100 years of sorrow and joy
Montreal Gazette , Canada
July 24, 2006
Ask ‘Nene’ about the Armenian genocide, and her awful memories unfold
in novelistic detail. But through a life of quiet, patient dignity,
she has been a guiding light to her large family Article Tools
ANNETTE AGHAZARIAN, Freelance Published: Monday, July 24, 2006
Some people touch the lives of everyone they meet without ever
realizing the effect they have. They don’t need to write a book or
govern a country to hold such great power; in their own simple way,
they can restore your faith in God and humanity.
This month, Arousiag Aghazarian turned 100 years old. You would never
know it by looking at her, but if you take the time to listen to her
stories, she will transport you to a time and place unimaginable.
Although her health is failing, her mind and heart are still strong,
and she has forgotten nothing.
Memories unfold behind her now blind eyes, like the pages in a
history book. If you ask her about her life, she will describe it
in such detail that you might think she was reading passages from
a novel. She can tell you how she witnessed the horrors of genocide
as a child and travelled like a fugitive for more than a decade in
her bare feet. She has seen entire families, churches and villages
obliterated. She has experienced the ugly brutality of war but remains
strangely optimistic, because she has always lived her life as a true
survivor and never as a victim. If you listen very closely, you will
understand the concept of faith: someone who quietly and courageously
moves forward under tragic circumstances and never once asks, “Why me?”
Imagine sitting atop a family tree spanning five generations and
knowing that somehow, by the grace of God, your life was spared for
reasons you never would have expected. You lived through a massacre,
were married off at 13, and gave birth to your first child at 15,
when you were still a child yourself. You are the mother of six,
grandmother of 13, great-grandmother of 22, and you now await the
grandchild of your own grandchild. Would you have ever dreamed that
all these children would speak a language (Armenian) you were forbidden
to learn?
“Nene” means grandmother in Turkish. And all her children, from 85 down
to to 2 years old, call her Nene. She lives with her only daughter,
who refuses to put her in a convalescent facility. She has spent a
century washing and cooking and mothering for so many, and to take
her away from her home and her family would be unthinkable.
When I suffered through eight years of infertility and had given up
hope, Nene never once lost faith. She told me she would not leave
this Earth until I produced a child. Only after my son was born did I
truly understand the beauty of her perseverance. When I looked at his
perfect little face, I felt what she always knew: to feel great joy,
you must first know great sorrow.
Nene never blames anyone for the events of her life. She knows her
fate lies with a higher power. Through the atrocities of war, she
followed a divine path that only her eyes could see. With the birth
of each child, her heart grew stronger, as did her patience. When I
asked her through what miracles she survived, the simplicity of her
words fell heavy on my chest: “It was my silence that kept me alive.
My silence and my patience – that is what God gave me.”
There are no diplomas on Nene’s shelves. There isn’t a Nobel Peace
Prize for all her accomplishments, but her house is full of awards.
On every wall, table or dresser there is the photo of a child Nene
has raised. Every single one of us holds a memory deep in our hearts
of a time when she made us feel worthy of her love.
Some people escape tragic circumstances but allow their pain to
consume them. Others live their lives with a quiet dignity and
lead by example. Like Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel, Nene has often
wondered why her life was spared when so many others were destroyed.
She never questions God’s will, but as she reached 100 years on this
planet she couldn’t help but ask why she’s still here.
Perhaps we, her family, need to be reminded to be grateful for what we
have and for how far we have come. And that without Nene’s strength
and courage, none of us would be here today. She has taught us the
importance of family and the appreciation of simple things.
There are far too many of us now to be seated at one table for a
Sunday meal, but we all can remember the wonderful smells that danced
in Nene’s kitchen. Until she went blind at 90, she still prepared with
her own hands the delicacies that take all day to make – the home-baked
bread, dolma, stuffed meatballs, roasted lamb, and her famous mantee.
Nene’s hands now lie still in her lap, but they are waiting. There is
one more child on the way and she wants to be ready. She must rock
him to sleep as she rocked so many of us when our own mothers were
too tired. It is her legacy to soothe our cries.
Annette Aghazarian is a Montreal writer and granddaughter of Arousiag
Aghazarian.
algazette/news/arts/story.html?id=5f03e5e0-b5a3-4f ef-98e7-f4daeb39e3ec

Mary Beth Danielson – Live from Armenia
Journal Times Online, WI
July 24, 2006
By Mary Beth Danielson
My neighbors are Armenian. Well, actually, Jim is not, but Susan
sure is, and their children, like good kids everywhere, seem to be
mostly fun.
Susan Proctor and her teenage daughters, Kati and Lillian, have spent
most of July in Armenia. They joined a Habitat for Humanity work
crew from St. Mesrob in Racine. Thirteen folks from this congregation
traveled to Armenia to join in the construction and repair of houses
for folks there who are very poor.
Their Armenian volunteer coordinator, Tatevik, wrote this to them at
the end of their stint. “Your team worked with 4 families in Lori
Region and 5 families in Gavar, Gegharkunick region. You mixed and
carried 36 tons of concrete and 16 tons of sand. Huge work, isn’t
it?” I e-mailed Susan and the girls to ask about their adventure.
Kati, who just finished her first year at the University of Chicago,
wrote back to me.
“Landing in the airport in Yerevan is always an interesting
experience. Every time I hope that it will be better, but the Armenians
waiting in lines with us are as pushy and loud as ever. After we
finally get through, we leave the airport to drive through Yerevan,
the capital city of Armenia. It’s in a valley. A million people live
there, though there are no skyscrapers. Street lights are turned off
late at night, so it’s beautiful and you can see the stars. Also,
at night, there are cool breezes, so it isn’t as ridiculously hot as
it is in the day.
“The sun is rising as we drive north through the city and I am struck
by what’s around me. Not necessarily by its beauty, but its presence.
By all the changes since the last time we were here.
“We drove to Vanadzor, a city of about 100,000 about 3 hours north
of the airport. It’s beautiful. It’s surrounded by hilly, green
mountains that are a pleasure to wake up to every day, though not to
drive through! “We didn’t start work the first two days. We visited
old monasteries and churches. Armenia converted to Christianity ten
years before the Roman empire did, making it the first Christian
nation on Earth. So it has a lot of churches to visit.
“The third day we started working. Amazingly, the drizzle stopped long
enough for us to start on the first family’s home. It was a two-story
house that they hadn’t been able to finish back in the nineties. Since
then the family of five had been living in three small rooms. The
bathroom was an outhouse that I couldn’t imagine using once, much
less for eight years.
“We moved concrete all morning, pouring it on the roof of the
unfinished part until the rain started again and we had to break
for lunch.
“Once a little old lady showed up at the work site to thank us
profusely for our work. It should be noted she didn’t speak English
and we’re going on my limited Armenian (Kati studied Armenian this year
at college). I was standing closest to the road because I was filling
water buckets, so she started talking to me. She kept saying how happy
she was that we were doing this. Suddenly she asked if I was married,
then started talking about her wonderful grandson … It was amusing,
to say the least.
“One memorable day our lunch was a mixed blessing. It was lamb kebab,
which was quite good, except for the fact that most of us had seen the
lamb being butchered. Those with weaker stomachs and slight vegetarian
leanings decided against eating it. The sight of the lamb’s head
sitting on the stoop didn’t help much, either.
“There was a funny moment one evening when some of the guys ordered
hamburgers at a restaurant in the city. Hamburger type buns came,
but they had ham on them!” I asked about the spirit of the people,
the pace of life.
Susan wrote this: “My sister and I sponsor a girl, named Mane, in
Armenia. Last year we went through all the proper channels to arrange
a visit with her. This year I just e-mailed to the coordinator that
we were going to drop in on her on Sunday after church. He wrote back
with her address but said he couldn’t call because her family doesn’t
have phone.
“That afternoon our cab driver found the house after asking several
people for directions, which were cheerfully given. We finally pulled
up to a house with two women outside and told them we were looking
for Mane. They immediately invited us onto their porch, then made
phone calls to get Mane over to see us. I’m still not exactly sure
how they were related to her. Then they brought out Armenian coffee,
peaches picked off their garden tree, strawberries, dried apricots,
and candies. Even though their English was negligible and our Armenian
worse, we all talked for a half hour until Mane arrived with her
father. To our surprise, he pulled out homemade wine and was ready
to light up the grill to make us a meal! “The best part was that our
cab driver was part of the party, too. He sat down and had coffee,
joined in on the conversation! “The thing here that is so beautiful,
gracious and rich is the spirit of hospitality and friendliness of
the people of this country.”

ASBAREZ ONLINE
TOP STORIES
07/24/2006
TO ACCESS PREVIOUS ASBAREZ ONLINE EDITIONS PLEASE VISIT OUR
WEBSITE AT <;HTTP://WWW.ASBAREZ. COM 1. EU Concerned Over Azeri Calls for Resumption of War 2. Parties Issue Joint Announcement on Lebanon Crisis 3. Over 400 People Evacuated to Armenia From Lebanon 4. US Urges Turkey to Delay Anti-PKK Attacks 1. EU Concerned Over Azeri Calls for Resumption of War YEREVAN (Yerkir, RFE/RL)--The European Union's special representative to South Caucasus Peter Semneby Monday criticized Azerbaijan for calling for the resumption of military activities as a resolution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. He said if Azerbaijan continued to make hostile calls then the EU would be forced to make them realize that the resurgence of military activities could have a negative impact on the further development of the process. "Any military solution concerns us," the visiting dignitary told a joint press conference with Armenia's foreign minister Vartan Oskanian. In response to a reporter's inquiry about possible sanctions against any country calling for the resumption of war, Semneby said "I cant's talk of sanctions but the EU can convince the sides to stay away from military assertions because it would not be in their interest." The diplomat explained that such a course not only be detrimental in politically, but also in economic terms as the countries of the region are building free-market economies and a war would make investors reconsider their decisions of investing in the region. Oskanian said that the two discussed joint Armenia-EU initiatives, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Armenia's relations with its neighbors and next year's parliamentary elections in Armenia. When asked whether the OSCE Minsk Group US co-chairman Matthew Bryza, would make new proposals on the conflict resolution process during his visit to the region, Oskanian said such proposals do not drop from the sky, but rather are formulated at the negotiation table. He added he hoped Bryza could convince Azerbaijan to resume talks. The freedom and fairness of parliamentary elections due in Armenia next spring will be "crucially important" for the Armenian government's drive to forge closer political and economic links with the European Union, Semneby said. The EU representative warned that a repeat of serious electoral fraud would seriously jeopardize Yerevan's participation in the European Neighborhood Policy program that provides for a privileged partnership with the 25-nation bloc. Speaking during a regular visit in Yerevan, he said the plan of ENP-related actions which the Armenian government is currently discussing with the EU will include a pledge to conduct the upcoming polls in accordance "European values, standards and norms," reported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "The elections that will follow the entry into force of the action plan will be a crucially important test for Armenia in terms of the quality of its future relationship with the European Union," Semneby told a news conference after talks with senior Armenian officials. "After all, Armenia has committed itself and has confirmed in the far-reaching and detailed document, which will regulate the Armenia-EU relationship, that free and fair elections are a top priority," he said. "That is why I expect the elections to be free and fair." The EU has always added its voice to Western criticism of the Armenian authorities' handling of elections. In particular, the bloc questioned their "commitment to democracy" in the wake of last November's constitutional referendum which was marred by allegations of massive vote rigging. However, EU pressure for Armenia's democratization was otherwise minimal until recently. The EU signaled its intention to press harder for political reform in February when its External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner visited Yerevan and raised the issue with Armenian leaders. They assured her that they will do their best to tackle the chronic vote rigging. Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian said the issue was high on the agenda of his talks with Semneby. He said Yerevan is close to completing its negotiations with the EU on the ENP action plan and will publicize the document "soon." "The Armenian side is having virtually no problems [in the talks,]" he said. "There are a number of minor outstanding issues which we think will be sorted out in the course of next week." Semneby's itinerary in Yerevan also included a meeting with President Robert Kocharian. The meeting was apparently not held in the presidential palace in Yerevan, with photographs released by the presidential press service showing Kocharian wearing casual clothes. 2. Parties Issue Joint Announcement on Lebanon Crisis BEIRUT (Aztag)--Representatives of the three traditional political parties met Monday evening to discuss the ongoing crisis in Lebanon and to assess the condition of the Lebanese Armenian community. Following the meeting a joint communique was issued signed by the Armenian Democratic League (Ramkavar party) Central Executive, the Social Democratic Hunchakian Party Governing Body and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Central Committee of Lebanon. The political leaders discussed the 13-day-old Israeli attacks on Lebanon and called on the international community to accelerate its efforts for an immediate cease fire and an "end to the bloodshed." They also assessed the resulting refugee crisis in the country and the conditions under which the victims of these attacks are living. The meeting emphasized the importance of community unity, which was deemed as "the only guarantee to maintain the security and safety of the community." The political parties decided to continue holding such meetings, in order to effectively monitor and respond to the military and diplomatic developments in the country. Continuing assistance to the displaced citizens of Lebanon through the parties' organizational and community mechanisms was an important topic of discussion at the meeting, which pledged to further its efforts to provide care to refugees and victims. To this end, the meeting welcomed the assistance by the Armenian government, as well as various Diaspora communities, which the meeting participants said underscored the national role the Lebanese-Armenian community plays in our reality. 3. Over 400 People Evacuated to Armenia From Lebanon YEREVAN (RFE/RL)--More than 400 Armenians and ethnic Armenian citizens of Lebanon have been evacuated to Armenia since the start of Israel's military assault against the Middle Eastern nation, a senior official in Yerevan said on Monday. Deputy Foreign Minister Gegham Gharibjanian said virtually all of them have been transported to Yerevan from Syria in special charter flights carried out by the Armavia national airline and partly subsidized by the Armenian government. "The planes flying to Syria are empty and the government covers their one-way cost," told RFE/RL. Gharibjanian said Armavia carried out a similar flight to Tel Aviv, bringing back more than 50 Armenian nationals residing in Israel early on Monday. Not all of them are believed to have returned to Armenia for security reasons, though. The government estimates that some 1,200 Armenian nationals lived in Lebanon before the start of the Israeli onslaught almost two weeks ago. Lebanon is also home to an estimated 80,000 ethnic Armenians, most of them living in the Christian districts of Beirut that have been largely spared bombardment so far. The Armenian community has not reported any casualties yet. "Fortunately, our forecasts have proved correct and there has been no massive influx [of Armenian evacuees from Lebanon], even though our diplomatic missions are prepared to help to evacuate more people," said Gharibjanian. The government in Yerevan announced last week that any citizen of Lebanon fleeing the war and willing to take refuge in Armenia will be granted special residency permits free of charge. It also sent two diplomats to Beirut and Aleppo, Syria to assist in the evacuation. So far, about 30,000 foreign nationals have fled Lebanon, most traveling to Cyprus and Turkey by boat. 4. US Urges Turkey to Delay Anti-PKK Attacks CRAWFORD, Texas (AFP)--The United States appealed to Turkey to delay its invasion of Iraq in an effort to destroy Kurdish insurgency strongholds. Over the weekend, President George Bush telephoned Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and urged a postponement of an invasion of Iraq. Officials said Bush, in his second phone call in three days, pledged to intensify US efforts to eliminate strongholds of the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, in Iraq's Kandil mountains. They discussed the need to work jointly to address that terrorist threat," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also contacted her Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul. They said what ever is necessary will be done, the Turkish Zaman daily newspaper reported. Rice told Gul that the US is aware of the seriousness of the problem and would not let it go unattended. She said the US would definitely do whatever was needed. Matthew Bryza, US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, held a press conference in Washington and promised concrete steps would be taken against the PKK soon. The most important item in Rice -Gul's phone conversation was the PKK issue. Gul told Rice that Turkey wanted an immediate, visible, sensible, and concrete solution to the PKK issue. Turkey would be seriously hampered in its aid efforts to Iraq as long as the PKK existed. The two phone conversations were welcome relief to Ankara and raised optimism that the US would take firm steps against the PKK. As for tripartite meeting, which was attended by military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials from the US, Turkey, and Iraq, sources said, any decisions made would be as important as the meeting held. Tripartite meetings were previously held in February 2005 and August 2005 in Ankara and Washington respectively. The results, however, did not satisfy Ankara. The statement, "concrete results are expected," is being interpreted as several PKK leaders may be arrested, and handed over to Turkey. In 2005, Turkey delivered official documents to Iraqi and US officials about 150 PKK members. However, neither Baghdad nor Washington has taken any steps so far. President Jalal Talabani said Iraqi territory should not be used to launch attacks against Turkey but insisted that Iraq's sovereignty should be respected. The president's comments came a day after Turkish troops killed two Kurdish rebels in a clash near the border with Iraq and amid increasing threats by Turkey to launch attacks against members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, in northern Iraq. "It is necessary to solve the pending matters between Iraq and Turkey and securing the border between the two countries," Talabani said according to a statement released by his office. "Iraq's territories should not be used and exploited against Turkey." The PKK has been battling for autonomy in Turkey's southeast for the past two decades in a fight that has killed more than 37,000 people. The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. There has been escalating tension between Turkey and rebels. The deaths of 15 soldiers in three separate attacks last week prompted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to say the Turkish military was considering a cross-border operation to clear PKK bases in northern Iraq. The US, which has some 130,000 troops in Iraq, is strongly opposed to such an operation. "Iraq's sovereignty and independence should be respected," Talabani said when he received Turkey's acting ambassador. All subscription inquiries and changes must be made through the proper carrier and not Asbarez Online. ASBAREZ ONLINE does not transmit address changes and subscription requests. (c) 2006 ASBAREZ ONLINE. All Rights Reserved. ASBAREZ provides this news service to ARMENIAN NEWS NETWORK members for academic research or personal use only and may not be reproduced in or through mass media outlets.

KNOW IT ALL Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?
The New Yorker
July 24, 2006
By STACY SCHIFF
On March 1st, Wikipedia, the online interactive encyclopedia, hit
the million-articles mark, with an entry on Jordanhill, a railway
station in suburban Glasgow. Its author, Ewan MacDonald, posted a
single sentence about the station at 11 P.M., local time; over the
next twenty-four hours, the entry was edited more than four hundred
times, by dozens of people. (Jordanhill happens to be the “1029th
busiest station in the United Kingdom”; it “no longer has a staffed
ticket counter.”) The Encyclopædia Britannica, which for more than
two centuries has been considered the gold standard for reference
works, has only a hundred and twenty thousand entries in its most
comprehensive edition. Apparently, no traditional encyclopedia has ever
suspected that someone might wonder about Sudoku or about prostitution
in China. Or, for that matter, about Capgras delusion (the unnerving
sensation that an impostor is sitting in for a close relative),
the Boston molasses disaster, the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, Bill
Gates’s house, the forty-five-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War, or Islam
in Iceland. Wikipedia includes fine entries on Kafka and the War of
the Spanish Succession, and also a complete guide to the ships of the
U.S. Navy, a definition of Philadelphia cheesesteak, a masterly page on
Scrabble, a list of historical cats (celebrity cats, a cat millionaire,
the first feline to circumnavigate Australia), a survey of invented
expletives in fiction (“bippie,” “cakesniffer,” “furgle”), instructions
for curing hiccups, and an article that describes, with schematic
diagrams, how to build a stove from a discarded soda can. The how-to
entries represent territory that the encyclopedia has not claimed since
the eighteenth century. You could cure a toothache or make snowshoes
using the original Britannica, of 1768-71. (You could also imbibe a lot
of prejudice and superstition. The entry on Woman was just six words:
“The female of man. See HOMO.”) If you look up “coffee preparation”
on Wikipedia, you will find your way, via the entry on Espresso, to
a piece on types of espresso machines, which you will want to consult
before buying. There is also a page on the site dedicated to “Errors
in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia”
(Stalin’s birth date, the true inventor of the safety razor).
Because there are no physical limits on its size, Wikipedia can aspire
to be all-inclusive. It is also perfectly configured to be current:
there are detailed entries for each of the twelve finalists on this
season’s “American Idol,” and the article on the “2006 Israel-Lebanon
Conflict” has been edited more than four thousand times since it was
created, on July 12th, six hours after Hezbollah militants ignited
the hostilities by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers. Wikipedia, which
was launched in 2001, is now the seventeenth-most-popular site on the
Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNBC.com and the online
versions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal combined. The number
of visitors has been doubling every four months; the site receives as
many as fourteen thousand hits per second. Wikipedia functions as a
filter for vast amounts of information online, and it could be said
that Google owes the site for tidying up the neighborhood. But the
search engine is amply repaying its debt: because Wikipedia pages
contain so many links to other entries on the site, and are so
frequently updated, they enjoy an enviably high page rank.
The site has achieved this prominence largely without paid staff or
revenue. It has five employees in addition to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s
thirty-nine-year-old founder, and it carries no advertising. In 2003,
Wikipedia became a nonprofit organization; it meets most of its budget,
of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with donations, the bulk
of them contributions of twenty dollars or less. Wales says that he is
on a mission to “distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person
on the planet in their own language,” and to an astonishing degree he
is succeeding. Anyone with Internet access can create a Wikipedia entry
or edit an existing one. The site currently exists in more than two
hundred languages and has hundreds of thousands of contributors around
the world. Wales is at the forefront of a revolution in knowledge
gathering: he has marshalled an army of volunteers who believe that,
working collaboratively, they can produce an encyclopedia that is as
good as any written by experts, and with an unprecedented range.
Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night’s party
or to next season’s iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more
immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness,
idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing
about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing
invites abuse. Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering
with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been
banned from Wikipedia several times. (It is not subtle to change
Senator Robert Byrd’s age from eighty-eight to a hundred and eighty.
It is subtler to sanitize one’s voting record in order to distance
oneself from an unpopular President, or to delete broken campaign
promises.) Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos.
Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy,
has sprouted policies and procedures. At the same time, the site
embodies our newly casual relationship to truth. When confronted with
evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse:
look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia,
are wrong! As defenses go, this is the epistemological equivalent of
“But Johnny jumped off the bridge first.” Wikipedia, though, is only
five years old. One day, it may grow up.
The encyclopedic impulse dates back more than two thousand years
and has rarely balked at national borders. Among the first general
reference works was Emperor’s Mirror, commissioned in 220 A.D. by a
Chinese emperor, for use by civil servants. The quest to catalogue
all human knowledge accelerated in the eighteenth century. In
the seventeen-seventies, the Germans, champions of thoroughness,
began assembling a two-hundred-and-forty-two-volume masterwork. A
few decades earlier, Johann Heinrich Zedler, a Leipzig bookseller,
had alarmed local competitors when he solicited articles for his
Universal-Lexicon. His rivals, fearing that the work would put them out
of business by rendering all other books obsolete, tried unsuccessfully
to sabotage the project.
It took a devious Frenchman, Pierre Bayle, to conceive of an
encyclopedia composed solely of errors. After the idea failed
to generate much enthusiasm among potential readers, he instead
compiled a “Dictionnaire Historique et Critique,” which consisted
almost entirely of footnotes, many highlighting flaws of earlier
scholarship. Bayle taught readers to doubt, a lesson in subversion that
Diderot and d’Alembert, the authors of the Encyclopedie (1751-80),
learned well. Their thirty-five-volume work preached rationalism at
the expense of church and state. The more stolid Britannica was born
of cross-channel rivalry and an Anglo-Saxon passion for utility.
Wales’s first encyclopedia was the World Book, which his parents
acquired after dinner one evening in 1969, from a door-to-door
salesman. Wales-who resembles a young Billy Crystal with the
neuroses neatly tucked in-recalls the enchantment of pasting in
update stickers that cross-referenced older entries to the annual
supplements. Wales’s mother and grandmother ran a private school
in Huntsville, Alabama, which he attended from the age of three. He
graduated from Auburn University with a degree in finance and began
a Ph.D. in the subject, enrolling first at the University of Alabama
and later at Indiana University. In 1994, he decided to take a job
trading options in Chicago rather than write his dissertation. Four
years later, he moved to San Diego, where he used his savings to found
an Internet portal. Its audience was mostly men; pornography-videos
and blogs-accounted for about a tenth of its revenues. Meanwhile,
Wales was cogitating. In his view, misinformation, propaganda, and
ignorance are responsible for many of the world’s ills. “I’m very
much an Enlightenment kind of guy,” Wales told me. The promise of the
Internet is free knowledge for everyone, he recalls thinking. How do
we make that happen?
As an undergraduate, he had read Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 free-market
manifesto, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which argues that
a person’s knowledge is by definition partial, and that truth is
established only when people pool their wisdom. Wales thought of the
essay again in the nineteen-nineties, when he began reading about
the open-source movement, a group of programmers who believed that
software should be free and distributed in such a way that anyone could
modify the code. He was particularly impressed by “The Cathedral and
the Bazaar,” an essay, later expanded into a book, by Eric Raymond,
one of the movement’s founders. “It opened my eyes to the possibility
of mass collaboration,” Wales said.
The first step was a misstep. In 2000, Wales hired Larry Sanger, a
graduate student in philosophy he had met on a Listserv, to help him
create an online general-interest encyclopedia called Nupedia. The
idea was to solicit articles from scholars, subject the articles to a
seven-step review process, and post them free online. Wales himself
tried to compose the entry on Robert Merton and options-pricing
theory; after he had written a few sentences, he remembered why he
had dropped out of graduate school. “They were going to take my essay
and send it to two finance professors in the field,” he recalled. “I
had been out of academia for several years. It was intimidating;
it felt like homework.”
After a year, Nupedia had only twenty-one articles, on such topics
as atonality and Herodotus. In January, 2001, Sanger had dinner
with a friend, who told him about the wiki, a simple software tool
that allows for collaborative writing and editing. Sanger thought
that a wiki might attract new contributors to Nupedia. (Wales says
that using a wiki was his idea.) Wales agreed to try it, more or
less as a lark. Under the wiki model that Sanger and Wales adopted,
each entry included a history page, which preserves a record of all
editing changes. They added a talk page, to allow for discussion of the
editorial process-an idea Bayle would have appreciated. Sanger coined
the term Wikipedia, and the site went live on January 15, 2001. Two
days later, he sent an e-mail to the Nupedia mailing list-about two
thousand people. “Wikipedia is up!” he wrote. “Humor me. Go there
and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.”
Wales braced himself for “complete rubbish.” He figured that if he
and Sanger were lucky the wiki would generate a few rough drafts for
Nupedia. Within a month, Wikipedia had six hundred articles. After
a year, there were twenty thousand.
Wales is fond of citing a 1962 proclamation by Charles Van Doren,
who later became an editor at Britannica. Van Doren believed that
the traditional encyclopedia was defunct. It had grown by accretion
rather than by design; it had sacrificed artful synthesis to plodding
convention; it looked backward. “Because the world is radically new,
the ideal encyclopedia should be radical, too,” Van Doren wrote. “It
should stop being safe-in politics, in philosophy, in science.”
In its seminal Western incarnation, the encyclopedia had been a
dangerous book. The Encyclopedie muscled aside religious institutions
and orthodoxies to install human reason at the center of the
universe-and, for that muscling, briefly earned the book’s publisher a
place in the Bastille. As the historian Robert Darnton pointed out, the
entry in the Encyclopedie on cannibalism ends with the cross-reference
“See Eucharist.” What Wales seems to have in mind, however, is less
Van Doren’s call to arms than that of an earlier rabble-rouser. In
the nineteen-thirties, H. G. Wells lamented that, while the world was
becoming smaller and moving at increasing speed, the way information
was distributed remained old-fashioned and ineffective. He prescribed a
“world brain,” a collaborative, decentralized repository of knowledge
that would be subject to continual revision. More radically-with
“alma-matricidal impiety,” as he put it-Wells indicted academia;
the university was itself medieval. “We want a Henry Ford today
to modernize the distribution of knowledge, make good knowledge
cheap and easy in this still very ignorant, ill-educated, ill-served
English-speaking world of ours,” he wrote. Had the Internet existed
in his lifetime, Wells might have beaten Wales to the punch.
Wales’s most radical contribution may be not to have made information
free but-in his own alma-matricidal way-to have invented a system that
does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read fifteen-year-old. “To me,
the key thing is getting it right,” Wales has said of Wikipedia’s
contributors. “I don’t care if they’re a high-school kid or a Harvard
professor.” At the beginning, there were no formal rules, though
Sanger eventually posted a set of guidelines on the site. The first was
“Ignore all the rules.” Two of the others have become central tenets:
articles must reflect a neutral point of view (N.P.O.V., in Wikipedia
lingo), and their content must be both verifiable and previously
published. Among other things, the prohibition against original
research heads off a great deal of material about people’s pets.
Insofar as Wikipedia has a physical existence, it is in St.
Petersburg, Florida, in an executive suite that serves as the
headquarters of the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of
Wikipedia and its lesser-known sister projects, among them Wikisource
(a library of free texts), Wikinews (a current-events site) and
Wikiquote (bye-bye Bartlett’s). Wales, who is married and has a
five-year-old daughter, says that St. Petersburg’s attractive housing
prices lured him from California. When I visited the offices in March,
the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a
dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge.
The real work at Wikipedia takes place not in Florida but on thousands
of computer screens across the world. Perhaps Wikipedia’s greatest
achievement-one that Wales did not fully anticipate-was the creation
of a community. Wikipedians are officially anonymous, contributing
to unsigned entries under screen names. They are also predominantly
male-about eighty per cent, Wales says-and compulsively social,
conversing with each other not only on the talk pages attached
to each entry but on Wikipedia-dedicated I.R.C. channels and on
user pages, which regular contributors often create and which
serve as a sort of personalized office cooler. On the page of a
twenty-year-old Wikipedian named Arocoun, who lists “philosophizing”
among his favorite activities, messages from other users range from the
reflective (“I’d argue against your claim that humans should aim to be
independent/self-reliant in all aspects of their lives . . . I don’t
think true independence is a realistic ideal given all the inherent
intertwinings of any society”) to the geekily flirtatious (“I’m a
neurotic painter from Ohio, and I guess if you consider your views
radical, then I’m a radical, too. So . . . we should be friends”).
Wikipedians have evolved a distinctive vocabulary, of which “revert,”
meaning “reinstate”-as in “I reverted the edit, but the user has
simply rereverted it”-may be the most commonly used word. Other terms
include WikiGnome (a user who keeps a low profile, fixing typos, poor
grammar, and broken links) and its antithesis, WikiTroll (a user who
persistently violates the site’s guidelines or otherwise engages in
disruptive behavior). There are Aspergian Wikipedians (seventy-two),
bipolar Wikipedians, vegetarian Wikipedians, antivegetarian
Wikipedians, existential Wikipedians, pro-Luxembourg Wikipedians,
and Wikipedians who don’t like to be categorized. According to a
page on the site, an avid interest in Wikipedia has been known to
afflict “computer programmers, academics, graduate students, game-show
contestants, news junkies, the unemployed, the soon-to-be unemployed
and, in general, people with multiple interests and good memories.”
You may travel in more exalted circles, but this covers pretty much
everyone I know.
Wikipedia may be the world’s most ambitious vanity press. There are two
hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom
about thirty-three hundred-fewer than two per cent-are responsible
for seventy per cent of the work. The site allows you to compare
contributors by the number of edits they have made, by the number of
articles that have been judged by community vote to be outstanding
(these “featured” articles often appear on the site’s home page), and
by hourly activity, in graph form. A seventeen-year-old P. G. Wodehouse
fan who specializes in British peerages leads the featured-article
pack, with fifty-eight entries. A twenty-four-year-old University of
Toronto graduate is the site’s premier contributor. Since composing
his first piece, on the Panama Canal, in 2001, he has written or
edited more than seventy-two thousand articles. “Wikipediholism” and
“editcountitis” are well defined on the site; both link to an article
on obsessive-compulsive disorder. (There is a Britannica entry for
O.C.D., but no version of it has included Felix Unger’s name in the
third sentence, a comprehensive survey of “OCD in literature and
film,” or a list of celebrity O.C.D. sufferers, which unites, surely
for the first time in history, Florence Nightingale with Joey Ramone.)
One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D.
in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to
sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private
university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially,
he contributed to articles in his field-on the penitential rite,
transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen
hours a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life
a secret from his colleagues and friends. (To his knowledge, he has
never met another Wikipedian, and he will not be attending Wikimania,
the second international gathering of the encyclopedia’s contributors,
which will take place in early August in Boston.)
Gradually, Essjay found himself devoting less time to editing and
more to correcting errors and removing obscenities from the site. In
May, he twice removed a sentence from the entry on Justin Timberlake
asserting that the pop star had lost his home in 2002 for failing
to pay federal taxes-a statement that Essjay knew to be false. The
incident ended there. Others involve ideological disagreements and
escalate into intense edit wars. A number of the disputes on the
English-language Wikipedia relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and to religious issues. Almost as acrimonious are the battles waged
over the entries on Macedonia, Danzig, the Armenian genocide, and
Henry Ford. Ethnic feuds die hard: Was Copernicus Polish, German,
or Prussian? (A nonbinding poll was conducted earlier this year
to determine whether the question merited mention in the article’s
lead.) Some debates may never be resolved: Was the 1812 Battle of
Borodino a victory for the Russians or for the French? What is the
date of Ann Coulter’s birth? Is apple pie all-American? (The answer,
at least for now, is no: “Apple trees didn’t even grow in America until
the Europeans brought them over,” one user railed. He was seconded
by another, who added, “Apple pie is very popular in the Netherlands
too. Americans did not invent or introduce it to the Netherlands. You
already plagiarized Santa Claus from our Saint Nicholas. Stop it!”) Who
could have guessed that “cheese” would figure among the site’s most
contested entries? (The controversy entailed whether in Asia there is
a cultural prohibition against eating it.) For the past nine months,
Baltimore’s climate has been a subject of bitter debate. What is the
average temperature in January?
At first, Wales handled the fistfights himself, but he was reluctant
to ban anyone from the site. As the number of users increased, so did
the editing wars and the incidence of vandalism. In October, 2001,
Wales appointed a small cadre of administrators, called admins, to
police the site for abuse. Admins can delete articles or protect them
from further changes, block users from editing, and revert text more
efficiently than can ordinary users. (There are now nearly a thousand
admins on the site.) In 2004, Wales formalized the 3R rule-initially
it had been merely a guideline-according to which any user who
reverts the same text more than three times in a twenty-four-hour
period is blocked from editing for a day. The policy grew out of a
series of particularly vitriolic battles, including one over the U.S.
economy-it was experiencing either high growth and low unemployment
or low growth and high unemployment.
Wales also appointed an arbitration committee to rule on disputes.
Before a case reaches the arbitration committee, it often passes
through a mediation committee. Essjay is serving a second term as
chair of the mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat,
and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians
authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He
often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to
Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C.
chat channels, where users often trade gossip about abuses they
have witnessed.
Five robots troll the site for obvious vandalism, searching for
obscenities and evidence of mass deletions, reverting text as they
go. More egregious violations require human intervention. Essjay
recently caught a user who, under one screen name, was replacing
sentences with nonsense and deleting whole entries and, under
another, correcting the abuses-all in order to boost his edit count.
He was banned permanently from the site. Some users who have been
caught tampering threaten revenge against the admins who apprehend
them. Essjay says that he routinely receives death threats. “There
are people who take Wikipedia way too seriously,” he told me.
(Wikipedians have acknowledged Essjay’s labors by awarding him numerous
barnstars-five-pointed stars, which the community has adopted as a
symbol of praise-including several Random Acts of Kindness Barnstars
and the Tireless Contributor Barnstar.)
Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate
hierarchy of users and policies about policies. Martin Wattenberg and
Fernanda B. Viegas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site
using computerized visual models called “history flows,” found that
the talk pages and “meta pages”-those dealing with coordination and
administration-have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles
once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of
last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it,
“People are talking about governance, not working on content.” Wales is
ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are
necessary. “Things work well when a group of people know each other,
and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting,”
he told me.
For all its protocol, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily
favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller
at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim
of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had
contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic,
who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse
effect, the case went into arbitration. “User William M. Connolley
strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does
not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. “His
views on climate science are singular and narrow.” A decision from
the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which
Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole. The
punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two
thousand pages on his watchlist-a feature that enables users to compile
a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He
says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page
on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that
in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user
who spends the most time on the site-or who yells the loudest-wins.
Connolley believes that Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know
what they’re talking about,” a view that is echoed by many academics
and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues that too
many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly
confident of their own opinions. He left Wikipedia in March, 2002,
after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the dot-com
bust. Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority in an
anti-authoritarian community. “Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect
anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule,” he told me. (Sanger is now the
director of collaborative projects at the online foundation Digital
Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based encyclopedia,
a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work. He promises
that it will have “the lowest error rate in history.”) Even Eric
Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that
” ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view,
the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little
minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on
science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was
trespassing on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the
Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond
said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable
to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard:
either it works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth.
Nor has increasing surveillance of the site by admins deterred
vandals, a majority of whom seem to be inserting obscenities and
absurdities into Wikipedia when they should be doing their homework.
Many are committing their pranks in the classroom: the abuse tends
to ebb on a Friday afternoon and resume early on a Monday. Entire
schools and universities have found their I.P. addresses blocked
as a result. The entry on George W. Bush has been vandalized so
frequently-sometimes more than twice a minute-that it is often closed
to editing for days. At any given time, a couple of hundred entries
are semi-protected, which means that a user must register his I.P.
address and wait several days before making changes. This group
recently included not only the entries on God, Galileo, and Al Gore
but also those on poodles, oranges, and Frederic Chopin. Even Wales
has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia entry-eighteen times in the
past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn
traffic on his Web portal. “Adult content” or “glamour photography”
are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the
site, they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian
strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to a compromise:
“erotic photography.”) He is repentant about his meddling. “People
shouldn’t do it, including me,” he said. “It’s in poor taste.”
Wales recently established an “oversight” function, by which some
admins (Essjay among them) can purge text from the system, so that
even the history page bears no record of its ever having been there.
Wales says that this measure is rarely used, and only in order
to remove slanderous or private information, such as a telephone
number. “It’s a perfectly reasonable power in any other situation,
but completely antithetical to this project,” said Jason Scott, a
longtime contributor to Wikipedia who has published several essays
critical of the site.
Is Wikipedia accurate? Last year, Nature published a survey
comparing forty-two entries on scientific topics on Wikipedia with
their counterparts in Encyclopædia Britannica. According to the
survey, Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Britannica’s,
a result that, oddly, was hailed as a triumph for the upstart. Such
exercises in nitpicking are relatively meaningless, as no reference
work is infallible. Britannica issued a public statement refuting
the survey’s findings, and took out a half-page advertisement in
the Times, which said, in part, “Britannica has never claimed to be
error-free. We have a reputation not for unattainable perfection but
for strong scholarship, sound judgment, and disciplined editorial
review.” Later, Jorge Cauz, Britannica’s president, told me in an
e-mail that if Wikipedia continued without some kind of editorial
oversight it would “decline into a hulking mediocre mass of uneven,
unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles.” Wales has said
that he would consider Britannica a competitor, “except that I think
they will be crushed out of existence within five years.”
Larry Sanger proposes a fine distinction between knowledge that
is useful and knowledge that is reliable, and there is no question
that Wikipedia beats every other source when it comes to breadth,
efficiency, and accessibility. Yet the site’s virtues are also
liabilities. Cauz scoffed at the notion of “good enough knowledge.”
“I hate that,” he said, pointing out that there is no way to know
which facts in an entry to trust. Or, as Robert McHenry, a veteran
editor at Britannica, put it, “We can get the wrong answer to a
question quicker than our fathers and mothers could find a pencil.”
Part of the problem is provenance. The bulk of Wikipedia’s content
originates not in the stacks but on the Web, which offers up everything
from breaking news, spin, and gossip to proof that the moon landings
never took place. Glaring errors jostle quiet omissions. Wales, in
his public speeches, cites the Google test: “If it isn’t on Google, it
doesn’t exist.” This position poses another difficulty: on Wikipedia,
the present takes precedent over the past. The (generally good) entry
on St. Augustine is shorter than the one on Britney Spears. The article
on Nietzsche has been modified incessantly, yielding five archived
talk pages. But the debate is largely over Nietzsche’s politics;
taken as a whole, the entry is inferior to the essay in the current
Britannica, a model of its form. (From Wikipedia: “Nietzsche also
owned a copy of Philipp Mainlander’s ‘Die Philosophie der Erlosung,’
a work which, like Schopenhauer’s philosophy, expressed pessimism.”)
Wikipedia remains a lumpy work in progress. The entries can read
as though they had been written by a seventh grader: clarity and
concision are lacking; the facts may be sturdy, but the connective
tissue is either anemic or absent; and citation is hit or miss.
Wattenberg and Viegas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of
Wikipedia edits consist of deletions and additions rather than of
attempts to reorder paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole,
and they believe that Wikipedia’s twenty-five-line editing window
deserves some of the blame. It is difficult to craft an article
in its entirety when reading it piecemeal, and, given Wikipedians’
obsession with racking up edits, simple fixes often take priority
over more complex edits. Wattenberg and Viegas have also identified a
“first-mover advantage”: the initial contributor to an article often
sets the tone, and that person is rarely a Macaulay or a Johnson. The
over-all effect is jittery, the textual equivalent of a film shot
with a handheld camera.
What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes
wrong, and sometimes illiterate? When I showed the Harvard philosopher
Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the
one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted
when he learned how Wikipedia worked. “Obviously, this was the work
of experts,” he said. In the nineteen-sixties, William F. Buckley,
Jr., said that he would sooner “live in a society governed by the
first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in
a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard
University.” On Wikipedia, he might finally have his wish. How was his
page? Essentially on target, he said. All the same, Buckley added,
he would prefer that those anonymous two thousand souls govern,
and leave the encyclopedia writing to the experts.
Over breakfast in early May, I asked Cauz for an analogy with which
to compare Britannica and Wikipedia. “Wikipedia is to Britannica as
‘American Idol’ is to the Juilliard School,” he e-mailed me the
next day. A few days later, Wales also chose a musical metaphor.
“Wikipedia is to Britannica as rock and roll is to easy listening,” he
suggested. “It may not be as smooth, but it scares the parents and is
a lot smarter in the end.” He is right to emphasize the fright factor
over accuracy. As was the Encyclopedie, Wikipedia is a combination
of manifesto and reference work. Peer review, the mainstream media,
and government agencies have landed us in a ditch. Not only are
we impatient with the authorities but we are in a mood to talk
back. Wikipedia offers endless opportunities for self-expression. It
is the love child of reading groups and chat rooms, a second home
for anyone who has written an Amazon review. This is not the first
time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an elite,
or cast a harsh light on certitude. Jimmy Wales may or may not be
the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate,
with but a squint back at the railroad. We’re on the open road now,
without conductors and timetables. We’re free to chart our own course,
also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. Your truth or mine?
–Boundary_(ID_D4sGAzegFgtNW2cybxNmmw)–

Azeri president receives Pakistani Ambiassador
TREND Information, Azerbaijan
July 24, 2006
Author: S.Agayeva
Azerbaijan and Pakistan successfully cooperate in many spheres,
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev stated on 24 July in a meeting with
Pakistani Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Muhammad Hafizi, on the occasion
of accomplishment of his tenure in Azerbaijan, Trend reports.
The head of state voiced his confidence in further development of
the bilateral relationships.
The Ambassador voiced his gratitude to the Azerbaijani president
for support rendered during his diplomatic mission in Azerbaijan.
Reminding of mutual visits of the Presidents of the two countries,
the diplomat voiced his confidence that the visits will enhance the
bilateral relationships between Azerbaijan and Pakistan.
Touching upon the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh
Hafizi stated the country’s leadership supports Azerbaijan’s fair
position in this issue and is for the settlement of the conflict in
accordance with international law and principles.

“RESCUER 2006” CPX CREATES PRECONDITIONS FOR FURTHER INTERNATIONAL
July 24, 2006
COOPERATION FOR ARMENIA
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
YEREVAN, July 24. /ARKA/. The joint command-post exercises (CPX)
“Rescuer 2006” created preconditions for further international
cooperation, the US Co-Commander of the “Rescuer 2006” CPX, member of
the National Guard, Kanzas, USA, Colonel Joe Wheeler told reporters.
He pointed out that numerous difficulties, particularly linguistic
ones, arose during the exercises. However, all the tasks set to the
participants were accomplished. Wheeler reported that attention was
focused on tactical decisions and on planning specific procedures.
Without making any appraisal of the exercises, he pointed out that
they must be finished before. On behalf of the Kansas National Guard,
Colonel Wheeler thanked the RA Ministry of Defense for high-level
organization of the exercises. The “Rescuer 2006” CPX are held under
NATO’s “Partnership for Peace” program, involving 300 servicemen
from 11 countries: the USA, Armenia, Albania, Austria, Georgia,
Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, Macedonia, Romania, Tajikistan and Ukraine.
The USA-sponsored exercises are held under a joint program of the US
European Command and the RA Ministry of Defense. P.T.

PRESS RELEASE
Diocese of the Armenian Church of Australia & New Zealand
10 Macquarie Street
Chatswood NSW 2067
AUSTRALIA
Contact: Laura Artinian
Tel: (02) 9419-8056
Fax: (02) 9904-8446
Email: [email protected]
24 July 2006
SAFE ARRIVAL HOME FOR SYDNEY-BASED DANCE GROUP
Sydney, Australia – The last of the 80 plus group of the Hamazkaine
Sevan Dance Group caught up in the bombings in Lebanon touched down
in Sydney on Saturday evening after a harrowing ordeal.
The 45 person dance troupe, mostly made up of teenage youth, with their
minders had been on a concert tour of Armenia, Syria and Lebanon and
were due to fly out of Beirut the same day the airport was first
bombed. The group was part of the first convoy organised by the
Australian Government to evacuate from Beirut, enduring a 17-hour
road trip which saw them enter Syria through a northern border and
onto Amman, Jordan. The evacuation operation, considered high risk,
was kept secret for security reasons until word was received that
the group had arrived safely in Damascus, Syria.
Thereon in, evacuees and their loved ones back home took some comfort
as the group spent anxious but safer days in Amman awaiting a flight
back to Sydney. The group finally made its safe passage in three
waves with the first arrivals on Thursday evening.
His Eminence Archbishop Aghan Baliozian, Primate of the Diocese of
the Armenian Church of Australia and New Zealand joined contingents
of family, friends and concerned community members to welcome the
evacuees each day.
As they made their way into the arrivals hall of Sydney International
Airport there was much cheering and overwhelming emotions among
the commotion of ‘welcome home’ banners, balloons, well-wishers and
media frenzy.
As the members of the group arrived, reunited families gathered in
the arrival area altogether to receive the blessing of Archbishop
Baliozian, offering prayers of thanksgiving to the Almighty for guiding
the children of our community back to the safety of their loved ones
and homes.
Over the past two weeks, prayer services resonated at the Armenian
Apostolic Church of Holy Resurrection, initially requesting of our
Heavenly Father His guidance in delivering our faithful safely out of
the dangers of the conflict region. On Sunday, prayers of thanksgiving
were offered for His careful delivery of the troupe to Australia as
well as prayers for peace to reign and protection of the thousands
of people affected in the region.
In appreciation of the Australian Government’s efforts and vigilant
care of the Armenian dance group in securing their safe passage home,
the Primate sent letters of gratitude to both the Prime Minister and
Foreign Affairs Minister of Australia.

Armenian National Committee of America
1711 N Street NW
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: (202) 775-1918
Fax: (202) 775-5648
E-mail: [email protected]
Internet:
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 24, 2006
Contact: Elizabeth S. Chouldjian
Tel: (202) 775-1918
STATE DEPARTMENT MISLED SENATE ON
TURKISH COMMUNICATIONS ABOUT AMB. EVANS
— Signed Statements Contradict State Department’s
Official Denial
— Justice Department Records Reveal Repeated Contacts
by Turkey’s Foreign Agent with the State Department
Concerning Remarks by the Ambassador to Armenia
WASHINGTON, DC – In yet another troubling development concerning
the controversial nomination of Richard Hoagland to serve as U.S.
Ambassador to Armenia, Department of Justice records have revealed
that the State Department has misled the U.S. Senate regarding its
communications with the Turkish government concerning the February
2005 public affirmation of the Armenian Genocide by U.S. Ambassador
to Armenia John Marshall Evans, reported the Armenian National
Committee of America (ANCA).
In a letter, dated June 28, 2005 written on behalf of Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice to Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), the Ranking
Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the State
Department denied that the Turkish government had even approached
the Administration on this issue. However, official Foreign Agent
Registration filings by the Turkish government’s registered foreign
agent, the Livingston Group, document that, in the days following
Ambassador Evans’ February 19, 2005 remarks, one of Turkey’s agents
communicated on at least four different occasions with State
Department officials concerning the envoy’s statement and his
subsequent retraction.
“With each new revelation, we see more clearly the corrosive impact
that the Administration’s complicity in Turkey’s denial is having
on our own core values as Americans,” said ANCA Chairman Ken
Hachikian. “This latest failed attempt by the State Department to
mislead the Senate adds to the many compelling reasons to block the
confirmation of a new Ambassador to Armenia.”
Consistent with the pattern of unresponsiveness that has come to
characterize the Administration’s actions on the Hoagland
nomination, the only answer the State Department chose to provide
in response to Senator Biden’s four questions was a misleading one.
His other inquiries – including an official request for an
explanation of why Ambassador Evans was being replaced prematurely
– remain unanswered.
On June 23rd, as part of Ambassador Richard Hoagland’s confirmation
process to replace Amb. Evans in Yerevan, Senator Biden wrote a
letter asking Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a series of
questions including the following: “Has the State Department
received any communication – written, electronic, or spoken – from
the Turkish Government concerning Ambassador Evans?”
Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Jeffrey T.
Bergner responded on behalf of Secretary Rice with the following
assertion: “Please be assured that allegations that the U.S. is
removing Ambassador Evans under pressure from the Government of
Turkey are simply untrue. The Government of Turkey has not
approached the Administration on this issue, and the United States
and Turkey engaged in no diplomatic exchanges related to this
matter.”
However, Justice Department filings by the Livingston Group reveal
that a day after Amb. Evans’ statements on the Armenian Genocide
were publicized in an ANCA-San Francisco press release dated
February 24, 2005, a Turkish agent communicated with the State
Department concerning his statements. On February 28, 2005, one
business day after the agent’s first phone call, Ambassador Evans
issued his first public retraction – noting that his mention of the
Armenian Genocide was made in a private capacity. Later that same
day, the Livingston Group reported three additional calls between
one of Turkey’s agents and State Department officials including the
Deputy Chief of Mission-designate at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara to
discuss Ambassador Evans’ retraction. The very next day on March
1, 2005, Ambassador Evans issued a public correction of his
retraction – removing entirely any mention of the Armenian
Genocide.
In addition to the Justice Department filings, several Turkish
press accounts reported that officials of the Government of Turkey
communicated their concerns to the State Department regarding
statements made by Ambassador Evans:
1) Turkish Press
On March 3, 2005, Turkish Press reported that, “Turkey’s Ambassador
in Washington Faruk Logoglu reacted to this. Ambassador Logoglu
reminded his interlocutors in the State Department that the United
States did not recognize ‘Armenian genocide’ noting the expression
in Evans’ apology was unacceptable. Justifying Turkey’s warning,
US State Department made Evans to issue a ‘correction’ for the
apology.” (“Evans Had to Correct His Statement Again After Using
‘Genocide’ in His Apology,” Turkish Press, March 3, 2005)
2) Anadolu News Agency
On March 4, 2005, the Anadolu News Agency reported that, “The
Turkish ambassador to Washington Faruk Logoglu reacted to this
message and the Washington administration approved Turkey’s demand
and made Evans correct the message of apology. Logoglu reminded the
US State Department that the US does not recognize the Armenian
genocide, but the term was used in the message of apology of the US
Yerevan Ambassador. Logoglu noted that a term that is not accepted
by USA could not be used in a statement of policy.” (“Double
Genocide Correction from US Yerevan Ambassador,” Anadolu News
Agency, March 04, 2005)
3) Turkish Daily News
On May 27, 2006, Turkish Daily News reported that, “‘After his
remarks last year that caused reaction at the State Department and
by Turkey, Evans was given a second chance, but he continued to
deviate from the official U.S. policy, working almost as a part of
Armenian groups that have a specific agenda,’ one U.S. analyst
familiar with the matter said on Thursday. ‘As a result he was
recalled.'” (“US Envoy Fired Over ‘Genocide’ Claims,” Turkish Daily
News, May 27, 2006)
The ANCA has circulated relevant sections of the Justice Department
FARA filings to Congressional offices.
#####

Press Release
Catholicosate of Cilicia
Communication and Information Department
Contact: V.Rev.Fr.Krikor Chiftjian, Communications Officer
Tel: (04) 410001, 410003
Fax: (04) 419724
E-mail: [email protected]
Web:
PO Box 70 317
Antelias-Lebanon
Armenian version:
THE DIOCESES OF THE CATHOLICOSATE OF CILICIA
SUPPORT LEBANON
In light of the war situation in Lebanon, His Holiness Aram I issued
a pontifical circular to all the dioceses of the Catholicosate
of Cilicia, asking them to support Lebanon through the Lebanese
embassies in their respective countries and the local leaders of
Lebanese Christian and Muslim communities.
All the dioceses expressed support for Lebanon, calling for an
immediate and full ceasefire and participating in the humanitarian
aid efforts through the Lebanese embassies in their countries, where
special committees have been formed for the provision of medicine,
food, clothes and other essential material to Lebanon.
##
The Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia is one of the two Catholicosates
of the Armenian Orthodox Church. For detailed information about the
dioceses of the Catholicosate, you may refer to the web page of the
Catholicosate, The Cilician Catholicosate, the
administrative center of the church is located in Antelias, Lebanon.

Bombing King David One man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist
uruknet.info, Italy
July 24, 2006
Nick Possum
Old Possum, Joadja and I went in to the city for the big demonstration
against the Israeli attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. It was the biggest
demonstration Sydney had seen since before the invasion of Iraq.
“By a strange coincidence, today is the 60th anniversary of the
bombing of the King David hotel in Jerusalem”, Old Possum remarked,
as we waited at Town Hall Square for the march to kick off. “While
their air force is unleashing hell in Lebanon, Israelis are dancing
on the graves of 92 people killed by the Irgun terrorist organization
on 22 July 1946”.
“I read in the Times On Line that the British Government has objected
to the Zionists celebrating the event and putting a plaque at the
spot”, I said. “They had a conference to mark the anniversary and
tied themselves in semantic knots trying to find a difference between
‘resistance’ and ‘terror’. In the end, they decided they had been
‘freedom fighters’ while the Arabs were always ‘terrorists'”.
“What’s the story of the bombing?” Joadja asked.
Old Possum leaned on his walking stick and raised his voice a
decibel or two above the din: “The Hotel was the headquarters for the
secretariat of the British Mandate in Palestine. The military command
was also based there. The Irgun team entered the hotel posing as Arabs
delivering milk. The explosive charges were in milk churns, set to go
off after half an hour. A warning call was made to the hotel and to
the nearby French consulate, but it was never acted on by the British,
probably because their guards detected the bombers and there was a
running gunfight with them as they were leaving, during which the
terrorists set off an explosive device in the street outside the hotel.
“The warning call spoke only of an ‘explosive device’, so in the
confusion, the authorities probably thought the attack had been
foiled. Then the real bomb went off, destroying a whole wing of the
hotel. As British military engineers rushed there with heavy lifting
gear to rescue survivors they were impeded by Zionist roadblocks
and stoned and booed by crowds of Jews. As well as Britons, Arabs,
Armenians, Greeks and 15 Jews were killed.”
“Some historians date the beginning of modern terrorism from the
event.”
“Who ordered the bombing?”
“The story goes that David Ben Gurion, the chief Zionist honcho
originally suggested it, but he got cold feet. Moshe Sneh, the leader
of Haganah, the Zionist military command, decided to go ahead and
told Menachem Begin to carry it out.”
“So what was it supposed to achieve? The British Mandate had already
encouraged hundreds of thousands of Jews to settle in Palestine.”
“Yeah, after driving the Turks out in World War I, the British
government decided unilaterally, to establish what it called a
‘National Home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, over which they
had gained a League of Nations mandate to shepherd the country towards
self-government. Of course there was a slippery little formulation
about it being ‘clearly understood’ that the decision wouldn’t
prejudice the civil and religious rights of the original non-Jewish
communities, who weren’t consulted about the idea. Somehow, the hapless
British officials and soldiers trying to make the Mandate work were
supposed to reconcile the hopes and rights of the native Palestinians
with the implacable thrusting ambition of the Zionist immigrants.
“But in the ten years before the hotel bombing, around 378,000 Jews
had migrated to Palestine. In 1946, the native Palestinian population
was about 1.3 million. Over that short period Jewish immigrants
suddenly made up something like a third of the population! Compare
that to Australia. Our population isn’t yet 21 million. Over recent
years the migrant intake has been less than half a per cent of the
existing population in any year! The redneck nutters would really have
something to screech about if Australia had copped the massive influx
the Palestinians faced. An equivalent rate of immigration would be
six million people coming here since 1996.
“But none of this satisfied the Zionists. By that stage they were
hell-bent on driving the natives out of the place and setting up an
exclusively Jewish state. And that’s what they preceded to do. The
King David Hotel bombing was about clearing the Mandate out of the
way. The British public was outraged, but the politicians realised
they’d created a monster they couldn’t control and they decided it
was time to go.
“In April 1948, Begin’s Irgun, another Zionist group, the Stern Gang
and members of the mainstream Haganah, followed up the hotel bombing
by massacring 254 Palestinians from the village of Deir Yassin. The
aim was to terrorise Palestinians into flight. And that worked too.
By the time it was over they’d depopulated over 400 towns and villages
and driven 700,000 people from their lands and businesses.”
“So now, any Jew, born anywhere in the world, has the ‘right to return’
to Israel, but no Palestinian does”.
Just then, they announced it was time to march, and we shuffled out
onto George Street.
PICTURES of Sydney’s ‘Israel out of Lebanon & Gaza!’ march on 22 July:
l_out!.html .
:: Article nr. 24978 sent on 24-jul-2006 06:04 ECT
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