Armenia sells major rubber plant to British company
Arminfo
18 Aug 06
Yerevan, 18 August: The Armenian government today decided to sell 90
per cent of the shares of the state-owned closed-typed stock company
the Nairit factory – the only producer of polychloroprene rubber in
the Commonwealth of Independent States – to the British-Irish company
Rhinoville Property Limited for 40m dollars, the government said in
a press release.
The press release said the British-Irish company had applied to buy
the plant and said it could invest in the plant to upgrade it.
The government instructed the energy minister to allow the Armgazprom
joint-stock company to sell 90 per cent of the shares of the Nairit
factory to the foreign investor for 40m dollars.
[Passage omitted: details]
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

An African Journal: The Translated Stories of Raymond Boghos Kupelian
By Hovig Tchalian
Critics’ Forum
Literature
8.19.2006
The recently published collection of stories by Raymond Boghos
Kupelian, African Symphony (AuthorHouse, 2006), marks a return of
sorts, for both the author and his readers. The volume translates
Kupelian’s second collection of stories of the same name, originally
written three decades ago in Armenian. They also chronicle the thoughts
and experiences of a man who emigrated to West Africa from Lebanon,
where he grew up, leaving yet again twenty years later for Southern
California, where this first English-language volume now appears.
It is significant that Kupelian left Lebanon voluntarily. A recent
article quotes him as saying that “the beauty of the forest, …
nature … everything was different” in Africa than it was in Lebanon
(Glendale News Press, 8/01/06). There is little or no nostalgia
for Lebanon, no longing for the past, in Kupelian’s statement,
but a search for something new. And that same spirit of discovery
is evident in the volume, which seems more concerned with what the
author’s biography refers to as the “immediacy” of its subject.
The tales themselves do not exhibit the structure of the classical
short story-with its dramatic conflict, swift progression and equally
dramatic conclusion. Kupelian’s stories feel more like journal entries
written on a tranquil beach, one sentence at a time, then reworked
months or years later. They invite a reading that shares that same
leisurely spirit.
One of the better known stories in the collection, “Surie Una Man,”
is written in that leisurely spirit. It tells the tale of Surie,
an African servant who takes a younger second wife and jeopardizes
his manhood and his family’s well-being in the process. The story
is perhaps the collection’s least convincingly translated. Certain
passages sound awkward, almost as though they had been translated
verbatim from Armenian, such as in this passage, which describes
Surie’s brief brush with schooling: “Next day, in the evening hours,
for the first time in his life, Surie stepped into school! Sitting
like a bishop in the back of the car, he entered through the gate of
the establishment.” (52).
Much better translated is “The Bush in the Man.” In it, Bomboli, a
disgraced Minister of Education now awaiting trial in jail, mourns the
loss of his former glory. It begins with a description of Bomboli’s
recurring dream, in which a boy fishing in a boat is attacked by a
crocodile, which turns out to be a man in disguise who takes the boy’s
body deep into the jungle. The rest of the story takes a cue from the
dream, weaving in and out of the minister’s thoughts and telling a
kind of morality tale or fable. Along the way, we find out that the
minister, a former schoolteacher, had a rapid rise to glory and an
equally rapid demise, after being accused by British authorities of
witchcraft and cannibalism. The story succeeds in touching on issues
of culture and colonialism, without being unnecessarily didactic
or preachy.
Less successful is “Despot,” a story of a white Englishwoman who falls
in love with an African man who later becomes his (unnamed) country’s
ruler. After his exile and death, she is pressured to publish her
journals, which recount the torrid and well-publicized affair. But
she refuses on principle. Here is where the leisurely spirit of the
book goes awry. The tale seems to tie episodes loosely together,
while balancing an apparent moral at the center of it. All the while,
the narrator’s voice intrudes too often, as in this example, where he
explains the woman’s actions: “It was evident. Hers was an idealized
love for an absolutely great man. She needed to keep it immaculate”
(70).
By far the best story in the collection is “Kookoo Sherif.” It is
the wrenching but subtle tale of the African girl referred to in the
title, molested by a Middle Eastern shop-owner, in exchange for a
pair of shoes she has spotted in his store window. The repercussions
of that emblematic, brutal barter at the heart of the story-goods
for people-reverberate until the end. But the tale also allows the
girl’s story to unfold gradually and convincingly.
Kookoo grows into a woman of the streets and eventually falls in love
with a young African revolutionary, who is soon imprisoned for his
ideas. In the end, she manages to turn the tables on her oppressors
by pretending to be the mistress of a high-ranking mulatto official
(mulattos in some cases being the offspring of illegitimate unions
between black Africans and white immigrants).
The scandal the story creates allows her to trick him and her own
past oppressors (the shop-owner chief among them), freeing her lover
from prison in the process. The story develops from conflict to
resolution in sure-handed and compelling fashion, using the tension
of the narrative to tie the various details together. It embodies
better than any other story in the collection the promise fulfilled
more fully in Kupelian’s later works.
The book’s first story and its last tie the collection together and
add the structure and cohesion sometimes missing from other individual
tales. “A Diamond Tale” starts off the collection and is itself perhaps
the best structured in the volume. It recounts a conversation between
the narrator and a local judge, who decries the fact that people have
been killed for the sake of the precious stone in the title. The judge
recounts stories of barbaric acts-such as when a young boy working as
a “sen sen boy” (or “sand boy”), looking through freshly dug dirt for
diamonds, rubs the sweat off of his face, only to be wrongly accused
of swallowing a diamond and murdered. The story ends in a reversal of
sorts, when the narrator announces that the judge has been poisoned
to death, after having invited the narrator to “hear a diamond tale”
by sitting in on the murder hearing at his court the following day.
The tale also includes an interesting look at middle eastern immigrants
in Africa, people the locals refer to collectively as “Syrians” (the
writer among them). They are portrayed as good people occasionally
gone bad, under the glare of the sun and the constant temptation of
riches. With the introduction of the “foreigners” into the African
context, this first story acts as a fitting beginning to the book. The
act is completed in the final story, “Washed by the Waves,” which tells
the story of an idealistic black American woman who comes to Africa
looking for peace and leaves disillusioned, never to return. The story
describes her love affair with a local official, a married man. It
also recounts the parallel, and sometimes strangely incongruous,
story of the narrator’s short-lived affair with a Scottish woman. The
tale also sounds the note of universality in the collection, of the
sameness of cultures-their loves, cruelties and disappointments-that
far outweigh their differences.
The volume’s cover art and original illustrations, drawn by Armen
Minassian and the writer’s son, Roger Kupelian, complement the volume
well and represent perhaps its most pleasant surprise. The collection
could have benefited as well from a longer introduction, placing
the stories in the writer’s larger body of work and its original
Armenian-language context. The volume currently includes a good but
brief biography that gets lost at the very back of the book.
All in all, Raymond Boghos Kupelian’s African Symphony is an
interesting look at a different diasporan existence-not the forced
exile of the immigrant but the voluntary travels of a man in search
of something greater.
Additional information about the writer and his works may be found
at
All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2006
Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.

‘Bonnie and Clyde’ held for spate of jewellery thefts
Kuwait Times, Kuwait
Aug. 20, 2006
KUWAIT: A source revealed that an Armenian expatriate and a Kuwaiti
woman embarked on a series of jewellery thefts. The expat and the woman
would go to jewellery shops and ask the salesman to look at chains and
bracelets. They would then put some of them in their pockets while the
salesman wasn’t looking. They would buy one item from the shop but
steal others. They stole from four shops but when they came back to
the first store, the salesman called the police. During interrogation,
they confessed that they committed a number of thefts.

US STATE DEPARTMENT DECLINED REQUEST OF ARMENIANS
[August 19, 2006, 15:20:09]
AzerTag, Azerbaijan
Aug. 19, 2006
The State Department of the United States of America has rejected the
letter of the Armenian lobby sent to President Georges Bush with the
purpose to prevent participation of Turkish soldier in peace-making
forces of the United Nations in Lebanon.
The assistant to the press secretary of the State Department Tom Keisy
has informed in this connection, that the letter signed by chairman
of National Committee of the American Armenians by Ken Khachikian,
President Bush did not read at all.
Noting that the question connected with peace-making forces which will
be directed to Lebanon, has been discussed in New York, in headquarters
of the United Nations, Mr. Tom Keisy said the government of the USA
stands for participation in these discussions of all countries which
wish to be in staff of peacemakers, including Turkey.
To note, in the letter of Armenians, it was stated that sending of
Turkish armies to Lebanon contradicts interests of the United States.

Man set to be tried abroad
Daily News
Los Angeles Daily News
Aug. 19, 2006
A Glendale man who fled to Armenia when he came under suspicion of
strangling his 23-year-old girlfriend is scheduled to be tried next
week for murder.
If convicted in an Armenian court, Artur Khanzadyan, 25, could serve
up to 12 years in jail. He was arrested there in November, just two
months after investigators found the body of his girlfriend, Odet
Tsaturyan, in the trunk of his car.
Glendale police and U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, have asked local
authorities to return Khanzadyan to the United States for trial, where
he could face up to life in prison if convicted, but Armenian officials
refused. The two nations do not have a formal extradition treaty.
Tsaturyan’s father Shagen Tsaturyan, who insisted Khanzadyan be
brought back, will be attending the hearing with two Glendale police
officers. Hrachooe Tsaturyan, his wife, said he wanted to ensure
Khanzadyan is convicted, despite being tried overseas.
The Glendale Police Officer’s Association and St. Peter’s Armenian
Church paid for Tsaturyan’s $1,500 airfare.

National Post (Canada)
August 19, 2006 Saturday
Toronto Edition
A dream within a dream; Istanbul’s reality, fantasy: Fiction
by Michael Greenstein, Weekend Post
THE BLACK BOOK
By Orhan Pamuk
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
Vintage
480 pp., $21
– – –
Istanbul ranks high among the most interesting cities in the world,
its fascination attributable to its geographic location: a meeting
point between East and West, Asia and Europe, an imperial crossover
as Byzantium and Constantinople and a Mediterranean threshold among
the Bosphorus, Marmora and Black seas. Heaping detail upon detail in
the same way Dickens chronicled London or Joyce Dublin, Orhan Pamuk
puts Istanbul on the map. A Balzac (and Borges) of the Bosphorus,
with several novels to his name, Pamuk has become a cause celebre in
Turkey and abroad because of his outspokenness on the Armenian
genocide.
First published in 1990 and translated into English in 1995, The
Black Book now appears in a new translation by Maureen Freely, who in
her afterword discusses the complexities of the Turkish language,
with its “cascading clauses.” Her meticulous translation captures the
Byzantine musicality of Pamuk’s prose in his multi-layered novel, a
metaphysical detective story that is a quest for meaning and identity
on personal, literary and political levels.
Like the city he writes about, Pamuk straddles modernity and
tradition, interweaving his chapters with allusions to and from many
sources. The epilogue is taken from The Encyclopedia of Islam (though
it could as easily be Pamuk’s postmodernist sleight of hand): “Ibn’
Arabi writes of a friend and dervish saint, who, after his soul was
elevated to the heavens, arrived on Mount Kaf, the magic mountain
that encircles the world; gazing around him, he saw that the mountain
itself was encircled by a serpent. Now, it is a well-known fact that
no such mountain encircles the world, nor is there a serpent.”
The Black Book repeatedly calls into question what is real and what
is imagined, so that characters and readers often enter into a
dervish-like trance in the tug-of-war between centrifugal and
centripetal forces, cascading through lengthy narrative passages. If
the circular magic mountain undercuts itself, so, too, does the
epigraph to the opening chapter: “Never use epigraphs — they kill
the mystery in the work!” The author never ceases to pull the Turkish
rug from under his readers’ feet.
>>From the outset, the three major, incestuous characters are
introduced: Galip (a lawyer) watches his wife (and cousin), Ruya,
while thinking about another relative, Celal, a famous journalist
whose columns appear in every second chapter, in counterpoint to the
main narrative. The opening sentence seems innocent enough, but on
second reading the deceptions begin to appear: “Ruya was lying
facedown on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the
billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt.” Only if we know that her
name means “dream” do we become aware that The Black Book is a dream
within a dream in which Istanbul is both realized and fantasized.
In contrast to Ruya’s warm, dreamlike world, the cold January morning
in 1980 invades the interior. “The first sounds of a winter morning
seeped in from outside: the rumble of a passing car, the clatter of
an old bus, the rattle of the copper kettles that the salep maker
shared with the pastry cook, the whistle of the parking attendant at
the dolmus stop.” The narrator captures the sights and sounds of
Istanbul that play in Ruya’s mind, even as Galip remembers Celal’s
words that “memory is a garden.” These early phrases are merely a
prelude to the lengthy lists the narrator accumulates from the
external world as well as from psychological realms.
The plot is fairly straightforward: Ruya and Celal disappear, Galip
searches for them for several days before they end up being murdered.
Skeletal as this detective summary appears, the novel dwells on so
many other matters that the reader loses sight of the plot. At what
point does one enter Istanbul’s labyrinth and when does one emerge
from its intricacies?
Paradox and contradiction abound in this hall of mirrors. Celal’s
first column begins with an epigraph: “Nothing can ever be as
shocking as life. Except writing.” Which leads to: “Did you know that
the Bosphorus is drying up? I don’t think so.” Celal’s apocalyptic
vision haunts the pages of The Black Book where life and art imitate
each other to an extreme degree. Celal’s next column, “Alaadin’s
Shop,” begins with an epigraph from Byron Pasha: “If I have any fault
it is digression.” If Pamuk’s prose seems digressive, rest assured
that everything he writes is to the point (as long as the reader
patiently awaits the point).
His “passion for the epic” takes the form of an urban odyssey, a
Joycean Ulysses, a picaresque tour of Istanbul. If Ruya is an avid
reader of detective fiction, Galip sleuths her and that fiction.
Pamuk is obsessed with the influence of Western cinema, which tends
to undermine traditional Turkish life. Turkish identity dominates The
Black Book. “Yes, it was because of those damn films — brought in
from the West canister by canister to play in our theatres for hours
on end — that the gestures our people used in the street began to
lose their innocence. They were discarding their old ways, faster
than the eye could see; they’d embraced a whole new set of gestures
— each and every thing they did was an imitation.”
So what The Black Book boils down to is a quest for authenticity, for
the true self, but that goal remains elusive. Galip and Celal become
almost interchangeable, and all the stories about stories — the
search to end all searches, word games, surface versions and hidden
versions, dreams belonging to others — all of these, and others too
numerous to mention, add up to Istanbul’s labyrinth.
Dostoevskian doubles pervade the narrative, multiplying identities.
At once omniscient and ignorant, the narrator calls knowledge into
question. “We also knew that the Khazars were really Turks who had
converted to Judaism. But what we did not know was that the Turks
were as Jewish as Jews were Turkish. And wasn’t it amazing to watch
these two peoples travel through the 20th century swaying to the
rhythm of the same secret music, never meeting, always at a tangent,
but forever linked, however condemned, like a pair of helpless
twins.” This tangential linkage lies at the core of this novel and
the country that oscillates between Ataturk and Muhammad. To
complicate matters further, The Black Book explores alphabetical
letters in the shapes of faces, a system derived from the
15th-century Sufi sect of Hurufism.
After the murders, Pamuk offers an anti-climactic twist: “Reader,
dear reader, throughout the writing of this book I have tried … to
keep its narrator separate from its hero, its columns separate from
the pages that advance its story … but please allow me to intervene
just once before I send these pages off to the typesetter.” His human
intervention explains the black dream and black pages that form his
black book. Readers accustomed to black print on white pages should
adjust their focus to imagine floating letters without a white
background: low profile and high visibility. In 2003, Pamuk’s novel
My Name Is Red won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Can the Nobel
Prize be far behind?
GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: BOOK COVER: The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk; Black &
White
Photo: Staton R. Winter, AFP, File; Pamuk straddles modernity and
tradition in The Black Book, which has received a new translation.

The Economist
August 19, 2006
U.S. Edition
Too much of a good thing; Azerbaijan and oil
Managing oil revenues
A case study in the perils of being a petro-state
THE beaches near Baku are popular weekend spots. But their view of
the Caspian is spoiled by a rusty oil platform towed close to the
shore years ago. By contrast, an hour’s drive south is the gleaming
Sangachal terminal, the starting-point of the new $3.9 billion
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline.
The old and the new, the past and the future, are never far apart in
Azerbaijan, which 100 years ago was briefly the world’s largest oil
producer. Now, after 15 years of independence, Azerbaijan is seeing
another boom. By 2010, oil production is expected to triple, to
1.3m barrels a day, and gas output to quadruple, to 28 billion cubic
metres a year. The first oil was delivered through the BTC pipeline
in June. A Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline will open later this
year. If oil prices average $50 per barrel (they are now over $70),
these two will bring a massive $140 billion into Azerbaijan’s state
coffers over the next 20 years, claims President Ilham Aliev.
Such a gushing of money ought to be a blessing for this impoverished
country. It has just 8m people, but that includes some 800,000 refugees
left from the war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh in the early
1990s. Yet few oil-rich countries have avoided the triple threats
of corruption, competitive rent-seeking or “Dutch disease”-in which,
thanks to exchange-rate appreciation, oil production crowds out other
economic activity.
Azerbaijan is, according to Transparency International, one of the
most corrupt places in the world. Under Mr Aliev, it is a thinly
disguised autocracy. Yet it has taken some steps. A national oil fund,
set up in 1999, holds some $1.6 billion. Azerbaijan has also signed
up to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI),
an anti-corruption scheme established by Britain’s Tony Blair in
2002. Oil companies report payments to the oil fund, which publishes
full details. An independent auditor checks the fund. “I think it
has worked very well,” says David Woodward, associate president of
BP Azerbaijan, the biggest foreign investor in the oil industry.
The problem is that, even if revenues are well-monitored, spending is
not-since it is not covered by the EITI. Observers in Baku say the
government is already spending too much money, too quickly and with
too little oversight (needed to stop such things as the awarding of
contracts to close relatives). Inflation has risen and the currency,
the manat, has appreciated, symptoms of a possible outbreak of Dutch
disease.
The model that Azerbaijan, like other oil producers, aspires to is
that of Norway, which has built a huge stabilisation fund without
distorting its economy. Even Russia’s economic management has been
better than some critics feared. But it would be miraculous if a poor
country, under intense social pressure, managed a similar feat. The
risk for Azerbaijanis, as for Venezuelans or Nigerians, is that the
oil bonanza will end up hurting the people it ought to help.
GRAPHIC: Nice beach, shame about the view

Federal News Service, Inc.
FNS DAYBOOK
August 19, 2006 Saturday
SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE
SUBJECT: Full committee markup of T.Doc.108-23, the “Extradition
Treaty Between the United States of America and the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland”; and vote on the nominations of
Richard Hoagland to be ambassador to the Republic of Armenia; John
Bolton to be U.S. representative the United Nations; and John Rood to
be assistant secretary of State for international security and
non-proliferation.
LOCATION: 419 Dirksen Senate Office Building — September 07, 2006

Russian Supreme Court delays deliberation of senator’s issue
ITAR-TASS News Agency
August 18, 2006 Friday 05:45 AM EST
MOSCOW, August 18 — Russia’s Supreme Court on Friday again postponed
deliberation of the issue of whether there were hallmarks of crime in
actions by Federation Council senator from Kalmykia Levon Chakhmachian.
“The Court’s session cannot take place without the presence of
my client, who remains in hospital,” Chakhmachian’s lawyer Boris
Kuznetsov told Itar-Tass.
The senator’s condition has worsened. “Due to deteriorating health,
he is likely to be connected to an artificial kidney,” Kuznetsov said.
On June 6, the Prosecutor General’s Office asked the Court to give
a qualification of Chakhmachian’s actions which may be covered by
Part 4 of Article 159 of Russia’s Criminal Code /fraud committed by
an organized group or grand fraud/.
Chief accountant of the Association of Russo-Armenian business
cooperation Igor Arushanov and assistant auditor of the Audit Chamber
Armen Oganesyan were detained in Moscow on June 2 on suspicion of
taking a large bribe.
According to investigators, they demanded 1.5 million dollars from
a businessman for taking out negative information from an audit report.
Levon Chakhmachian happened to be in their office when detectives
seized 300,000 of marked dollar bills.
However, as a FC member, he enjoys immunity, so no procedures were
instituted against him. Arushanov and Oganesyan were arrested.
In accordance with the Criminal Code, judges will meet behind closed
doors to consider the Chakhmachian issue.
Chakhmakhchian was elected senator of the Federation Council from
Kalmykia in 2004. He occupied the post of Deputy Chairman of the
Committee for problems of local governments.
On June 23, 2006, the Kalmyk parliament, on a presentation by Speaker
of the Federation Council upper house of the Russian parliament Sergei
Mironov, voted for early termination of Chakhmachian’s powers.

UNHCR PRAISES AZERI GOVT FOR NATURALIZING REFUGEES FROM ARMENIA
AssA-Irada, Azerbaijan
August 17, 2006 Thursday
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ant?nio Guterres visiting
Azerbaijan has praised the governments support for 250,000 Azeris
displaced from Armenia during the outbreak of the armed Upper
(Nagorno) Garabagh conflict in the late 1980s. The fact that these
persons were granted citizenship in 1998 is particularly commendable,
Guterres told a news conference on Thursday.
He said that granting citizenship is the highest form of care the
UNHCR demands from various countries. The organization at times puts
pressure on governments to take the step. However, Azerbaijan
provided this status to refugees fleeing Armenia without any
pressure, said Guterres. There is no higher form of state care for
refugees anywhere in the world, the UNHCR head said. He criticized
other former Soviet republics for failing to grant citizenship to
their refugees. The provision of refugees from Armenia with
citizenship has drawn differing responses from the Azerbaijani
public, with some experts terming the measure as rather hasty. There
have been some allegations that by naturalizing these people, the
government actually deprived them of international aid. Deputy Prime
Minister and chairman of the State Committee on Work with Refugees
and Displaced Persons, Ali Hasanov, said these statements are wide
off the mark. By taking the step, the government showed that it
honors international law. Both Azerbaijan and Armenia have joined
international legal acts dealing with persons devoid of citizenship,
which stipulate that if refugees are settled in a country for over
seven years, they automatically receive citizenship status, Hasanov
said. He noted that Armenia has not granted this status to refugees
from Azerbaijan yet and is still receiving international assistance,
which runs counter to standing international conventions.