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 )–

Portugal benefits from oil tycoon’s legacy
Bahrain Tribune, Bahrain
Aug 6, 2006
Daniel Silva
Lisbon
Portugal produces no oil yet for the past five decades oil wealth
has played a key role in the development of the country, paying for
library books, hospital equipment and thousands of scholarships.
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, named after a Turkish-born Armenian
oil tycoon who left his fortune to the country, has given out two
billion euros (2.5 billion US dollars) at current prices since it
was set up in 1956, a year after his death.
Money provided by the foundation has also funded the nation’s top
symphony orchestra, several rehabilitation centres for the handicapped
and exhibition halls as well as the restoration of historical sites.
“The truth is that this foundation is the most extraordinary lucky
break in the history of this country,” sociologist Antonio Barreto
said last month at a ceremony marking the 50-year anniversary of the
approval of the foundation’s statutes.
Barreto is writing a book on the impact that the foundation’s vast
resources have had on Portugal, one of western Europe’s poorest
nations.
Gulbenkian, who made his fortune in the Middle East, lived at a
Lisbon hotel during the last 13 years of his life after moving in
1942 to Portugal, at the age of 73, by car with his wife, from Nazi
Germany’s occupied France. Three years before his death he drew up
a will allotting the bulk of his fortune, as well as his vast art
collection, to Portugal to be used to set up a charitable foundation
to thank the country for providing him with a refuge from the ravages
of World War II.
The will specified that the foundation must be based in Lisbon, exist
in perpetuity and focus on the fields of arts, charity, education
and science.
Under the care of its executors the foundation’s assets have risen
to just over three billion euros, equal to two percent of Portugal’s
gross domestic product, from the equivalent of 14 million euros when
it was founded in 1956.
It is Europe’s sixth-biggest charitable foundation by assets.
Among its holdings is oil company Partex, which has interests in Abu
Dhabi, Algeria, Angola, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Oman. It produces some
13.5 million barrels of oil per year.
The foundation has an annual budget for its charitable activies equal
to four percent of its overall assets, which this year amounted
to 113 million euros, more than the budget of some government
ministries. Roughly 80 percent of the money is spent in Portugal
with much of the rest earmarked for projects in the country’s former
colonies in Africa.
Gulbenkian’s art collection, which includes Egyptian sculptures,
Chinese Qing vases and scores of gold and silver Greco-Roman coins,
is on display at a Lisbon museum set in a park that shares his name
which has become one of the nation’s top tourist attractions since
it threw open its doors in 1969.
“I think we’ll never be able to thank him sufficiently for his
generosity,” the president of the foundation, Rui Vilar, said in an
interview published in July in literary magazine JL.
One of the first ventures which the foundation bankrolled was the
creation of a network of traveling libraries which operated out of a
fleet of buses, lending books to readers in the most remote parts of
the country. Five years after the foundation was set up it operated
61 “library buses” alongside 156 permanent libraries at a time when
Portugal was ruled by a repressive right-wing dictatorship which
vastly neglected social spending.
“Few actions touched the interior of Portugal during the second half
of the twentieth century as deeply as this one,” Portuguese President
Anibal Cavaco Silva said at the celebrations marking the foundation’s
50-year anniversary. Speaking before an audience which included all of
Portugal’s living former presidents, Cavaco Silva also recalled how a
Gulbenkian scholarship allowed him to do a PhD in economics in England.
Since its establishment the foundation has given out more than 65,000
scolarships. Before Portugal, a nation of just over 10 million people,
joined the European Community, the precursor to the European Union
in 1986, the foundation was the nation’s main source of scholarships,
especially for studies abroad.
Born in 1869 to a family of well-to-do Armenian merchants in Scutari,
now part of Istanbul, Gulbenkian became a British citizen after
studying petroleum engineering in London and was one of the first to
open the Middle East to the oil trade.
AFP

Sortie en France d’une biographie autorisee de Charles Aznavour
Le Devoir
jeudi 3 août 2006
AP
Mots cles : France (pays), charles aznavour, biographie
Paris — Elu en 1998 “artiste de varietes du siècle” devant Elvis
Presley et Bob Dylan par un sondage du magazine americain Time,
Charles Aznavour est aujourd’hui, pour le monde entier, une veritable
legende.
Il lui manquait pourtant, a côte de son livre de souvenirs personnels
(Le Temps des avants, 2003), une vraie biographie de reference qui
raconte l’histoire de son destin exceptionnel, d’abord hostile et
litteralement “apprivoise” a force de courage, de tenacite, et bien
sûr, de talent.
C’est chose faite maintenant avec un ouvrage de Daniel Pantchenko,
avec Marc Robine, dans lequel le chanteur — qui a accepte de
participer sans reserve — seduit d’abord par le regard d’historien
porte sur ses racines, depuis le genocide armenien de 1915 et la
diaspora qui s’ensuivit, puis par l’analyse sensible de ses chansons.
Pour la première fois de sa longue et impressionnante carrière (ne le
22 mai 1924 a Paris, il debute a neuf ans au theâtre, a 12 ans au
cinema, avant de se lancer finalement dans la chanson en solo en
1950), Charles Aznavour temoigne, delivrant des souvenirs inedits et
multipliant commentaires, precisions ou reflexions sur une vie riche
notamment en rencontres de toutes sortes, ajoutant ainsi a cet
ouvrage une formidable dimension humaine.
Grand specialiste de la chanson francaise (il a tenu la rubrique au
quotidien L’Humanite), l’auteur a repris et mene a terme un manuscrit
qu’avait commence a ecrire son collègue et ami Marc Robine, disparu
en août 2003. Une “bio” passionnante et en tous points reussie. (Ed.
Fayard/Chorus, 609 pages, plus un cahier photos de 16 pages.)
–Boundary_(ID_TN9evJODvCN1eAI6z+jaQg)–

The Economist
August 5, 2006
U.S. Edition
Fighting talk casts a summer shadow;
Georgia and Russia
Georgia’s prospects are still rosy, but could be imperilled by
foreign meddling and domestic impetuosity
SUMMER in Tbilisi. The latticed balconies suspended over the Kura
river alive with chatter; naked boys splashing in the fountains; the
grimy courtyards overrun by unruly vines-and rumours of war.
If it were not for geopolitics and history, Georgia would be rich.
Its 5m-odd population ought to subsist comfortably on its Black Sea
summer resorts, winter skiing, agriculture and transit revenues.
Under Mikhail Saakashvili (pictured above), who was swept to the
country’s presidency by the “rose revolution” of 2003, it at last has
a chance of becoming a prosperous, free country. But the Soviet rule
that followed the tsarist period bequeathed Georgia and Mr
Saakashvili daunting problems-including Abkhazia and South Ossetia,
two enclaves that broke away from Tbilisi in nasty wars in the early
1990s. Each summer, as the weather gets hotter, the political
temperature rises in the enclaves.
This year’s drama has included the Georgian government’s operation
last week to disarm a renegade warlord in the remote Kodori gorge,
the only bit of Abkhazia at least nominally controlled by the Tbilisi
authorities. That alarmed the Abkhaz leadership. There have been a
string of murky assassinations-perhaps political, perhaps criminal-in
South Ossetia. The tension there, says Matthew Bryza, an American
diplomat, is “worrisomely high”, not helped, perhaps, by the sacking
last month of Georgy Khaindrava, Georgia’s conflict-resolution
minister. Both Zurab Noghaideli, the prime minister, and Mr
Khaindrava himself say this was for unrelated reasons. But his was a
(relatively) conciliatory voice. Others saw his departure as a
victory for the “party of war” within the government.
War, though, would be crazy-because it would in effect be war against
Russia, whose support helped the two enclaves to achieve their
quasi-secession and sustains them in it. The Georgian parliament last
month told Russia’s peace keepers to leave the enclaves, and the
government may soon follow suit. After us, say (or promise) the
Russians, there will be chaos. Some Georgians detect a Russian hand
behind the opaque events in the Kodori gorge: it is “highly
unlikely”, says Mr Noghaideli, that the wayward warlord acted alone.
In a way, though, Russia and Georgia are already at war, albeit a
cold one. Russian ire with Mr Saakashvili and his Westernising
policies have led to increases in the price of gas and the
shutting-off of other energy supplies, border closures, disruption to
the visa regime and a vindictive economic embargo. One example
concerns Borjomi, a chalky, pungent Georgian water. It has, says
Badri Japaridze, vice-president of the firm that bottles it, been
drunk in Russia for 115 years. Russians were consuming half the
production, until it was banned on questionable health grounds in
May.
For its part, Georgia wants to reopen the bilateral trade deal the
two countries have already reached in preparation for Russia’s
accession to the World Trade Organisation: unwise perhaps, if they
were to end up with even worse terms. Mr Noghaideli observes
defiantly that Georgia can have good relations with Russia “if we get
down on our knees”.
But an actual war in South Ossetia or Abkhazia would mean disaster
for Georgia, and not only because it would probably lose. It would
make solving the territorial disputes impossible. And it would wreck
one of Mr Saakashvili’s dearest aspirations, and the one the Russians
most resent: his plan to take Georgia into NATO. All that should be
clear, even to Georgia’s young, hot-headed defence minister, Irakli
Okruashvili. Mr Noghaideli says the whole government is committed to
peaceable solutions. “There is a party of war,” says Mr Khaindrava,
the sacked minister, “but it is in Russia.”
Sabres are indeed rattling in Russia. The foreign minister, Sergei
Lavrov, said recently that his country would use “all means” to
protect its citizens in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Thanks to
Russia’s generous ways with passports there, that applies to almost
everyone in the statelets (though the Abkhaz, unlike the Ossetians,
still covet full independence). During recent military exercises in
the Russian north Caucasus, Russian officials made it clear that they
had had Georgia in mind.
On the other hand, Mr Saakashvili and his team are anxious to do
something about the enclaves, which are being creepingly incorporated
into Russia. That may be part of a Kremlin plan, also involving
Moldova (see page 37). Much more waiting risks losing the territories
for ever. Yet irresponsible talk and ill-considered actions will have
unintended consequences.
Georgians are a proud, nationalistic lot, and virtually all of them
share Mr Saakashvili’s ambition to reunite the country. But 70 years
of Soviet rule have also left them cynical, and some see another
motive in the government’s urgency over the enclaves: to distract
attention from its other travails.
There have been big achievements, chief among them an impressive
crackdown on corruption, which largely explain the president’s
still-high approval ratings. More tax is being collected; economic
growth will reach double figures this year, predicts Mr Noghaideli.
Since 2004 Tbilisi’s writ has run over Ajaria, another once-breakaway
Black Sea enclave. In the summer months it now swarms with Armenian
tourists. Apart from those of the Baltic countries, Mr Saakashvili’s
may be the most accomplished post-Soviet government now in
office-even if many Georgians prefer to see themselves as a
struggling European country than as a better-than-average ex-Soviet
one.
But there have been disappointments too, not all of them part of the
inevitable post-revolutionary come-down. Poverty and unemployment are
still rife. Even in Tbilisi life for many is tough. In the
countryside, it is grinding.
Worse, Mr Saakashvili’s enhanced presidential powers and the pliant
parliament are encouraging his authoritarian streak. The police,
claims Tinatin Khidasheli, an opposition activist, are out of
control. Conditions in the country’s over-stuffed prisons, says one
well-placed Western observer, are medieval. A bloody prison riot took
place in March. Accusations are made of unfair arrests and rigged
trials, as in the case of a banker killed by interior-ministry
employees: a test of the government’s commitment to the rule of law,
says Salome Zourabichvili, a former foreign minister now in
opposition-and one that it looks like failing. Pressure on the media
is the subject of various rumblings.
Mr Noghaideli dismisses them. “Georgia”, he says, “will be a
successful democracy very soon.” Perhaps. But some recent
developments rather resemble those in another country to which
Georgians do not much like to be compared: Mr Putin’s Russia. Like
other governments in the region, Mr Saakashvili’s sometimes shows
signs of a dangerous contempt for the people it governs. He can still
turn Georgia into the prosperous democracy it ought to be-the best
way, anyway, to win back the enclaves-but, on both scores, he needs
to be rather careful.

Suspected skinheads attack three Caucasians in Moscow
Agence France Presse — English
August 5, 2006 Saturday 10:00 PM GMT
MOSCOW, Aug 5 2006 — A group of suspected skinheads attacked three
residents of Russia’s Caucasian republic of Dagestan in a suburban
Moscow train, Russian news agencies reported late Saturday.
“Two Dagestanis were hospitalised in a serious condition, another one
was allowed to go home,” police sources were quoted by the ITAR-TASS
news agency as saying.
Police were questioning witnesses and searching for the culprits,
the sources said.
Recognisable Russian ethnic minorities — especially Chechens and
other Caucasians — as well as Armenians, Roma gypsies and Jews,
and foreign nationals such as Africans and Asians, have increasingly
been targeted in racist attacks.
Although a string of murders by skinheads has grabbed the headlines,
human rights campaigners also accuse Russian security forces and
semi-official law enforcement militias of routine abuses and point
to a climate of near-impunity.
Crimes against foreigners in Russia have risen by 33 percent this year
compared with the same period in 2005, with 6,000 crimes registered
against foreigners and non-citizens, the interior ministry has
announced.
Rights defenders reported that ethnic hatred motivated 18 murders
and 129 attacks this year.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress