IN A POLITICAL MOVE, LEBANON OFFERS AN ARMY THAT ALL OF ITS SECTS CAN ACCEPT: ITS OWN
By John Kifner And Jad Mouawad
New York Times
Aug. 14, 2006
BEIRUT, Aug. 12 – Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s offer to send the
Lebanese Army into the Hezbollah-dominated south proved central to
breaking the diplomatic impasse over Israel’s invasion. But it is an
almost entirely political – or even symbolic – gesture.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Lebanese Army soldiers in Tyre. The army lacks modern equipment,
but it has integrated the nation’s sects.
Hostilities in the Mideast
Go to Complete Coverage ”
Interactive Graphics
The Toll After a Month of War
The army, for many years the least bellicose group of armed men in
a country otherwise filled with them, is more suited to internal
security than to facing outside threats. It has no modern tanks,
no air force – only a handful of Vietnam-era helicopters – and its
modest budget goes mostly for salaries.
The resolution on a truce adopted by the United Nations Security
Council on Friday calls for 15,000 Lebanese soldiers to patrol southern
Lebanon, once Israeli troops withdraw, in concert with an international
peacekeeping force of the same size. The Lebanese Army has about 3,000
crack troops, Lebanese officers say, in units that specialize in tasks
like commando operations and hostage rescue, aimed primarily at dealing
with fractious local elements like Palestinian or Islamic militants.
The army was once divided into brigades by religion – the Sixth
Brigade, made up of Shiites trained by Americans, was saddled with
the motto “we serve and defect” when it went over to local militias
in the early 1980’s.
But in recent years, the army has been transformed into a national
force, with the various sects integrated in the units.
Its deployment, some hope, could help soothe Lebanon’s fragmented
politics and strengthen the government’s shaky legitimacy.
“This is a political mission for the army,” said Brig. Gen. Elias
Hanna, who is retired from the Lebanese Army.
“The Lebanese Army reflects the fabric of this society,” General Hanna
said. “Lebanon is a very small country. Everybody knows everybody.
“When you talk about the Shia in the army, you are talking about
relatives, neighbors and friends. All we need in Lebanon is political
consensus.”
Prime Minister Siniora, a newcomer to politics who ran the vast
business empire of Rafik Hariri, the assassinated former prime
minister, is being widely praised here for his role in trying to end
the fighting and, particularly, for calling for the army deployment.
“It shows the determination of the Lebanese government to act as a
government, finally,” said Rami G. Khouri, a columnist at The Daily
Star and the director of a new Middle East research center at the
American University of Beirut.
“That’s significant,” Mr. Khouri said. “The recent history has been
one of terrible personal divisions. This sets the stage for future
reconciliation.”
Indeed, Mr. Siniora’s performance drew a positive assessment even
in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where Zvi Barel wrote that he
“has managed to surprise everyone.
“His decision regarding stationing Lebanese Army reserve soldiers
to prove that his intentions are genuine, was a perfect move in
negotiations,” he said.
After 15 years of civil war, 15 more of Syrian domination, past
Israeli invasions and attacks, official corruption beyond measure and
countless political assassinations, Lebanon had seemed, before the
current conflict began, to be on the brink of establishing a legitimate
independent government. But under the surface, the sectarian divisions
remain and with them the fear of a renewed civil war.
In elections last spring, an anti-Syrian reform coalition – including
some members who were old civil war enemies – won a narrow majority
in Parliament.
But the voting still ran along religious lines, with Hezbollah
candidates piling up huge margins in the Shiite districts.
In the sectarian straitjacket that allots political office, the
speaker of Parliament must be a Shiite, so the post was retained by
Nabih Berri, a longtime ally of Syria – as is President Emile Lahoud,
a Maronite Catholic.
The result was a government stalemated on virtually every front.
But Mr. Siniora, a Sunni, has managed to get all of the major players
to sign on to what he called his Seven-Point Plan for a cease-fire.
Hezbollah’s insistence that it would not give up its weaponry has
remained a troubling unresolved issue, though, and it continues to
raise doubts about whether Mr. Siniora’s plan can work.
In addition to his own Sunni backers, the rival Christian factions
loyal to either the former warlord Samir Geagea or to Gen. Michel
Aoun and the Druse chieftain Walid Jumblatt, the plan now has its
most important backer: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader.
In a televised speech on Wednesday night, he said, “Now for the sake
of national unity and despite our reservations we will not stand as
an obstacle.”
“The deployment of the army protects the sovereignty and the
independence of the country,” he added.
For more than a year, outside the formal government structure, the
real powers of Lebanon, largely an assortment of near feudal clan
chiefs known here as zaim and figures from the 17 different religions
– the tiny Armenian community sent a rotating representative – have
been meeting around a large round table in an effort to achieve a
national dialogue.
The most difficult issue was Hezbollah’s weaponry, which it defended
as necessary to resisting what it considers Israel’s occupation of
the Shebaa Farms area.
“The main sticking point was the weapons,” said Nizar Hamzeh, a
political science professor at the American University of Kuwait and
the author of “In the Path of Hezbollah.”
Mohammed Chatah, an important behind-the-scenes adviser to Mr. Siniora
in the current negotiations and a former Lebanese ambassador to the
United Nations, agreed, saying, “That’s at the heart of the discussion
that’s been going on.”
“They argued strongly that a separate resistance entity served the
country better,” Mr. Chatah said, adding, however, that the contention
“that it was a deterrence did not stop the Israelis.”
He emphasized the difference in perspective between the Western and
Arab views of Hezbollah.
“I do not regard Hezbollah as a renegade militia,” he said. “We are
in a war against Israel which is perceived by many in this country
as doing terrible things in Gaza and elsewhere.”
Speaking of support for Hezbollah during the current Israeli occupation
of southern Lebanon, he said, “There is a degree of solidarity that
transcends diverse politics.”

ARMENIANS AID POOCHIGIAN’S CAMPAIGN
Hank Shaw
Capitol Bureau Chief
Stockton Record, CA
Aug. 14, 2006
Ethnic pride may have helped spur donations in run for attorney general
SACRAMENTO – Most candidates raise the bulk of their cash from
unions or builders or insurance companies. Not state attorney general
candidate Chuck Poochigian: The fount of his campaign cash comes from
fellow Armenians.
Poochigian, a state senator from Fresno, whose district includes part
of San Joaquin County, will face former Gov. Jerry Brown, now mayor
of Oakland, in autumn’s election for California’s top cop.
A Record analysis of Poochigian’s fund-raising shows he has at least
900 Armenian contributors who have combined to pump more than $780,000
into his campaign.
Compare this to Brown, who state records show has just nine Armenian
contributors.
It is a tremendous show of ethnic pride: According to a calculation
based on population estimates from the Armenian National Committee,
only about 500,000 voting-age people of Armenian ancestry live in
California.
The reason for this outpouring of support is simple, according to
interviews with dozens of Poochigian contributors: Armenians take
care of their own.
“We Armenians stick together – we’re a close-knit group of people,”
said Ted Katzakian of Lodi. “It’s just Armenian pride more than
anything.”
Even tennis star Andre Agassi, who has some Armenian heritage,
contributed $10,000 to Poochigian.
“It is a very large extended family,” Poochigian said.
Indeed, nearly every one of the dozen Central Valley Poochigian
contributors interviewed for this story had a direct connection to the
candidate; one had a sister who dated one of Poochigian’s relatives,
another had a cousin who went to California State University, Fresno,
with him, a third has met him at any number of Armenian community
functions.
Poochigian deflects the uniqueness of his situation, noting that the
Portuguese have always helped their own in the San Joaquin Valley and
the Vietnamese were instrumental in getting Orange County Assemblyman
Van Tran elected two years ago.
“I’m certain that there’s a lot of groups that seek to be supportive
of people of their own background,” he said.
Turlock melon farmer Berj Moosekian says ethnic pride helped a little
when he decided to write Poochigian a check, but he said it’s not
that related to being Armenian. “It’s because he supports Valley
issues. He’s sensible and doesn’t go to extremes.”
Moosekian and the others see Poochigian as something akin to the
Second Coming of George Deukmejian. “The Duke” was California’s first
elected Armenian in the 1960s, and later became attorney general and
then governor from 1983-1991.
“He reminds me so much of Deukmejian,” said Ralph Saroyan of
Stockton. “In my mind, he is the antithesis of a typical politician.”
Poochigian got into politics volunteering on Deukmejian’s 1978 campaign
and later worked for him during the last two years of his gubernatorial
term. He calls Deukmejian his role model.
Both men are viewed by those who know them as hard-working,
intellectual conservatives, polite to a fault and deeply interested –
critics say obsessed – with law-and-order issues.
It was Deukmejian who as a Long Beach state senator sponsored the
legislation that re-instated the death penalty in California. Jerry
Brown vetoed it and then suffered one of California’s rare veto
overrides. The Duke then served as attorney general during Brown’s
second term. They remain ideological foes.
Deukmejian is widely considered responsible for pushing the Armenian
community into politics. Deukmejian said the effort took years,
but it worked: “I have often said I never would have made it without
their support.”
He’s transferred that support to Poochigian by writing fund-raising
letters on his behalf.
Whether it will lead Poochigian to victory in November remains to be
seen. Few Californians know who he is, and he trails Brown 54 percent
to 33 percent in last month’s Field Poll. Brown also has $1.7 million
more in his campaign account than Poochigian heading into the fall.
Deukmejian thinks money will matter: He says voters need to get to
know Poochigian as much as they need to know the details of Brown’s
time as governor and mayor of Oakland, and the only way to do that
statewide is through expensive radio and TV ads.
“It’s an uphill effort, but so was mine,” Deukmejian said. “If he
(Poochigian) and his campaign can raise enough money to get his
message across, I believe this is doable.”

S.J. ATTORNEY BOUND FOR ARMENIA TO TRAIN COUNTRY’S FIRST PUBLIC DEFENDERS
Scott Smith
Record Staff Writer
Stockton Record, CA
Aug. 14, 2006
STOCKTON – Attorney Amy Righter is about to travel a really long way
for a very tough job.
She clocked out her last day of work Friday with the San Joaquin
County’s Public Defenders Office, where she has represented the
county’s poorest accused of anything from petty crimes to murder.
Next month, she will pack her bags and fly halfway around the world
to Armenia. There she will help the fledgling democracy establish
its own public defenders office from the ground up.
Righter – whose shy demeanor belies an undying drive to fight for
the underdog – said she is ready for her next adventure.
“Yes, it’s completely daunting,” said Righter, 45. “It’s exciting
and daunting at the same time.”
Righter will be one of five Western attorneys, mostly Americans,
sent to Armenia with an American Bar Association project called
Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative.
For the next year or more, Righter will train about 30 Armenian
attorneys who make up the country’s public defenders office, launched
Jan. 1 under an amendment to that country’s constitution.
Armenia, an arid country wedged between Turkey and Azerbaijan, was
among the first satellite republics of the Soviet Union to break
away in 1991. Since then it has struggled to establish an independent
economy and legal system.
In a part of the world populated with regimes known for trampling
on human rights, Armenia has made strides in legal reform, said
Mary Greer, a senior criminal law advisor for the American Bar law
initiative project based in Washington, D.C.
The American Bar Association works in more than a dozen eastern
European and central Asian countries. Armenia is one of few trying
to balance its justice system by adopting a public defenders office,
Greer said.
The old system tended to favor prosecutors and deny the accused of
their rights, by Western standards, she said. Those charged with
crimes had access to attorneys, but the reform puts public defenders
all in one office funded by the government.
“Armenia really is at the forefront,” Greer said. “They’re really a
leader in that way.”
Yet, development work is tough and brings its own frustrations at
times, she added.
In addition to learning the idiosyncrasies of Armenian law, Righter
will have to adjust to the culture and cuisine. But she is not a
complete neophyte to Armenia.
Raised in Pennsylvania, she majored in Russian studies at the
University of Texas, Austin. She capped her university degree with
a monthlong tour in the late 1980s through Soviet cities such as
Tashkent, Tbilisi and Moscow.
Last year, she spent three months in Yerevan, the Armenian capital,
visiting a friend already working there.
“I look forward to getting immersed again in the language,” she said.
Righter, who lives in the Bay Area and had commuted to work in
Stockton, has worked in San Joaquin County’s Public Defender’s Office
for nearly eight years. She hopes there is a position here for her
once she returns in a year or two.
Her last few days at work in Stockton were consumed with divvying up
her cases to colleagues, such as Deputy Public Defender Roger Ross.
Ross said Righter is known among her colleagues for her apparent calm
demeanor, but she is not at all shy about speaking out when she spots
an injustice.
Like most attorneys in the Public Defender’s Office, she identifies
with the underdogs. That will serve her well in Armenia, Ross said.
“We all read about these opportunities in the former Soviet republics,”
Ross said. “She’s actually doing it.”

GETTING INTO GERE
Alwynne Gwilt
Entertainment Reporter
Toronto Star, Canada
Aug. 14, 2006
It wasn’t movie star power that touched young people during a chat
with Richard Gere about AIDS and HIV. It was the actor’s passion
about the issues.
The spotlight shone on 48 youth involved in a film project for the
International AIDS Conference yesterday, despite the fact a passionate
dialogue on AIDS issues was headed by silver-screen fox Richard Gere.
>From the start of the chat on issues ranging from AIDS prevention to
Stephen Harper, Gere and actor wife Carey Lowell made it clear the
conversation was not about them but about how they could help the
youth who will make films over 48 hours about HIV/AIDS topics.
“I don’t really like giving speeches, so why don’t you ask some
questions so I know what you really want to talk about?” said the
white-bearded Gere right off the start.
Both he and Lowell are HIV/AIDS activists. Part of Gere’s foundation,
Healing the Divide, works on projects in India that aim to reduce
stigmatization and increase awareness of HIV/AIDS. He and Lowell
spent 30 minutes yesterday afternoon chatting with the youth in the
Community Dialogue Space of the Metro Convention Centre about how they
can help bring HIV/AIDS issues to the forefront in their countries.
“In India, (many orphans) love cricket so we got cricket stars to do
public service announcements … and that really had a large effect,”
said Gere to one youth from Uganda who asked how younger generations
can be taught the importance of HIV/AIDS early on and become productive
citizens.
“And the investment that one can make in any kid is education. It
gives them a sense of themselves, a sense of solidness and being in
their own skin, an understanding of how they fit into the world and
a sense of confidence in themselves.”
“The best thing you can do for them is to give them a voice … and
empower them to tell their own stories,” added Lowell. “That touches
a lot of people.”
For many, the issue was also about why more celebrities are not
involved in activism, since their voices are often listened to by
youth around the world.
“There are many celebrities who do this kind of work, but it wasn’t
always that way,” said Gere, who will also speak at a “Media and AIDS”
panel this evening. “That was one of the problems of getting the
problems of HIV/AIDS known, is that no one would be even associated
with the word.
“We had a president, Ronald Reagan, who never spoke the word AIDS …
and that pervaded all of our society, we had no leadership. So these
things begin from the top, don’t they?”
Perhaps the most poignant remark for Canadians came from Catherine
Renaud, a 19-year old from Whitby, Ont., who brought up Stephen
Harper’s refusal to attend the conference.
“A lot of us feel abandoned … people have spent their entire life
savings to be a delegate in this conference … it’s demonstrating to
us a huge lack of support and him (not) viewing the HIV/AIDS issue
as a primary issue,” said Renaud to applause. “I was wondering what
your view is on the Prime Minister not taking (the time to be here)?”
“I don’t know your Prime Minister, but let me tell you about …
Prime Minister Singh in India,” said Gere. “We went to see him and
he reiterated it was one of the most important things for us to deal
with. We said, `We’d like to have a media summit of all the media in
India,’ and he said, `That’s wonderful, where would you like to have
it?’ We said `We would like it at your residence … and we’d like
you to be there the entire day.’ And that’s what he did … heads of
all the media in India were there presided over by (Singh), discussing
and making commitments.
“Now that is leadership, not what you have here.”
“I do hope someone can approach our Prime Minister and get the same
results,” said Renaud.
“Absolutely. You have to keep working on it, but if he doesn’t change
don’t re-elect him, that’s what you can do,” replied Gere to applause.
Chosen from more than 1,000 applicants, the 48 youth from countries
as diverse as Armenia and Guyana will be split into eight teams of
eight, and given two days – starting today at 4 p.m. – to write,
shoot and edit a three-minute film that will be screened and judged
at MTV headquarters Thursday night. Many are medical students who
have never used a camera, and questions inevitably arose about how
to make a good film and be a strong actor.
“I’ve been reminded that I am a western youth and I come from a lot of
power and privilege … I don’t know how I’d have any right portraying
someone who’s so different from me,” said Andrea Yip, 20, from
Calgary. “How do you step into a role you’re so disconnected with?”
“All of us have experienced, to some degree, a little bit of
everything,” said Gere. “We’ve all been sad, we’ve all lost people,
we’ve all been angry, we’ve all done horrible things. We’ve basically
had the same experience as every other being, so that’s an easy thing
to draw upon.”
By the end, Gere was thanking the youth for their work, not the other
way around.
“The world is always changed by the youth, always … you have
ultimate power,” said Gere, adding he learned this as a child of the
’60s. “Now if you can do it with generosity, with real love, with
real understanding, then the transformation is joyous.
“If you can educate kids, they know how to educate (their peers) on
a subject and that change then becomes organic … there’s nothing
imposed from outside and that’s when real change can happen. So I
wish you a lot of luck; thank you for doing this.”

THE PHILOSOPHER STONED
By Adam Kirsch
New Yorker
Aug. 14, 2006
What drugs taught Walter Benjamin.
On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty in the morning, Walter Benjamin
began writing a memorandum titled “Main Features of My First Impression
of Hashish.” It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he
thought it necessary to record was not the time he had taken the drug
but the time he started writing about it. Like the books he read and
the streets he wandered-like life itself-hashish was important to
him less for its own sake than as a subject for interpretation.
For a writer with Benjamin’s interests and allegiances, a rendezvous
with hashish was inevitable. The surprising thing is that it took
him until the age of thirty-five to try it. As early as 1919,
he had been fascinated by Baudelaire’s “Artificial Paradises,” in
which the poet issues warnings against the drug so seductive that
they sound like invitations: “You know that hashish always evokes
magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions,
cascades of liquid gold.” Benjamin, who regarded Baudelaire as one
of the central writers of the nineteenth century, admired the book’s
“childlike innocence and purity,” but was disappointed in its lack
of philosophical rigor, noting, “It will be necessary to repeat this
attempt independently.” The notes from his first hashish trance show
him holding deliberately aloof from any kind of rapture. “The gates to
a world of grotesquerie seem to be opening,” he wrote. “Only, I don’t
wish to enter.” According to Jean Selz, a friend with whom Benjamin
smoked opium on several occasions, “Benjamin was a smoker who refused
the initial blandishments of the smoke. He didn’t want to yield to
it too readily, for fear of weakening his powers of observation.”
Over the next seven years, Benjamin participated in drug sessions
as either subject or observer at least nine times, but his attitude
toward drugs remained vigilantly experimental. He seldom took them
when he was alone, and he never had his own supplier, relying on doctor
friends to procure hashish, opium, and, on one occasion, mescaline. The
sessions were recorded in “protocols,” furnishing raw material for
what Benjamin intended to be a major book on the philosophical and
psychological implications of drug use. When, in a letter to Gershom
Scholem, his best friend from the age of twenty-three, Benjamin, then
forty, listed four unwritten books that he considered “large-scale
defeats”-evidence of the “ruin or catastrophe” that his career had
become-the last was a “truly exceptional book about hashish.”
Nearly three-quarters of a century later, a book by Walter Benjamin
called “On Hashish” has finally appeared in English, along with another
long-gestated work, “Berlin Childhood Around 1900” (Harvard; $14.95
each). “On Hashish” is not, however, the “truly exceptional book”
he had in mind; it’s a miscellany, gathering the protocols of his
drug experiments, two published accounts of his experiences, and a
handful of references to drugs culled from his other works. It can
only begin to suggest the true importance of drug experiences for
the development of Benjamin’s thought.
Yet for this very reason “On Hashish” stands in the same relation
to a more conventional essay on drugs as Benjamin’s literary essays
do to conventional criticism. “You hardly feel that you have been
reading criticism,” Frank Kermode noted when “Illuminations,” the
first English-language selection of Benjamin’s writings, appeared,
in 1968. “It requires the kind of response we are accustomed to give
to works of art.” “Illuminations” revealed just a few peaks from
the sunken continent of Benjamin’s work, but these were enough to
establish him as a central figure in the history of modernism.
Benjamin approached every genre as a kind of laboratory for his
lifelong investigations into language, philosophy, and art, and his
ideas on these subjects are so original, and so radical in their
implications, that they remain profoundly challenging today, more
than sixty-five years after his death.
The period of Benjamin’s adulthood and achievement was 1914 to 1940,
the darkest in modern European history, and, if no one ever wrote
criticism the way he did, it is because no other critic felt the
dislocations of the time so severely. Benjamin was born in Berlin
in 1892, into a prosperous Jewish family, and his expectations were
formed in the halcyon period before 1914. In “A Berlin Chronicle,”
a series of newspaper articles that make up the nucleus of “Berlin
Childhood Around 1900,” he remembered the feeling of bourgeois security
that suffused the very furniture in his family’s apartment:
Here reigned a species of things that was, no matter how compliantly it
bowed to the minor whims of fashion, in the main so wholly convinced of
itself and its permanence that it took no account of wear, inheritance,
or moves, remaining forever equally near to and far from its ending,
which seemed the ending of all things.
In such a home, poverty was unimaginable: “The poor? For rich children
of his generation, they lived at the back of beyond.”
In time-honored fashion, Benjamin hoped to abandon the commercial
milieu of his father, a successful antiques dealer, for a more
prestigious career as an academic. By the time the First World War
began, he was already committed to a life of scholarship and, as an
opponent of the war, felt no qualms about maneuvering to get out of
military service. The best source for Benjamin’s life in these years,
Gershom Scholem’s moving yet unsentimental memoir, “Walter Benjamin:
The Story of a Friendship,” records that the two of them stayed up
the whole night before Benjamin’s draft-board medical exam, “while
Benjamin consumed vast quantities of black coffee, a practice then
followed by many young men prior to their military physicals.” The
trick, calculated to simulate a weak heart, worked, and Benjamin was
able to spend the rest of the war in Switzerland, studying for his
doctorate at the University of Bern.
Scholem shared Benjamin’s academic ambitions and his antiwar
convictions, and their student friendship laid the groundwork for
a lifetime of intellectual debate, most of which was to take place
by mail. The most important issue between them, from the beginning,
was Judaism, and the possibility of being a Jewish intellectual in
Germany. For Scholem, an ardent Zionist who was expelled from his
assimilated family for his views, the history of Jewish mysticism
gradually displaced mathematics and philosophy as a focus of study.
For Benjamin, however, Judaism remained more a possibility to be
imagined than a life to be lived. He never mastered its religious
practices or sacred texts, and, as he acknowledged to Scholem, “I
have come to know living Judaism in absolutely no form other than you.”
The friends’ divergent attitudes toward Jewishness largely
determined their subsequent careers. Neither of them entered the
German university life for which they had trained. In 1923, Scholem,
changing his first name from the German Gerhard to the Hebrew Gershom,
emigrated to Palestine, where there was no university; he planned
to support himself as a schoolteacher. As fate would have it, when
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded, shortly afterward,
he was named one of the first professors, and by the time of his
death, in 1982, he had become known as the greatest modern scholar
of Jewish mysticism. Benjamin, who remained closer to home, ended
up straying much farther from his early academic path. Having taken
his doctorate in 1919, he enrolled at the University of Frankfurt to
write his Habilitationsschrift, the second dissertation required for
teaching in a German university. But even as he was researching the
thesis, which became “The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” Benjamin
suspected that it would never be approved by the tradition-bound
faculty. The thesis, less a historical treatise than a philosophical
meditation on the nature of allegory, was, he bragged to Scholem,
“unmitigated chutzpah.” Even worse than the possibility of being
rejected, however, was the possibility of being accepted. In February,
1925, as he prepared to submit the dissertation, Benjamin admitted,
“I dread almost everything that would result from a positive resolution
to all of this: I dread Frankfurt above all, then lectures, students,
etc.” He needn’t have worried. Although the dissertation contains
some of his most radical insights into language and literature, his
examiners rejected it, admitting that they couldn’t understand a single
page. In the mid-nineteen-twenties, then, his career took a sharp
turn. With his parents increasingly unwilling or unable to support
him, he began to earn a living as a freelance literary journalist,
contributing to the culture sections of newspapers and magazines.
The death of Benjamin the academic philosopher meant the birth of
Benjamin the cultural critic. Harvard University Press’s monumental,
four-volume edition of “Selected Writings” (from which the texts of
the two new books have, for the most part, been taken) allows the
reader to chart Benjamin’s change of direction and his increasing
productivity, as he began to cater to the demands of the literary
market. All of his writing from 1913 to 1926 fits into the first
volume, which is dominated by unpublished essays on abstract topics.
His first major piece of literary criticism, a long essay on Goethe’s
novel “Elective Affinities,” was not published until 1925. But from
the mid-nineteen-twenties onward he became more and more prolific.
The Harvard edition’s second volume covers the seven years from 1927
to 1934, and two volumes are required for his last six years.
Much of Benjamin’s early writing, though always stamped with his
oblique intelligence, is the small change of journalism: travel pieces,
book reviews, an article on the Berlin Food Exhibition of 1928. In
addition to giving Benjamin a precarious living, such work helped him
adapt his extremely dense style, formed in the harsh school of German
idealist philosophy, into a more appealing literary instrument. Even
so, his prose remained challenging. A friend once told him, “In great
writing, the proportion between the total number of sentences and
those sentences whose formulation was especially striking or pregnant
was about one to thirty-whereas it was more like one to two in [your]
case.” (“All this is correct,” Benjamin admitted.)
Benjamin’s roundabout methods can be seen in his best-known literary
essays, the examinations of Proust, Baudelaire, and Kafka published in
“Illuminations.” These contain little of what we ordinarily expect
from criticism: biographical background, information about plot
and character, literary-historical comparisons. Instead, Benjamin
presents his subjects enigmatically, using startling metaphors and
emblems. His essay on Proust (whose works he helped translate into
German) is called “The Image of Proust,” and draws an implicit parallel
between the novelist’s method and the critic’s, presenting Proust as a
collector of charged images, momentary glimpses that open up passages
to the buried life. “The image detaches itself from the structure
of Proust’s sentences as that summer day at Balbec-old, immemorial,
mummified-emerged from the lace curtains under Francoise’s hands,”
Benjamin writes. And he responds in kind, concluding his essay with
the image of Proust lying in bed, his asthmatic prostration converted
into heroic labor:
For the second time there rose a scaffold like Michelangelo’s on which
the artist, his head thrown back, painted the Creation on the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel: the sickbed on which Marcel Proust consecrates
the countless pages which he covered with his handwriting, holding
them up in the air, to the creation of his microcosm.
Benjamin’s literary criticism was too unusual and too uncompromising
to win a large audience. But his admirers included some of the best
living German writers, among them Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Bertolt
Brecht. By 1930, Benjamin was confident enough to announce that his
life’s ambition was to “be considered the foremost critic of German
literature.”
It is not as a literary critic that Benjamin has been most influential,
however, but as a pioneering cultural critic, one of the first writers
to see all the products of civilization as worthy of analysis. This
is the principle that guides his most famous essay, “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” now a canonical text
in art history, film studies, and related fields. In it Benjamin
argues that, traditionally, a painting or sculpture was endowed with
something he calls “aura,” deriving from a recognition of its absolute
uniqueness. That is why thousands of people line up every day for a
quick, obscured glimpse of the Mona Lisa: not just to see it but to
be in its quasi-sacred presence. In the age of technology, Benjamin
perceived, this uniqueness is diluted by the ready availability of
reproductions, which makes it possible to see a work of art without
ever having seen the original. Furthermore, in the twentieth century’s
characteristic art forms, photography and film, there is no such
thing as an original.
Surprisingly, Benjamin welcomed the idea of art without aura. He
reasoned that aura was a kind of aristocratic mystery, and that its
disappearance should herald a new, more democratic art: “The social
significance of film, even-and especially-in its most positive form, is
inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation
of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage.” This rhetoric,
with its enthusiasm for “destruction” and “liquidation,” sounds
distinctly odd coming from Benjamin. How, the reader wonders, did
the great champion of Proust and Kafka end up decrying uniqueness and
originality? How could the man who compared “In Search of Lost Time” to
the Sistine Chapel ceiling also believe that “contemplative immersion”
in a work of art was “a breeding ground for asocial behavior”?
The answer lies in Benjamin’s exceedingly awkward embrace of Marxism.
Like many other intellectuals of the time, he came to feel
that only Communism could save Europe from war, depression, and
Fascism. He visited the Soviet Union in 1926, and clung to the hope
that Communism would provide better for writers than capitalism had
managed to do. Benjamin’s personal circumstances only reinforced this
judgment. Literary journalism, never a lucrative career, was an almost
heroically futile one in Weimar Germany. By 1931, Benjamin confessed
that “material circumstances . . . have made my existence-with no
property and no steady income-a paradox, in view of which even I
sometimes fall into a stupor of amazement.” And when Hitler seized
power, Benjamin lost what remained of his livelihood.
In March, 1933, he fled Germany for France, never to return. For the
rest of his life, he lived on the brink of destitution. A subsidy
provided by the Institute for Social Research, itself in exile from
its original base, in Frankfurt, helped him scrape by. “My Communism,”
Benjamin said, “is a drastic, not infertile expression of the fact
that the present intellectual industry finds it impossible to make
room for my thinking, just as the present economic order finds it
impossible to accommodate my life.”
Benjamin’s Marxist turn was welcomed by friends like Brecht, who
regretted only that he hadn’t gone far enough. Scholem, on the other
hand, kept up a stream of reproaches in his letters from Palestine,
thinking it nothing more than a fashionable disguise: “There is
a disconcerting alienation and disjuncture between your true and
alleged way of thinking.” And he was infuriated by Benjamin’s refusal
to acknowledge how far his idiosyncratic understanding of Communism
deviated from Party orthodoxy. “The complete certainty I have about
what would happen to your writing if it occurred to you to present
it within the Communist Party is quite depressing,” Scholem wrote.
Benjamin never did join the Party, though he agonized over it, just as
he continually postponed his often declared plans to learn Hebrew and
move to Palestine. But his limited and private adherence to Marxist
principles had significant effects on his work-effects that tended
to bear out Scholem’s pessimism. “The Work of Art” could not have
been written without Benjamin’s newfound interest in the material
conditions of cultural production. Yet his masochistic insistence on
putting his work at the service of the class struggle also accounts
for the forced belligerence and brutalism of that essay.
The most significant casualty of Benjamin’s Marxism was “The Arcades
Project,” which today enjoys a reputation as one of the most famous
books never written. It was the white whale of Benjamin’s last
years, a magnum opus of stupendous scope and originality that he
found himself perpetually unable to finish. The Passagenwerk, as
Benjamin referred to it, took its name from the passages, or arcades,
that adorned Paris in the age of Baudelaire. These were glass-covered
promenades set aside for shopping and strolling, which helped to give
the city its reputation as a paradise for flâneurs. In the arcades of
nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin believed he had found the omphalos
of the modern city, with its erotic anonymity, its phantasmagoria of
fashions, its mixture of banality and enchantment.
The passages appealed to him, above all, because by his own day they
were already extinct, made obsolete by the department store. This
gave them the charm that Benjamin found in everything discarded
and superseded, all the detritus on which civilization imprints its
deepest secrets. “To someone looking through piles of old letters,”
he wrote, “a stamp that has long been out of circulation on a torn
envelope often says more than a reading of dozens of pages.” In just
this way, Benjamin dreamed of using the arcades to write the hidden
history of the city he called, in one essay, “Paris, the Capital of
the Nineteenth Century.” He initially meant his arcades essay to be
brief, allusive, and literary-“a fairy-play,” he called it in 1928.
“In any case,” he assured Scholem, “it is a project that will just
take a few weeks.”
What transformed the essay of 1928 into the thousand-page midden of
notes, fragments, and quotations that Benjamin left behind at his
death, and that was published in 1999 under the title “The Arcades
Project”? Any answer would have to include Benjamin’s constant
tendency to procrastinate; the disordered conditions of his life
in the nineteen-thirties, which made sustained research difficult;
and the inherently elusive nature of what he was trying to accomplish.
Above all, however, what kept him from completing the project was his
Marxism. In the late thirties, when he returned to it in earnest, he
was determined to recast his analysis of nineteenth-century Paris in
the language of dialectical materialism. It was in support of this
project that the Institute for Social Research granted Benjamin a
subsidy, expecting a brilliant example of Marxist cultural criticism.
But when Benjamin started to put “The Arcades Project” in something
like publishable form, sending Theodor Adorno an essay titled “The
Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” he was in for a shock.
Although he was eager to embrace Marxist terminology, his use of it
proved far too clumsy for a subtle theorist like Adorno. Instead
of sharpening his vision of Paris, Marxism had settled over it
like a fog, reducing Benjamin to crude cliches. (For instance, he
interpreted Baudelaire’s great poem about drunkenness, “The Ragpickers’
Wine,” as a response to the wine tax.) In a devastating letter,
Adorno said that, by using “materialist categories,” Benjamin had
“denied yourself your boldest and most productive thoughts in a kind
of precensorship.” Adorno’s judgment echoed Scholem’s: Benjamin’s
Marxist vocabulary had betrayed his true insights.
This rejection, coming from a representative of Benjamin’s last
remaining sponsor, was a terrible blow. The timing made it even
worse: he had worked through the fall of 1938 to finish the essay,
believing that war could break out at any moment. “I was in a race
against the war,” he told Adorno, who was then living in New York,
“and in spite of all my choking fear, I felt a feeling of triumph on
the day I wrapped up . . . before the end of the world (the fragility
of a manuscript!).” Now he was being told that the triumph was
illusory, that the Arcades Project could not be written on the terms
he proposed. Even if Benjamin had lived long enough, it is doubtful
that he could have completed it. The intellectual and ideological
basis of the work was in ruins.
In any case, history was not to give him the chance. Despite his
friends’ attempts to persuade him to emigrate to England or America,
Benjamin was still in Paris in the summer of 1940, when the evil he
had fled in Berlin caught up with him. The fall of France set the
stage for a secular martyrdom that is a large part of his legend. The
exact details are disputed, but it seems that, on September 26,
1940, Benjamin was part of a group of refugees trying to cross the
Franco-Spanish border at Port Bou. But the Spanish border guards,
perhaps out of deference to the Gestapo, did not honor their visas
and turned them back. In despair and exhaustion, Benjamin took an
overdose of morphine. The next morning, the guards relented, and the
rest of the party escaped over the border. Only Benjamin, buried in the
cemetery at Port Bou, remained as an exemplary victim-a reproach to a
Europe intent on murdering its Jews, its radicals, and its best minds.
Where does hashish fit into this parable of persecuted genius? A
reader who turns to “On Hashish” for a clear answer may be
disappointed. Like a small-scale version of “The Arcades Project,”
it is the placeholder for a book he could never finish, a ruin
occupying the site where he planned a monument, and, as such, it has
to be carefully interpreted. This is entirely fitting, since Benjamin
himself believed that “all human knowledge, if it can be justified,
must take on no other form than that of interpretation.”
The most common kind of interpretation, of course, is reading. So
deeply ingrained is our association of the two that reading provides
a metaphor for many activities that have nothing to do with written
texts: the fortune-teller “reads” palms, the astrologer “reads” the
stars. The intellectual quest that defined Benjamin’s work-at times,
it seems, the dare that he set himself-was to find out how much of
the world could be “read” in this way. In “The Arcades Project,” he
made lengthy catalogues of ephemera-advertising posters, shop-window
displays, clothing fashions-commenting, “Whoever understands how to
read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents
in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions.”
The suspicion that everything in the world carries a hidden message
seems to have come to Benjamin at a very young age. “Berlin Childhood
Around 1900” is organized as a series of vignettes, each devoted to
a thing or a place from his childhood: “The Telephone,” “The Sock,”
“At the Corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner.” The result is an eerily
depopulated memoir, in which Benjamin’s parents are mute presences,
and friends are almost entirely absent. Benjamin told Scholem that
the project contained “the most precise portrait I shall ever be
able to give of myself,” and yet it is a portrait in which the sitter
never appears, his place taken by the objects that surround him. The
effect is not just to make Benjamin seem like a lonely, wary child,
though he undoubtedly was. Rather, if Benjamin luxuriates in memories
of solitude, sleepiness, and sickness, it is because these unguarded
states allowed him to communicate most intimately with the objects
around him. “Everything in the courtyard became a sign or hint to me,”
he writes in the section titled “Loggias.” “Many were the messages
embedded in the skirmishing of the green roller blinds drawn up high,
and many the ominous dispatches that I prudently left unopened in the
rattling of the roll-up shutters that came thundering down at dusk.”
Benjamin always hoped to turn his powers of reading to even more
tempting and obscure kinds of signs-astrology fascinated him-and his
willingness to indulge such ideas hints at the metaphysical, even
mystical inspiration that is at the heart of all his work, especially
his understanding of language. This affinity for the mystical was
evident to Scholem, who described Benjamin’s work as “an often puzzling
juxtaposition of the two modes of thought, the metaphysical-theological
and the materialistic,” but it is not easy for modern readers to
embrace. The theological side of Benjamin’s thought remained hidden,
during his lifetime and long afterward, in part because he chose to
hide it. He never published the seminal 1916 essay “On Language as Such
and on the Language of Man,” which explicitly set forth his mystical
vision of language, or later writings that show its continued hold on
his imagination. Only with the publication of the “Selected Writings”
has it been possible for English readers to grasp the crucial fact
that the “metaphysical-theological” element of Benjamin’s thought
was older and more profound than the “materialistic” element.
Benjamin’s essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”
states, “There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate
nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is the
nature of each one to communicate its mental contents.” Everything
in the world-stars, faces, animals, landscapes-has a meaning, and
Benjamin accepts that this implies the existence of a cosmic author.
“God,” he declares, “made things knowable in their names.” Of course,
secular reason holds that human languages are purely conventional,
but Benjamin would not countenance the idea that words are arbitrary:
“It is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language
maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object.”
Instead, he holds that every human language is really a failed and
garbled translation of a divine language that speaks in things:
“It is the translation of the language of things into that of man.”
The vision of language that Benjamin advances here is moving precisely
because it is beyond logical proof, and because it expresses so
eloquently his longing for meaning in a world that usually presents
itself as mere chaos. This longing drew him, slowly and equivocally,
to hashish. In a hashish trance, he hoped, it would be possible to
understand the language of things more directly than in ordinary
life-to experience a universe suffused with meaning.
By the time Benjamin tried drugs, he had been reading and wondering
about them for years, and when the moment finally came it proved to
be a letdown, at least in the philosophical sense. This is not to
say that Benjamin did not experience, and enjoy, all the usual effects.
He felt mellow. “Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive
anxiety complexes,” he noted during his first attempt. He saw weird
visions, such as “a long gallery of suits of armor with no one in
them. No heads, but only flames playing around the neck openings.” He
even got the munchies: “I had been suddenly unable to still the pangs
of hunger that overwhelmed me late one night in my room. It seemed
advisable to buy a bar of chocolate.”
But what Benjamin called “the great hope, desire, yearning to
reach-in a state of intoxication-the new, the untouched” remained
elusive. When the effects of the drugs wore off, so did the feeling
of “having suddenly penetrated, with their help, that most hidden,
generally most inaccessible world of surfaces.” All that remained
was the cryptic comments and gestures recorded in the protocols, the
ludicrous corpses of what had seemed vital insights. In a session on
April 18, 1931, Fritz Frankel, a doctor who administered the drug to
Benjamin, noted, “Arm and index finger are raised high in the air,
without support. The raising of the arm is ‘the birth of the kingdom
of Armenia.’ ” During another trance, Benjamin was very excited to
have come up with the phrase “Wellen schwappen-Wappen schwellen”
(“Waves splash-armorial bearings swell”), claiming that the rhyming
words held the clue to a deep structural connection between waves and
the designs used in heraldry. “The subject holds forth in learned
fashion,” Frankel noted. ” ‘Quod in imaginibus, est in lingua.’ ”
Frankel may have known the meaning of the Latin phrase-“Insofar as
it is in images, it is in language”-but he could not have recognized
how crucial the notion was to Benjamin’s thought, or how tremendously
significant the nonsense phrase must have appeared to him. Under the
influence of hashish, he felt that names and things belonged together,
that a rhyme had revealed a reality.
The tragedy, or perhaps the comedy, was that this insight, the crown
of Benjamin’s philosophical labor, could not survive the trance
that fathered it. In the cold light of the morning after, Wellen
schwappen-Wappen schwellen is a meaningless jingle, and the raising
of an arm has no perceptible connection to the kingdom of Armenia.
“What we are on the verge of talking about seems infinitely alluring,”
Benjamin wrote resignedly. “We stretch out our arms full of love,
eager to embrace what we have in mind. Scarcely have we touched
it, however, than it disillusions us completely. The object of our
attention suddenly fades at the touch of language.” Hashish, like an
evil genie in a fairy tale, granted Benjamin’s wish, but guaranteed
that he couldn’t enjoy it.
What makes “On Hashish” an important book is that Benjamin’s drug
experiments not only were a failure in themselves but also shifted
the ground beneath his other work in a way that he never fully
acknowledged. The allure of his thought lies in his imagination of
a perfected world, in which objects would be redeemed-to use one of
his favorite words-from their imprisoning silence. Borrowing from
the Jewish tradition, Benjamin sometimes imagined this redemption as
messianic; later in his career, he often cast it in Marxist terms,
seeing redemption as revolution. He clung to these hopes more and
more passionately the more terrifying the world around him became.
The last sentence of his last major essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of
History”-written in 1940, when Nazism seemed unstoppable-insists that
even at the darkest hour redemption remains possible, that every second
is “the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.”
Hashish, by granting a vision of this redemption in such a compromised
and transient form, forces us to confront the likelihood that it was
never anything more than a fantasy. If Benjamin discovered a mystic
language in his hashish trance, it is because he so fervently wanted to
discover it. And something similar holds true for all his messianic
speculations. The beguiling complexity of his work, built out of
profound insights into language, thought, art, and society, makes it
tempting to ignore the difficulty of actually dwelling inside it. After
all, if the world is not a text because it does not have an author,
then Benjamin is not an interpreter but a poet, creating meanings
rather than perceiving them. Ultimately, his strange, beautiful works
are best read as fragments of a great poem-the poem of a longing that
no world, and Benjamin’s least of all, could possibly satisfy.
rticles/060821crbo_books
–Boundary_(ID_+3E8YCaHN VEtNEsqmD+4cA)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

YEREVAN BLAMING GEORGIA IN “INTERNET BLOCKADE”
The Messenger, Georgia
Aug. 14, 2006
Rezonansi reports that for the last few days internet availability in
Armenia has been unreliable. Armenia blames Georgia in this, as the
only cable that connects Armenia to global computer networks passes
through Georgia.
The issue was discussed at the government session in Yerevan, although
any decisions are not yet publicly known. Tbilisi officials state it
is absurd to blame Georgia for an “internet blockade.”
According to the paper, the private owner of the cable is a Georgian
company, Fobt-Net, has itself been seriously damaged from this. The
Armenian network operator Armentel said that first the cable was
damaged near Kutaisi on August 4, which cut off Armenia from the
internet for six hours. This was followed by further damage of
the cable running along the Black Sea seabed, which disconnected
Armenia from the internet for three days. On August 8, Armentel’s
press secretary Asmik Chutlian stated that the internet connection
was restored with the help of reserve sources and satellite feeds,
though the repair works would take more than ten days. However, the
next day the connection was again broken off somewhere in Georgian,
according to Chutilian.
The issue was taken seriously by Armenian President Robert Kocharian,
who himself took part in the discussion of the problem.
The paper writes that the manager of Fobt-Net, Viktor Nanobashvili,
suggested that a passing ship could have been one of the causes of
damage to the Black Sea portion of the cable.
“I cannot say exactly that it was a ship’s fault, but I can assure
everyone that the investigation will be carried out to reveal the
reasons of the damage,” he said.
“The statements blaming Georgia have been made earlier as well,
although it is not fair to politicize the issue as if Georgian
government is to blame for what happened,” Nanoboashvili stated.

RABBIT-EARED ROBOT DEBUTS
By Astrid Wendlandt; Reuters News Agency
The Toronto Star
August 14, 2006 Monday
In the evolution of electronic companions, first came the speaking
doll, then the Tamagotchi virtual pet, then Sony’s short-lived
AIBO dog.
Now, it could be the dawn of the Wi-Fi rabbit era.
The plastic bunny with ears like TV antennae can read out emails and
mobile phone text messages, tell children to go to bed, alert one
to a stock collapse and give traffic updates by receiving Internet
feeds via a wireless Wi-Fi network.
The bunny, which stands 23 centimetres tall and has a white cone-like
body that lights up when it speaks, is called Nabaztag, which means
rabbit in Armenian, its creator’s mother tongue. It can also wiggle
its ears and sing songs.
“If I send a text message to my wife and she is busy cooking, she will
hear it without having to check her mobile,” said a Paris-based telecom
analyst at an international brokerage, who did not wish to be named.
French entrepreneur Rafi Haladjian, who conceived the idea, says the
rabbit sometimes carries more sway over children than their parents and
can help men who have misbehaved win forgiveness from angry partners.
“It is sad, but true,” he said.
Nabaztag costs 115 euros ($148) in France, 80 pounds ($152) in Britain
and $150 in the United States. It is made in Shenzhen, China.
Since its market debut last year, 50,000 Nabaztags have been sold in
France, Britain, Belgium and Switzerland, and Haladjian hopes to sell
150,000 by the end of this year.
The businessman is now looking to conquer the United States, where he
only has a tiny presence, and is gearing up for the December holiday
shopping season.
Last December, Haladjian appeared on CNN for three minutes and received
350,000 online information requests.
“The only problem was that we had zero bunnies, we had sold them all
already and we had not even started selling them in the United States
yet,” he said.
The rabbit is made by French company Violet, 55 per cent owned by
Haladjian and 30 per cent by Banexi Ventures, a private equity arm
of French bank BNP Paribas.
Paul Jackson, an analyst at research house Forrester, is among
several analysts who predict the Nabaztag will find favour among the
well-heeled and technology-savvy as it benefits from the spread of
Wi-Fi networks around the globe.
Wi-Fi technology is the latest must-have in many mass-market consumer
goods, from mobile phones to personal digital assistants, laptops
and TV set-top boxes. In Western Europe’s seven largest markets,
on average about 6 per cent of households have a Wi-Fi home network
while in the United States, the rate is between 12 and 14 per cent,
according to Forrester.
Nabaztag, which performs basic tasks, relies on relatively simple
technology – Wi-Fi and online software and filters.
Analysts say one of the reasons Sony’s AIBO dog was discontinued this
year was that its technology was too complex and the robotic animal
too pricey.
But some say simplicity can also be a weakness in a sophisticated
market where some want all the latest bells and whistles.
“The problem with targeting this tech elite is that they are very
fickle,” said Jackson.
Tamagotchi fell out of favour with many children after a while because
its functions were repetitive, analysts say.
Haladjian says the key to Nabaztag’s longevity will be constant
innovation and finding new applications as the Internet evolves. But
competition is heating up.
Ambient Devices, a spin-off from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, is one of several rivals putting
Internet-based communicating devices on the market.
Ambient sells a lamp ball that glows different colors to display
real-time stock market trends, weather and pollen forecasts for $150,
excluding shipping costs.
GRAPHIC: BENOIT TESSIER reuters Rafi Haladjian with his company’s
creation, a plastic bunny with ears like TV antennae. The robot
can read out emails and text messages, tell children to go to bed,
or alert one to a stock collapse by receiving Wi-Fi.

A HOT CAUCASIAN CUISINE
by Leonid Timofeev
Translated by Pavel Pushkin
Source: Tribuna, No. 31, August 11, 2006, p. 2
Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
August 14, 2006 Monday
COLONEL GENERAL LEONID IVASHOV: AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF INSTABILITY
SAAKASHVILI HOPES TO SOLVE INTERNAL PROBLEMS OF GEORGIA; Tbilisi
lacks only a mere trifle for forcefully solving the problems with
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which is getting rid of the collective
peacekeeping forces in the conflict zone.
Tbilisi lacks only a mere trifle for forcefully solving the problems
with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which is getting rid of the collective
peacekeeping forces in the conflict zone. Russian posts are a special
obstacle.
The technology is simple. Recently, Georgian Foreign Ministry accused
Russia of shooting at Georgian posts in the Kodori Gorge. Information
about helicopters without identifying signs was launched afterwards.
Meanwhile, the situation in the gorge is growing more alarming.
According to the Abkhaz party, the so-called police operation is
failing and resistance of the rebels commanded by Emzar Kvitsiani
is growing stronger. The fate of the local population is a special
concern because it is threatened with humanitarian catastrophe.
Expert opinion
Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, Vice President of the Academy
of Geopolitical Problems: – It is necessary to speak about the
Georgian-Abkhaz conflict today in connection to what is happening
in the Middle East and in the world in general. Characteristically,
the Middle Eastern conflict was “launched” after a meeting of Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with George Bush. Saakashvili also visited
Washington on the eve of the G8 summit. He has evidently received
instructions and is kindling up a conflict in the Caucasus. What the
Georgian authorities are doing now is an obvious provoking of a large
conflict into which Russia will be involved at least partially.
Implementation of this plan will enable the Georgian authorities to
demand intervention international forces, most likely, Americans,
Turks and other NATO countries. The US is not interested in integrity
of Georgia and it needs to stir up the Caucasus. Americans have
stirred up the Middle East and now they need to extend the “arch of
instability” in the western and in the eastern directions. We see
what is happening in Ukraine. In the opposite direction, we see Iran,
Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Through Saakashvili Washington is fulfilling a task of formation of
instability zones in the world. The Georgian leader hopes that against
the background of instability it is possible to solve all internal
problems and to lay the blame for them on Russia, Abkhazia and South
Ossetia and to strengthen his position in Georgia through this.
It is possible to stop aggravation of conflicts in reality only
by decisive political and probably economic actions. Where it is
necessary, in case of military provocations, it is necessary to stop
this by decisive actions of military nature. Russia should return
everything to the international law norms and demand stringent
observance of the agreements of 1994 from Georgia. It is necessary
to demand respectful attitude towards our peacekeeping contingent
and to reinforce it.

TBILISI AWAITS ARRIVAL OF SENIOR IRANIAN DIPLOMAT
RIA Novosti, Russia
August 14, 2006
TBILISI, August 14 (RIA Novosti) – Iran’s deputy foreign minister
will arrive in Georgia Monday on a two-day visit, where he will hold
talks with the South Caucasus country’s president and other leaders,
a national news agency said.
Novosti Georgia said that as well as meeting with President Mikhail
Saakashvili, Mehdi Safari would hold talks with Prime Minister Zurab
Nogideli and Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuashvili.
The two countries became energy partners earlier in the year, when
Georgia signed an emergency contract with the Islamic Republic for
natural gas supplies in the midst of a nationwide energy crisis. The
Georgian leadership has expressed an interest in establishing long-term
gas imports from Iran, including the construction of a gas pipeline
connecting the countries via Armenia.

DEADLY BAGHDAD EXPLOSION WAS ACCIDENTAL GAS BLAST: US
Agence France Presse — English
August 14, 2006 Monday 12:27 PM GMT
A deadly explosion which demolished a building in a Baghdad market
was an accidental gas blast, a US military spokesman said Monday,
differing sharply from the Iraqi government’s version of events.
Iraqi officials — including the office of Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki — had earlier blamed a series of insurgent car bombs and
missile strikes for Sunday’s explosions, which killed at least 57
people as night fell.
But Major General William Caldwell, the chief spokesman for the US-led
military coalition in Iraq, told reporters that American explosives
experts believed that a major gas explosion had triggered a series
of blasts.
“Our explosives specialists reported today that it was a very
significant gas explosion on the first floor of the building,” he said.
“The secondary explosions were the result of that. There is no evidence
substantiating that something else was involved. Everything now points
out that it was an internal gas explosion that set off a series of
other explosions.”
Earlier, a statement from Maliki’s media office had blamed the
explosions on insurgent bombers, a version supported by Iraqi security
officials.
“Terrorist groups carried out a dirty and criminal operation, firing
a number of Katyusha rockets on a building in Al-Qubyasi, followed
by a car bomb explosion and a Katyusha near the Al-Barid area,”
the premier’s office said.
“This was followed by exploding a motorcycle near a public library
and the fall of a mortar shell near the Armenian Church,” it added.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress