aligning with Russia seems remote, in Moscow’s eyes, Tbilisi’s
political course remains uncertain and thus changeable. Its bases in
Georgia also give Russia a bargaining chip to prevent the U.S. from
relocating some of its forces from Western Europe to NATO’s new East
European members.
Finally, the quasi-independence of Abkhazia, Adzharia and South
Ossetia gives Russia a foothold in Georgia, which controls the road
and rail links to Armenia, a key Russian ally and host to Russian
military bases. Not surprisingly, Moscow insists that Tbilisi must
agree not to forcibly annex these regions before a deal can be
reached on the bases.
The parliamentary elections significantly increased Saakashvili’s
political capital, but there are many ways in which his account could
be drawn down – and rapidly. Georgia’s seemingly intractable problems
can easily transform heroes into villains. Just ask Shevardnadze.

Associated Press
April 4 2004
Center displays works inspired by obsession and compulsion
By HELENA PAYNE
Associated Press Writer

BOSTON- A Boston artist has dedicated a museum exhibit to the type of
behavior that causes some to separate their M&Ms into colors, pop
bubble wrap until there is no more plastic to crush and focus all
their attention on the most minute detail out of pure obsession.
The exhibit at the Boston Center for the Arts is called “OCD,” as in
obsessive compulsive disorder. Curator Matthew Nash said it’s not
about an illness, but how the creative process can be driven by a
series of obsessions and compulsions.
“You should see my studio,” said Nash, who has shown his art in
Boston, Chicago, New York and Italy.
He is one of the people who separates his Skittles, M&Ms and Reese’s
Pieces into separate containers for each color. He used the latter
two sugary goods to create his art for the OCD exhibit, which lasts
through May 9 and features artists from New York, Pennsylvania,
Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Using the Halloween-like colors in the candies, Nash made a grid that
forms the images of soldiers, planes and other war-related pictures.
“The obsession of this is having bins and bins of M&Ms and hoping
when you’re done it looks like something,” Nash said.
Nancy Havlick has bins with objects separated by color, but they’re
filled with sugar eggs. In an attempt to fuse her multicultural roots
– English and Armenian – with her American upbringing, she decided to
start her own tradition.
With the sugar eggs, Havlick creates “rugs.” Make no mistake, they
aren’t to walk on.
The eggs are colored with a mixture of spices and foods often used in
Armenia, including mahleb, sumac, almonds, apricots, paprika and
rosebuds. She organizes them in decorative patterns on the floor.
“I’m deciding my own tradition. Rather than looking backwards, I’m
forging ahead,” Havlick said, laying one of the eggs in its position.
Havlick said she didn’t recognize her obsession with making sugar
eggs until she realized she has been doing it for a decade. But she
has also realized another fixation: carving out an identity from her
multiethnic past.
In her parents’ generation, Havlick said, it was much more common to
assimilate to the American culture rather than celebrate differences.
“My mother wasn’t cooking Armenian food. We were having hot dogs and
hamburgers,” she said.
The sugar eggs have become her own way of bridging the past to the
future and “to control the chaotic feelings” of life, she said.
And for her two children, the sugar egg tradition is working. Her
9-month-old son Jonathan’s first words were “momma,” “sugar” and
“eggs.”
Many of the exhibitors wanted their art to express something about
both the creation process and the result.
New York artist Jason Dean wanted to conquer bubble wrap after
working for an animation company where he did a lot of packing.
So he decided to make it an art project and see how much time it
would take for him to pop the largest roll of bubble wrap he could
find: 110 feet by 4 feet. It took about six hours.
That roll and other smaller ones are mounted on a wall of the exhibit
like paper towels above a kitchen sink. There is also a video that
features Dean’s “popping spree.”
“I kept thinking that they were a lot louder,” he said. “It just
sounded like fireworks and I kept thinking that someone is going to
question this odd sound.”
Joseph Trupia, another New York artist, used office supplies to make
drawings called “What I can do in 40 hours” and “What I can do in 8
hours.”
Another work in the OCD exhibit shows 600 photographs of rear ends.
“It was kind of a silly thing to do at first and it became a document
of the process of looking,” said Boston artist Luke Walker of his
gluteus photography.
Norfolk, Va., artist Jennifer Schmidt became fascinated with the
repetition of filling in ovals on test score sheets.
“The idea of the artwork showing evidence of repeated activity is
something we see in a lot of different forms,” said Martha Buskirk, a
fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in
Williamstown, Mass., and author of “The Contingent Object of
Contemporary Art.”
The clinical disorder is even more consuming, said Diane Davey, a
registered nurse and program director of the OCD Institute at McLean
Hospital in Belmont.
“Obsessive compulsive disorder is really defined as someone who has
unwanted or disturbing intrusive thoughts and who engages in a set of
behaviors that are meant to sort of neutralize the thought and help
them to feel less anxious,” Davey said.
Davey said an exhibit like “OCD” might help someone to question his
or her own behavior and seek help if necessary.

Manila Bulletin, Philippines
April 5 2004
Another Pacquiao sparmate punished
By winneleo campos
LOS ANGELES – At the end of six bruising rounds atop the ring,
Armenian Art Simonyan playfully planted a kick on Manny Pacquiao’s
behind. It was the only time he had the upperhand on the Filipino
pug.
Stepping up his preparation for a May 8 bout against world
featherweight king Juan Manuel Marquez, Pacquiao knocked down the
undefeated Armenian in the first round of a sparring session at
Freddie Roach’s Wild Card gym in Hollywood.
A few days after cracking the rib of another Armenian fighter, Kahren
Harutyunyan, in training, the 25-year old GenSan southpaw sent
Simonyan to the canvas with a left straight even before fans who had
come to watch him at the gym could settle in their places.
He held back the rest of the way, finishing the six rounds on his
heels then responded to Simonyan’s kick with a spinning back-kick
that narrowly missed his opponent’s head.
Simonyan is 13-0-1 (win-loss-draw) as a pro and has never been
knocked down in his career, sources said.
“Masaya si Manny sa ensayo, kumakain ng tama at focused na focused
doon sa laban,” said Lito Mondejar, a member of Team Pacquiao.
Pacquiao has now got it 18 rounds of sparring on
Monday-Wednesday-Friday sessions in preparation for his bout with
Marquez, whose WBA and IBF featherweight titles the Filipino covets
to legitimize his claim to be the king of the world in the division.
Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays are reserved for gym work,
calisthenics and sessions with the punch mitt with Roach.
“Manny is easy to deal with. He assimilates everything that you teach
him and he learns things very fast,” said Roach, unable to hide his
satisfaction over the pace of Pacquiao’s preparation.
On Monday, a new sparring partner that will come all the way from
Mexico will be fed to Pacquiao to give him a new perspective on how
to adapt to a fight.
Roach said the boxer fights like Marquez in some ways.
At the end of sparring sessions, Pacquiao, together with Filipino
trainer Buboy Fernandez and Mondejar, studied Marquez’s fight tapes
and took note of several weaknesses in his opponent’s style, whose
technical approach to boxing had been his meal ticket to success.
“Makikita na lang niya sa laban ang inihahanda namin,” said Pacquiao
of his fight plan. “Magaling s’ya sa counter-punching pero papasukin
namin siya.”

The Observer/The Guardian, UK
April 4 2004
The United Nations of France
Where the players are from
Lilian Thuram
Born: 1/1/1972 Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, West Indies
Club: Juventus
Caps:87
Thierry Henry
Born:17/8/1977 Paris, France
Origin: Guadeloupe Club: Arsenal
Caps: 49
Mikael Silvestre
Born: 9/8/1977 Chambray-les-Tours, France
Origin: Guadeloupe
Club: Man United
Caps:25
Bixente Lizarazu
Born: 9/12/1969 St-Jean-de-Luz, France
Origin: Basque
Club: Bayern Munich
Caps:84
Robert Pires
Born: 29/1/1973 Reims, France
Origin: Father Portuguese, mother Spanish
Club: Arsenal
Caps:57
David Trezeguet
Born: 15/10/1977 Rouen, France
Origin: Father Argentine, mother French
Club: Juventus
Caps: 43
Marcel Desailly
Born: 7/9/1968 Accra, Ghana
Club: Chelsea
Caps:106
Olivier Kapo
Born: 27/9/1980 Abidjan, Ivory Coast
Club: Auxerre
Caps:8
Christian Karembeu
Born: 3/12/1970 Lifou, New Caledonia
Club: Olympiakos
Caps: 50
Zinedine Zidane
Born: 23/6/1972 Marseille, France
Origin: Parents from Algeria
Club: Real Madrid
Caps: 82
Patrick Vieira
Born: 23/6/1976 Dakar, Senegal
Club: Arsenal
Caps:62
Jean-Alain Boumsong
Born: 12/14/1979 Douala, Cameroon
Club: Auxerre
Caps:4
Claude Makelele
Born: 18/2/1973 Kinshasha, Democratic Republic of Congo
Club: Chelsea
Caps: 26
Youri Djorkaeff
Born: 9/3/1968 Lyon, France
Origin: Armenian
Club: Bolton Wanderers
Caps: 82

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
April 04, 2004, Sunday
The forgotten genocide
Brendan Simms applauds this study of the Ottoman Turks’ attempts to
wipe out the Armenians
by Brendan Simms
The Burning Tigris:
A History of the
Armenian Genocide by Peter Balakian
Heinemann, pounds 18.99, 473 pp pounds 16.99 ( pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870
155 7222
THE MASS murder of the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey was, as
the Holocaust scholar Israel Charny put it, the “prototype” of
20th-century genocide. In 1894, and again with even greater ferocity
in 1915, the Turkish government engaged in a deliberate strategy of
straightforward massacre, transplantation, death marches, and forced
conversion to Islam.
All this was well known at the time: the Armenian massacres regularly
made the headlines in the British and American press. Indeed, as the
Pulitzer Prize-winning study by Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell,
reminded us recently, it was the Armenian massacres which prompted
the Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin in the 1920s to start thinking
about what kind of international legal safeguards could be put in
place to prevent recurrence. Another, and even more terrible genocide
later, Lemkin’s quest resulted in the United Nations Genocide
Convention of 1948.
Peter Balakian’s new book, The Burning Tigris, which made the New
York Times best-seller lists last year, retells the story of the
Armenian massacres in an accessible way. It is not for the
faint-hearted. In places, the narrative becomes an almost unbearable
catalogue of cruelties and killings. If the author seems to dwell on
these, the reason lies in a revisionist campaign to minimise the
scope of and intention behind the massacres, sponsored by some
otherwise rather eminent historians.
Whether or not the murder of the Armenians was comparable to the
Holocaust against the Jews is a matter of genuine academic debate;
but the broad outline of the killings themselves cannot be disputed.
Even if we discount the testimony of the survivors themselves as
biased, there are still the grim accounts of American observers, and
of the horrified German officers seconded to the Ottomans. In any
case, some senior Turkish figures, such as the Ottoman minister of
the interior, Talaat Pasha, openly bragged about having “disposed of
three-quarters of the Armenians”.
The Armenian genocide was driven by three mutually interlocking
concerns on the part of the Turkish government. First, there was a
profound suspicion of the Christian “otherness” of the Armenians in
an overwhelmingly Muslim polity. The Armenians were not alone in this
respect, of course; the Greeks occupied a similar position.
Second, attempts to modernise the empire led to an emphasis on
“Turkishness”, rather than simply Islam, as a legitimating force.
This only reinforced the exclusion of the Armenians. As Mr Balakian
shows, Armenian converts to Islam were by no means safe: here the
ethnic argument predominated.
Third, and most important, there was the fear of Russian subversion.
The Tsarist empire had been encroaching on the Ottomans in the
Caucasus for some time and had been using the Armenians as a pawn in
this great game; the second wave of attacks took place shortly after
the Ottomans entered the First World War on the German side. In the
minds of the Turkish leadership, therefore, the massacres were also
something of a pre-emptive strike.
The author pays particular attention to the American response to the
genocide. It was, he notes, the first time that the public was
exposed to this kind of man-made catastrophe. At the level of civil
society, the response was overwhelming. Huge sums of money were
donated for relief, and various committees were set up to raise
awareness and put the Ottoman government under pressure. All this
marked the beginning of a global human rights dimension in American
politics.
At governmental level, the reaction was rather different. Some State
Department figures, such as the ambassador to Constantinople, Henry
Morgenthau, played an important role in bringing the massacres to the
attention of the outside world. But in general, the received wisdom
within the administration was that Turkey was a sovereign state, and
that no direct American interests were involved.
Mr Balakian is perhaps a little too quick to judge here. It was all
very well for ex-Presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt to call for
American intervention, but there were severe practical difficulties
involved. The kind of military instruments which rendered
humanitarian interventions possible in the former Yugoslavia in the
1990s, such as precision air strikes, were still in their infancy;
and “Johnny Turk” had shown at Gallipoli that he was a much more
formidable foe than the Bosnian Serbs.
The Burning Tigris concludes with an epilogue on the memory of the
Armenian genocide in recent years. It notes that the American
government continues to defer to Turkish sensitivities on the issue.
A Congressional Bill, the Armenian Genocide Resolution, designed to
raise awareness of the massacres, was sabotaged by Clinton’s White
House as recently as the autumn of 2000 after furious Turkish
lobbying.
During the Cold War, when Turkey was a key pillar of NATO in the
eastern Mediterranean, this made some sort of sense. Nor was it
completely unreasonable to maintain this stance throughout the 1990s,
when Turkey was a cornerstone of the containment of Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq. No longer: the refusal of the Turkish government to join the
“coalition of the willing” in 2003 means that the moment may have
arrived when the American government can finally confront Ankara with
the truth.
Brendan Simms’s ‘Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of
Bosnia’, is published in paperback by Penguin.

Agence France Presse
April 4, 2004 Sunday 8:05 AM Eastern Time
Christians gather to celebrate Palm Sunday in Jerusalem
JERUSALEM
Hundreds of followers from different branches of Christianity began
Easter celebrations Sunday by parading through the streets of
Jerusalem’s Old City before praying at the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre.
Groups of Boy Scouts from the Catholic, Armenian, Greek Orthodox and
Assyrian communities banged drums, followed by crowds shouting
“Hosannah” and waving palm fronds and olive branches to mark Palm
Sunday.
They congregated at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed to the
final resting place of Jesus Christ, for a special service.
Palm Sunday marks the Sunday before Easter, when Jesus is said to
have ridden a donkey down the Mount of Olives and into the holy city
to a joyous welcome from the crowds, who scarcely a week later were
calling for his death.
Numbers were markedly down on the levels seen before the start of the
Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in September 2000, which has seen
many tourists steer clear of the Holy Land.
Many Palestinian Christians have also been unable to attend
celebrations, with Israeli authorities restricting travel from the
occupied territories.
One Arab resident of Jerusalem said she had been hoping that the rest
of her family, who live near the West Bank town of Ramallah, would
have been able to join her.
“None of my brothers and or sisters have been able to come to
Jerusalem,” said the woman who would only give her name as Labiba.
“Our family was meant to come and celebrate together and pray
together. The Israelis said they would allow Palestinians to come but
this is not true.”

Buffalo News (New York)
April 2, 2004 Friday, FINAL EDITION
DREAM DATE/ BAIRD TRIO OFF TO CARNEGIE HALL/
by MARY KUNZ; News Classical Music Critic
PREVIEW
WHAT: Baird Trio’s Carnegie Hall warm-up
WHEN: 8 p.m. Tuesday
WHERE: Slee Hall, UB North Campus, Amherst
TICKETS: $5
INFO: 645-2921
/ Next week, when the Baird Trio plays Carnegie Hall, its concert
will be a dream come true.
Not that the musicians haven’t ever played Carnegie Hall. Cellist
Jonathan Golove has appeared at the historic hall’s Weill Recital
Hall (and he’ll be returning in May with flutist Cheryl Gobbetti
Hoffman). Pianist Stephen Manes has played there numerous times.
So Carnegie Hall is hardly a dream to the musicians. No, the dream
lies in the music itself.
The Baird Trio has always taken a bold approach to music, embracing
the old and the new. This concert is a typical adventure — but it
has a theme.
One piece the trio will be playing is “Bad Dreams,” an excerpt from
“Red Harvest,” Golove’s opera in progress based on Dashiel Hammett
stories. Haydn’s Trio in E flat minor, with its “Jacob’s Dream”
finale, continues the dream theme. Also on the program is “Dream of
Dreams,” by the young Armenian composer Vache Sharafyan.
Pogossian, who is from Armenia, greatly admires Sharafyan both as a
composer and a countryman. “He’s a close friend of mine, someone I
love and respect in an equal amount,” he says. “He is a very deep
musician who also is very attuned to our common Armenian heritage,
the Armenian tradition.”
Sharafyan, he adds, is well-versed in the roots of Armenia’s
classical music, folk music and church music, including Gregorian
chant structures. “To me,” Pogossian says, “his music is always an
emotional journey.”
The program opens with five Bagatelles by Tigran Mansurian, Armenia’s
best-known contemporary composer. “They’re really beautiful,” Manes
says. “They’re short, poetic and eloquent.”
The musicians’ fun-loving side emerges with Charles Ives’ piano trio,
completed around 1914. The Scherzo movement is especially famous; the
composer labeled it TSIAJ, for “This Scherzo Is a Joke.”
“Ives is one of the greatest representative, if not the greatest,
American composer,” Pogossian says. “It seems almost a duty to
include him, along with another leading American composer, Golove.”
His colleagues laugh.
Golove’s opera, “Red Harvest,” is an adventure in progress. The
segment “Bad Dreams,” which the trio will be premiering at Carnegie
Hall, is a pivotal scene in which the hero meets the heroine for the
first time. Their meeting takes place, Golove explains, to the
accompaniment of a radio playing such sultry jazz standards as “Body
and Soul” and “Night and Day.” “I won’t say everyone will get all the
references, and I wouldn’t want them to,” Golove says.
The scene requires immense finesse on the part of the performers, who
have to portray, simultaneously, the hero, the heroine and the radio.
Preparing the piece for this particular concert was also a challenge
for Golove, who had to write the vocal version, and then transcribe
it for trio. “The ink is somewhat dry,” he jokes.
How does it feel to be premiering his opera in Carnegie Hall?
“Rather a thrill,” he says.
The Baird Trio performs its pre-Carnegie Hall warmup concert Tuesday
at 8 p.m. at Slee Hall on UB’s Amherst Campus. Admission is $5. For
info, call 645-2921.
e-mail: [email protected]
GRAPHIC: Cellist Jonathan Golove, violinist Movses Pogossian and
pianist Stephen Manes make up the Baird Trio./

The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)
April 1, 2004 Thursday Final Edition
AVERTING GENOCIDE IS FOCUS OF FORUM;
ENVOY BLAMES NATIONS FOR NOT PREVENTING SLAUGHTER OF TUTSIS IN RWANDA
IN 1994.
By Paul Riede Staff writer
Ten years ago this month, a genocide began in Rwanda that took the
lives of as many as 800,000 Tutsi people over 100 horrific days.
Since then, world leaders have acknowledged that the killings carried
out by extremist Hutus in the central African nation could have been
stopped or greatly reduced if they had stepped in.
The genocide and its lessons will be discussed today and Friday at a
symposium at Syracuse University. The symposium kicks off tonight
with a film about the genocide at 6:30 and a keynote address by
Stanislas Kamanzi, the Rwandan ambassador to the United Nations, at
7:30 at SU’s Heroy Geology Auditorium.
A full day of workshops is planned starting at 9 a.m. Friday in the
Schine Student Center. All the events are open to the public.
Horace Campbell, a professor in SU’s department of African-American
studies and the lead organizer of the event, said the symposium is
intended to help bring the Rwandan genocide to the same significance
in the public mind as other genocides in human history. He said the
Rwandan event was played down and distorted by the U.S. government
and media and therefore has not registered in the same way as the
Holocaust and other systematic ethnic killings.
“We believe at the university that genocide against Africans is just
as important as genocide against Armenians and against Jews,” he
said.
In a telephone interview earlier this week, Kamanzi said he
understands why the Holocaust registers more in the public mind than
the Rwandan genocide. It was a larger event that occurred during a
world war, and all eyes were focused on it. But he said it is
important for people to recognize that the Rwandan genocide was just
as evil, though it took place in a small African nation.
“It was a crime against the whole of humanity,” he said.
A report commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1999
concluded that the United Nations and its leading member countries –
especially the United States – could have prevented or ended the
genocide. It said the Clinton administration continually minimized
the disaster that was developing in Rwanda and blocked the Security
Council from taking significant action there.
The report said the United States was coming off the killing of 18
American Rangers in Somalia in 1993 and was reluctant to get involved
in another peacekeeping mission in Africa.
In a visit to Rwanda in 1998, President Clinton acknowledged the
shortcomings of U.S. policy, saying the United States and the world
could have done more to prevent the genocide.
Kamanzi said a recognition that something could have been done is the
key to preventing future genocides.
“It’s very good that leaders of these countries can acknowledge that
it was a mistake to think that nothing could stop this genocide,” he
said.
Remembering Rwanda
Here is today’s schedule for the Syracuse University’s symposium
“Remembering the Rwanda Genocide: Challenges of Healing and Peace in
the 21st Century.” Events are free.
Heroy Geology Auditorium
6:30 p.m.: “Triumph of Evil” video
7:30 p.m.: Keynote address by Stanislas Kamanzi, Rwandan ambassador
to the United Nations

New Times Broward-Palm Beach (Florida)
April 1, 2004 Thursday
Oi Va Voi: Laughter Through Tears (Outcaste)
By Scott Medvin
It seems like every kind of traditional and ethnic music is ripe to
be mixed with modern electronica to form some new genre-warping
musical experiment. Oi Va Voi hopes that it can repeat Tabla Beat
Science’s success with Indian classical music and the Gotan Project’s
work with tango; the group wants to take klezmer, a traditionally
Jewish form of folk music from Eastern Europe, and make it accessible
to a new generation. The British group recently released Laughter
Through Tears, its debut album. It is often haunting, though upbeat
and danceable at times, full of the instruments — clarinet, violin,
accordion — that klezmer is known for. But there also are
Spanish-sounding classical guitar, steady funk bass grooves, and
inventive percussive arrangements. The album’s opening track,
“Refugee,” is based on a traditional Armenian folk melody and
features duduk player Tigran Aleksanyan; it begins as a ballad with
swelling, poignant lyrics by silky-voiced guest vocalist KT Tunstall.
“Yesterday’s Mistakes” sounds like a well-produced pop track but
veers East with a Hebrew chorus. Surprisingly, the intricate beats
fit perfectly with the bowed violin and the deep, melodic chants. “7
Brothers” and “D’or Yikra” both supply doses of bar mitzvah breaks
and other-worldly chanting. At times, the album veers into a bubbling
stew of post rock-esque ambience much like the music of Godspeed You
Black Emperor! but never for long, as Oi Va Voi evokes emotion
through powerful melodies and mysterious lyrics rather than
emotionally swirling compositions. Laughter Through Tears is worth
checking out for its novelty and worth listening to a second time for
its beauty.