Karabakh rights activist denies Azeri colleague’s “mass grave” report
Regnum, Moscow
5 Aug 06
A rights activist from Nagornyy Karabakh has denied a report by his
Azerbaijani colleague that “a mass grave of Azerbaijani soldiers
has been found in the vicinity of the village of Marzili in Agdam
District”.
Regnum news agency has quoted the coordinator of the Nagornyy Karabakh
committee of the Helsinki Initiative-92, Karen Ogandzhanyan, as saying
that rumours on possible graves have been in fact disseminated, but
for the time being there are no facts about “precisely where and how
many”. Ogandzhanyan said he was surprised where the chairman of the
Azerbaijani national committee of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly,
Arzu Abdullayeva, had obtained this information from. At the same
time, Ogandzhanyan expressed confidence that the Azerbaijani media
ascribed this statement to Abdullayeva as the rights activists had
had experience of this kind in the past as well.
A report posted on KavkazWeb.net website on 4 August also quoted
Abdullayeva as saying that 21 Azerbaijanis had been buried in a mass
grave in the vicinity of the village of Marzili in Agdam District. One
of them has been identified as an officer of the Sumqayit regiment,
Lt Aliyev, the website said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Corruption in ex-communist countries
Judge or be judged
Jul 27th 2006
> > From The Economist print edition
In the ex-communist world corruption seems to be declining. Mostly
TURNING an aquarium into fish soup is simple. Turning the fish soup back
into an aquarium is not. For the ex-communist countries, stabilising
economies and introducing market mechanisms has proved the easy bit.
Remaking public institutions, and making them clean and efficient, is much
harder to do and to measure.
A new study published this week by the World Bank* casts an optimistic
light. It asked almost 10,000 firms in 26 ex-communist countries
(Turkmenistan was excluded) and Turkey about the cost and frequency of
bribe-giving, and their views about the nature and nuisance-level of
corruption. This time, for comparison, it included five other European
countries.
Compared with the previous surveys, in 1999 and 2002, it suggests corruption
in the region is becoming a bit less frequent, costly and damaging. Although
some countries are doing better than others (Georgia is a strong performer,
Russia a weak one) nowhere is it getting comprehensively worse. In many
countries corruption is falling on every count.
The trend is favourable-but, the authors note, still reversible. The Czech
Republic, for example, scored well in 2002 and seems to have gone backwards
since. But there’s a twist. That firms complain more about corruption may be
a good sign if it means they are becoming less tolerant of it. The most
depressing feature of the report is the high incidence of firms in
Russia-fully a fifth-that say they pay bribes often but do not regard it as
a problem. That figure is four times higher than in the eight nations now in
the European Union.
Most progress has been made in customs administration, which used to be slow
and predatory but is now quick and clean. That reflects the changes in the
countries that have joined the EU and those in the Balkans that are eager to
join. The average “bribe tax”-the share of turnover paid by those firms that
pay bribes-has declined from 3.6% to 2.9%, though booming economic growth
means that the total of bribes paid is probably rising.
The report says corruption hurts private firms more than state-owned ones,
small more than large, new more than old, locally owned more than foreign.
In short, the weak suffer more than the strong.
One big remaining problem, especially in the poorer ex-communist countries,
is the justice system. In the early post-communist years, the trend was to
give judges great independence but low salaries. That was a recipe for
corruption. The new approach is to pay them more and police their activities
more strictly. That is working-particularly in Romania-but it is a slow slog
elsewhere.
Other kinds of corruption are harder to deal with. Public procurement is
notably dirty-though not noticeably worse than in some countries of “old
Europe”. High-level political corruption, or “state capture” in the jargon,
is also a lingering curse. That is when bribery affects not just the
implementation of policy, but its conception. As the Russian proverb says, a
fish tends to rot from the head.
* “Anticorruption in Transition 3: Who is succeeding and why?”:
Selected Points made in the World Bank Report
Corruption as a problem of business: a slight increase in Armenia
between 2002 and 2005 indicating that firms do not view corruption
as a problem to the same extent as elsewhere in the CIS (Georgia,
Azerbaijan and Turkey as comparator all higher but Georgia heading
in the right direction)
Bribe Frequency decreased somewhat between 2002 and 2005 in Armenia
but was overhauled by Georgia’s startling improvement
Bribe Tax (percentage of annual revenue paid in bribes as reported by
firms themselves) no significant change the rate in Armenia between
2002 and 2005 but the rapid growth in the economy implies that the
total amount of bribery increased substantially
State Capture (corruption in the laws-making process that distorts in
favour of a few privileged insiders) Armenia significantly worsened
between 2002 and 2005
Policy and Outcomes
Though Armenia set up an Anticorruption Strategy and Action Plan in
2003 and created a high-level Anticorruption Council chaired by the
Prime Minister in 2004, the 2005 results in many dimensions were
significantly worse than in 2002. This contrasts with Georgia and
Turkey where there is some success in their developments.
The introduction of merit-based entrance examinations to law studies
in Armenia and Georgia should yield improvements in future.
Tax and Customs
There has been some deterioration in frequency of bribery in tax
administration and patterns of changes in customs-related bribery. In
both areas, Georgia has made significant improvements.

Armenia is cut off Internet again: cable breakages in Georgia become permanent
Regnum, Russia
Aug 5 2006
For the last 48 hours, the population of Armenia has twice been cut
off the internet, REGNUM correspondent reported from Yerevan on the
telephone. On August 4 and 5, the reason of the breakdowns in the
work of Armenian internet providers became cable failures on the
territory of Georgia.
According to the national ArmenTel Company information holding
exclusive rights on maintaining international telecommunications
in Armenia, the current situation is caused by cable failure in the
Kutaisi region, which resulted in the absence of internet connection
in Armenia for 6 hours. Today, on August 5, cable was also broken
on the Black Sea seabed. No information on when the damage would be
fixed is available so far.
The government of Armenia regards information technologies development
the main priority of the country’s national economy.
Meanwhile, the republic remains in an utterly vulnerable position
since the internet connection is established through the only cable
connecting Armenia via Georgia on the Black Sea seabed to Ukraine. In
the south of Armenia the cable is connected to Iranian communication
network. The current internet connection breakdown is the third
large-scale cable failure that happened lately in Georgia.

Turkish writer on trial
Cyprus Observer, Cyprus
Aug 5, 2006
The Beyoglu prosecutor’s office in Istanbul yesterday formally opened
a lawsuit against novelist and Turkish Daily News columnist Elif
Safak on charges of “insulting Turkishness”, after a court approved
the indictment. The opening of the case against Safak was announced
on the same day that an Istanbul court dropped a lawsuit against
novelist Orhan Pamuk. Safak will stand trial because of the words
uttered by fictional Armenian characters in her novel “Baba ve Pic”
(The Bastard of Istanbul). She is accused of belittling Turkishness in
her book. Both the Pamuk and Safak cases were initiated by nationalist
lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz.

Aid collection for Lebanon
Cyprus Observer, Cyprus
Aug 5, 2006
Kykkos Monastery, with the help of the Armenian Church of Cyprus
and the Orthodox Metropolis of Lebanon, is coordinating a plan to
distribute humanitarian aid to all the areas being bombed by Israel
in Lebanon. The collection of humanitarian aid for the victims of the
Lebanon war began on Tuesday and will be held at various points in the
government controlled areas of Cyprus by the Department of Humanitarian
Aid of the Kykkos Monastery and the Armenian Church of Cyprus.

Georgia, Azerbaijan Agree on 30-kilometer Border Portion
Civil Georgia, Georgia
Aug 5, 2006
The Georgian and Azerbaijani officials have agreed on demarcation of a
30-kilometer border line as a result of talks in Tbilisi on August 3-4.
As a result, a total of 300-kilometer section of the Georgian-Azeri
border is now agreed, but about 35% of border line still remains
disputed, Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Giorgi Manjgaladze, who
led the Georgian delegation at the talks, said on August 4.
Disputed areas involve Tsiteli Khidi (the Red Bridge) and Davit Gareji
sections of the border.
Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Khalap Khalapov told reporters
after talks on August 4 that disputed issues will be discussed at
the next round of talks, which are scheduled for September in Baku.
Georgia also has to demarcate its borders with Russia and Armenia.
Disputed border line with Russia involves Larsi, Pichvebi and
Chero-Intsokhi sections of the border.
A 110-kilometer section has already been agreed with Armenia, while
the rest 110-kilometer remains disputed.

Journal Times Online, WI
Aug 5, 2006
At Armenian Fest, food is the attraction
By Scott Anderson
RACINE – Armenian Fest will once again grace the Festival Park
grounds Sunday with an array of games, music, dance, art and a church
service.
“We pack a lot of things into one day,” festival chair Perry
Paragamian said.
But above all, Paragamian postulates, there’s one thing that really
brings people to Armenian Fest – the food.
“The weather is going to be nice and the aroma from the grill will
bring you in from the street,” he said.
Armenian Fest will be held from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday at Festival
Park, beginning at 10 a.m. with English Divine Liturgy services in
the Green Room of Festival Hall.
The festival, known as one of the largest Armenian Festivals in the
Midwest, is sponsored by St. Mesrob Armenian Apostolic Church.
The festival will feature Armenian foods such as shish kebab, pilaf
and cheese boeregs, plus numerous Armenian pastries and breads, all
of which are Armenian family recipes that the general public just
can’t find anywhere else.
Members of St. Mesrob’s Womens’ Guild organizes and performs all the
food preparation and cooking, and have been busy over the last week
preparing for the festival.
On Friday, they were preparing scores of sarma – a grape leaf roll
stuffed with rice, parsley, tomatoes, onions, lemon juice and oil.
It’s so good, Womens’ Guild chair Alice Garoukian said, that people
ask to buy sarma and the enamel container in which they were cooked.
“There are people who like it so much, they are addicted to it,” she
said. “I know it sounds crazy, but that’s the way it is.”
The sarma is homemade through-and-through, right down to the grape
leaves that are picked by hand from a special breed of grape plant
that characteristically does not bear fruit.
“Everything we do is labor intensive,” Garoukian said of the Womens’
Guild efforts in preparing the festival’s food.
Humble beginnings Paragamian said the festival got its start between
75-80 years ago as a picnic for parishioners that at one time was
held at
Johnson Park.
Over the years, he said, the picnic grew as the Armenian parishioners
intermarried, introducing more and more people to Armenian cultures
and traditions.
When Festival Park opened in the late 1980s, Armenian Fest moved in
and has played host to the yearly celebration ever since.
“This is the one time a year joining communities come to Racine to
see friends they haven’t seen for some time,” Paragamian said.
“Normally, when an Armenian goes out of town, they look for another
`ian’ in the phone book. That’s how close we are.”
There is no admission fee to the festival, however, a freewill
offering will be accepted. Proceeds will go to orphanages in Armenia
and to the Racine Northside Food Pantry.

Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Aug 5, 2006
Armenian Pan-National Movement will nominate Levon Ter-Petrosian for
presidency
[ 05 Aug. 2006 12:41 ]
Armenian Pan-National Movement plans to nominate former president
Levon Ter-Petrosian for presidency in 2008’s presidential election
(APA).
Ararat Zurabian, a representative of APNM, stated that the
organization is insistent on this decision but Levon Ter-Petrosian
will make the final decision.
“Of course, we will have any candidate for the elections but we want
him to be Levon Ter-Petrosian”. Zurabian said that the ruling party
enjoys only 15% support and this guarantees that Ter-Petrosian will
win an overwhelming victory if the elections are held democratically.
/APA/

Scripture provides inspiration for poet
By Rich Barlow | August 5, 2006
Boston Globe,MA
Aug 5, 2006
For 30 years, Patricia Giragosian labored in journalism and teaching,
but those were always a holding pattern while she sought her heart’s
destination, a poet’s career. “I felt I was being Lois Lane,” she
says of her newspaper days. “My poetry is me.”
Yet the need to pay the bills, plus literary stage fright, gave her
a stiff-necked resistance to publishing her work.
Then Giragosian, 53, of Boston, began exploring her family’s Christian
roots in the Armenian Apostolic Church. In particular, the counsel
in 1 Corinthians (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then
face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also
I am known.”) reminded her that human time is short, that all can’t
be known now, that trust in the future is a precursor to living.
“To get to this point, I’ve had to clutch onto something, and my
spirituality has been a great source of strength,” she says.
At last, things are breaking her way; she has been published in
several forums, was a finalist in a New York poetry competition,
and is writing full time.
It is a cultural stereotype, the solitary scribbler toiling for a
literary breakthrough by the dim light of a desk lamp. To struggling
writers, there’s little that’s romantic about this monastic
lifestyle. Last winter, a discussion sponsored by The Writers’
Room of Boston about the occupational hazards of penury, isolation,
and deadlines drew a crowd, reports Rabbi Susan Schnur, a writer who
assembled the panel.
Not all wordsmiths seek their solace and their muse in spirituality,
of course. But when you’re a writer and a rabbi, faith is as essential
as the word processor. Schnur compares spirituality in handling
inevitable literary setbacks with the Jewish mourning tradition of
sitting shiva. In writing, she says by e-mail, “one must learn to `sit
with’ and even `welcome’ the hard stuff: The first draft necessarily is
awful; the time spent on material that you later decide is irrelevant
to your project is par for the course; the days when all you do is
put in a comma and then take it out — yes, that’s what it means to
be a writer.”
“Writing is lonely,” says Myrna Patterson, a Cambridge poet and writing
teacher who fuses her Jewish heritage with Buddhist practices to combat
that loneliness. From Buddhism comes the idea that we shouldn’t grow
attached to anything, be it material goods or the loneliness of the
present moment; Patterson tries to pass on that wisdom by encouraging
students to meditate.
If writers’ block is their problem, pluck out preconceived notions,
she advises, and discard “any fixed idea of how things are going to
turn out.”
Giragosian says she finds her poetry topics by the compass of faith.
The New Hampshire Review, in its current issue, published her “Portrait
of Gertrud Lowe,” a haunting meditation prompted by the fate of the
title character, a real-life woman who posed for a painting in her
youth and who later perished in a Nazi concentration camp.
The poet gazes at the portrait, juxtaposing the innocent’s pose
with knowledge of what was to come. “No white dress / can save you /
from the Anschluss,” she writes, continuing later:
Facing the easel, it was natural that your shoulders folded toward
your breasts to avert the artist’s gaze, just as they will turn the
moment you witness history’s obscenity one afternoon when stormtroopers
shoot the locks on the French doors of your house and kick down the
screen of your dressing room to pull you, napping from the burgundy
velvet cushions.
“I wanted to remember this particular woman,” says the poet. “[She]
ended up in circumstances where her remains cannot be found, where no
one knows what happened. . . . I felt guided by my sense of spiritual
yearning and seeking some kinds of answers about why evil happens.”
Her spiritual choices aren’t always grim. “Fenway,” an ode to the
ballpark currently among poems on display at Boston City Hall,
is about generations passing on values to their successors and the
bonding that takes place when people visit that landmark. But whether
as cheery as a summer ball game or as chilling as Nazi pathology,
a writer’s subject can fulfill William Faulkner’s definition of his
craft’s spiritual mission:
“It is [the writer’s] privilege to help man endure by lifting his
heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride
and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of
his past.”

Ïðaâî Âûaîða, Azerbaijan
Democratic Azerbaijan
Aug 5, 2006
Ombudsman Apparatus Officers Visited Switzerland by invitation of
Organization for Development and Cooperation of Switzerland and
Geneva Institute of International Relations
05.08.2006
Beginning from 2001, the Organization for Development and Cooperation
of Switzerland and Geneva Institute of International Relations
implements International relations building-up project.
The main purpose of this project is to bring the South Caucasus
public departments in line of international standards, to reinforce
and develop public relations, and also to improve information
receiving process. Within the framework of the project the training
and courses in the field of human rights, humanitarian rights,
economics and negotiation process are held for officers of public
organizations of the South Caucasus states. Furthermore, to date
Councils of graduates, which members were trained within the
framework of the project have been established and being operated in
South Caucasus states each.
Already for two years these graduates are awarded the Switzerland
Leadership Prize and sent for weekly business visit to Switzerland.
Thus, from 23 to 28 July 2006 three winners of the Switzerland
Leadership Prize, among who were also officers of the Apparatus of
Ombudsman of the Republic of Azerbaijan Zaur Zamanov and Lala
Azimova, left for Switzerland.
At first day of visit the representatives of the South Caucasus
countries were received at the Institute of International Relations
where the Professor Daniel Warner, deputy Director of the Institute
congratulated winners on the Prize and told about the Swiss
Confederation.
Then in a number of international organizations which headquarters
are situated in Geneva, including the Office of the UN to Geneva, the
UN High Commissariat for Refugees (UNHCR), the Office of the UN High
Commissariat for Human Rights (UNHCHR), International Committee of
Red Cross and World Trade Organization, the discussion focused on
actual issues of international relations, and also problems in the
field of human rights, diplomacy and international security were
held.
Moreover, ’round table’ under the direction of deputy Minister of
Foreign Affairs of Switzerland for Political Issues was held in Bern.
The ’round table’ said that Switzerland interested in cooperation
with Azerbaijan intends to develop relations with our country.
At the same time, the officers of the Apparatus of Ombudsman visited
the Embassy of Azerbaijan to Switzerland and discussed the human
rights related matters.
During trip to Switzerland, the officers of the Apparatus of
Ombudsman informed in detail about our State, legal and social and
economic reforms for development of human rights and reinforcement of
civil society. Informing of multilateral work done by the Apparatus
of Ombudsman of the Republic of Azerbaijan and difficulties with
faced the Ombudsman, they told about the occupation of
Nagorno-Garabagh and 7 districts adjacent to that. They informed
about ethnic cleansing policy implemented by Armenia and the problem
of Azerbaijani refugees and internally displaced persons, withdrawn
by force from their native lands, who were deprived of their
properties and native lands as well as relatives who were killed
mercilessly by aggressors.
–Boundary_(ID_lho8mw7FW+ZO7Q/SDGtOng )–