EVERYONE’S A WINNER AT MONK COMPETITION
By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Washington Post
Monday, September 18, 2006; Page C01
But Pianist Hamasyan Takes Top Prize
For a music that usually flies beneath the radar of public notice,
jazz has had some rare visibility in Washington this past week,
and even a touch of glamour.
In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Thelonious Monk Institute
of Jazz, festivities began Thursday with a White House celebration
of America’s indigenous musical art that included an East Room
performance taped for PBS. It even had President Bush bobbing his
head to spirited versions of “Kansas City” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing
(If It Ain’t Got That Swing).”
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On Saturday, 12 pianists faced off in the semifinals of the annual
Monk competition at the National Museum of American History’s Baird
Auditorium. And last night at a sold-out Eisenhower Theater at the
Kennedy Center, three finalists competed for $35,000 in scholarships
and the exposure that goes with winning what has become, without
question, the most prestigious jazz competition in the world.
The annual contest, which rotates from one instrument to another each
year, has launched the careers of such young jazz stars as Joshua
Redman, Jane Monheit, Jacky Terrasson, Lisa Henry and Gretchen Parlato,
all of whom performed before and after last night’s competition.
There was other star power on hand as well, from presenters Quincy
Jones, Phylicia Rashad and Billy Dee Williams. But amid the celebratory
back-patting, there was a larger lesson to be learned than just
having a jazzy good time. The Monk Institute has a genuinely global
educational mission, which was embodied in this year’s 12 piano
semifinalists — who hailed from different countries. The annual
composition prize went to a Hungarian, Kalman Olah.
“The philosophy of jazz represents tolerance, teamwork and inclusion,”
said Thelonious Monk Jr., who helped found the Washington-based
institute in 1986 and is its board chairman. “That’s what America is
about. The music reflects that.”
For Monk, the institute is a way of “taking care of my father’s
legacy.”
His father, of course, was one of the guiding spirits of modern jazz,
a fiercely original composer and pianist who didn’t have megawatt jazz
competitions or college jazz programs to advance his career. Instead,
he came of age when jazz knowledge was passed from hand to hand and,
sometimes, from father to son.
“That music was part of my DNA,” said Thelonious Jr., 56, in a
pre-competition interview. After playing drums with his father in
the 1970s, the younger Monk had a career in R&B and rock music before
putting down his sticks in the mid-1980s.
Somewhat to his surprise, after founding the institute, he began to
reconnect with his jazz past, became absorbed in his father’s music
and formed a sizzling sextet that is one of the premier hard-bop
groups in jazz today.
He also settled into a role as the loquacious frontman for the Monk
Institute.
“I realized I could talk about this music,” he said, “because my
father had taken me everywhere and because he was like the oracle of
Delphi. I said, man, that’s a little gift. And gift is only a gift
if you use it.”
In 20 years, the Monk Institute has grown into a $5 million entity
that, against all odds, has put jazz into elementary and high school
curricula across the country. It sponsors a two-year fellowship
program for young musicians at the University of Southern California.
And, with his powers of persuasion, the younger Monk has helped bring
such distinguished musicians as Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Wayne
Shorter — all of whom performed at the White House and at last night’s
post-competition Kennedy Center jam — to schools from Miami to Alaska,
and overseas from Egypt to Vietnam.
“We’ve been very instrumental in changing the paradigm in jazz
education,” Monk says. “The Monk Institute is about re-creating that
interface between the older musician and the younger musician.”
Which brings us back to last night’s slickly produced finale,
underwritten by General Motors and Northrop Grumman. With Hancock,
Andrew Hill, Danilo Perez, Renee Rosnes, Billy Taylor and Randy Weston
judging the piano competition, the three young finalists added their
voices to a century-old jazz tradition.
The clear audience favorite was a Dutch-born Californian, Gerald
Clayton, who deftly combined the second movement of Beethoven’s
“Pathetique” Sonata with John Lewis’s “Django.”
But the judges were more impressed with Armenian-born Tigran Hamasyan,
who offered rhythmically dynamic readings of Ray Noble’s “Cherokee”
and Miles Davis’s “Solar” to take the top prize of $20,000. Clayton
won second place, and American Aaron Parks came in third.
Whether any of these pianists develops into a star remains to be
seen. But after 20 years of career-making competitions, the Monk
Institute can rightfully lay claim to being biggest buzzmaker in the
jazz world.

THE WORLD TAKES NOTE AT LAST
Messenger.ge, Georgia
Monday, September 18, 2006, #176 (1196)
After a “contentious procedural debate” GUAM member states (Georgia,
Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova) have succeeded in having the
protracted conflicts on their territories discussed at the 61st
session of the UN general assembly.
The significance of this event is underlined by the hostility with
which it was greeted by Russia, who’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
released a pre-emptive strike of a statement, and vowed to keep its
peacekeepers in Georgia’s breakaway regions regardless of any demand to
remove them. Russia was one of the fifteen countries that voted against
discussing the issue, which passed by just one vote on September 13.
The previous day Russia had successfully managed to stop the issued
from being included among those recommended for discussion to the
General Assembly at a sitting of the General Committee, which is
the steering body that sets the agenda for the GA sessions. In
a complacently victorious statement Russian MFA spokesman Mikhail
Kamynin said “We have from the outset been against politicizing this
issue and involving the General Assembly”, though, as the Georgian
MFA pointed out, these conflicts are by their very nature political.
President Saakashvili is expected to address the assembly later this
week, and will probably demand that Russian peacekeepers are replaced
with an international police force in South Ossetia. Russia is furious,
as even though there is little chance of any international organisation
offering to step in and police the conflict zone in the near future,
the very fact that the issue is being discussed at the UN at all
indicates that Russia’s ‘monopoly’ on the conflicts is slipping away.
This is a significant victory for both GUAM, which has now certified
itself as a proper international organisation, and not a petty anti-CIS
with no clout, as many in Russia had hoped, and also for the Georgian
government’s policy of pushing for the internationalisation of the
conflicts-even if they are only internationalised at the discussion
level.
This is not the only indication that the tide of opinion may
be changing with regard to the conflicts, however. In May US
Vice-President Dick Cheney gave a damning speech, lambasting Russian
“bullying” of its neigbours and use of energy as a political weapon,
the opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline have underscored
the importance of the region globally.
All year the Minsk group on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have
intensified their efforts to kick start the peace process, and the
appointment of the young and energetic Matt Bryza, deputy assistant
secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, as the US
co-chair has at least injected some new blood in the system, even if
no concrete achievements have been observed.
Moldova and Ukraine, with the explicit support of the EU, have adopted
a much more robust policy towards Transnistria also. Moscow calls it
a blockade, but it seems that, with the likely accession of Romania to
the EU in January, the EU are keen to clear up this ‘frozen conflict’
which will sit uncomfortably close to its eastern border.
But it is in Georgia where wind is changing most perceptibly
perhaps. The very public support for Georgia’s territorial integrity
and its government that has been forthcoming from the Whitehouse has
been accompanied by an increased assertiveness in Tbilisi.
Parliament’s resolution to ask the government to withdraw Russian
peacekeepers has been backed by two of the most senior lawmakers
in the US, Senator Richard Lugar and, as Saakashvili remarked,
possible-future-president Senator John McCain. These two both
unequivocally stated that Russian peacekeepers should be replaced in
the conflict zones.
Perhaps as significant, but less headline grabbing, is the recent
statements from Europe regarding the conflicts, where it seems patience
may finally be running out. Since the September 3 ‘helicopter incident’
in which South Ossetian paramilitaries fired on a helicopter carrying
Defence Minister Irakli Okruashvili reminded everybody how delicate
the situation is, and underlined the lawlessness of the South Ossetian
regime. The incident was strongly condemned by OSCE chair Karel De
Gucht, who described it as “criminal”.
Plans by the South Ossetian leadership to hold an ‘independence’
referendum have led to strong criticism from Europe also, with Council
of Europe Secretary General Terry Davis calling it “a waste of time”.
Even if we shouldn’t expect the blue helmets in the conflict zones
to suddenly have NATO or EU logos, these developments do indicate
an increasing engagement of the international community in Georgia’s
conflicts, and the UN decision is just the latest indication of the
trend towards ‘internationalisation’, which is exactly what Georgia
needs.
From: Baghdasarian

KAMANCHEH BY PEYMAN NASEHPOUR
Persian Mirror
The Persian Bowed Musical Instrument
Kamancheh is the chief Persian bowed instrument and is played both
in Persian art and folk music. The aim of this article is to offer
a historical introduction to this important Persian spike fiddle.
Kamancheh before Ghajar Period
Kamancheh is an ancient instrument. According to different books that
the author has considered, Ebn-e-Faghih is the first who mentions
to this instrument in 10th century. Also some Persian poets such as
Masoud-e-Sa’d, mentions to the name kamancheh in his poems.
Allameh-Ghotb-al-Din Mohammad Shirazi, in his famous encyclopedia,
Dorrat-al-Taj, mentions to this instrument by the name komajeh
that should be a dialect of kamancheh. The very famous Azerbaijani
musician/theorist/poet, Abd-al-Ghader Maraghi, describes this
instrument in his famous book, Jame’-al-Alhan and says that the
sound of kamancheh is more beautiful than ghezhak that is another
Persian bowed instrument and today ghezhak (with the name gheychak)
is played in Sistan-Baluchistan of Iran and is related to Indian
bowed instrument called sarangi.
In the book Kanz-al-Tohaf by Hassan Kashani that is maybe the only
historical book on making Iranian instruments, it has been written
about kamancheh of that time and describes how to make a kamancheh and
its accessories. It is very interesting to notice that the author of
the book mentions to this instrument with the name gheshak (another
dialect of ghezhak).
Maybe some object us what he describes is not the kamancheh but
fortunately he has painted the shape of kamancheh in his book and it is
wonderful that he mentions that bow (he calls it mezrab. It should be
mentioned that mezrab today is used for plectrum of Persian plucked
instruments) of gheshak is called kamancheh. The author believes
that etymologically Hasan Kashani was right and it is better to say
that kamancheh is more suitable to mention to the bow of this bowed
instrument than the instrument itself. The reason is that the word
kamancheh is the combination of the two words, ‘kaman’ that means
bow and ‘cheh’ that is diminutive suffix in Persian language. Anyway,
to apply kamancheh for this Persian bowed instrument is error allowed
by usage and it seems there is no better choice to offer.
Another book the Behjat-al-Ruh, mentions to kamancheh as a perfect
instrument.
Fortunately there are some historical Persian paintings (called in
the West as Persian miniatures) that show the kamancheh.
Some famous kamancheh masters of Iran before the Ghajar Period are:
Mirza Mohammad Kamancheh’i, Ostad Ma’sum Kamancheh’i, Molana Ahmad
Kamancheh’i entitled to Amir Ghazi, Ostad Zeytun, Malek Mahmud,
the brother of the author of the famous book, Tarikh-e-Sistan.
Kamancheh in and after Ghajar Period
According to different books in Persian language, it seems kamancheh
had only two strings. Though we don’t know when the third string had
been added to this instrument, but we know that in Ghajar period,
kamancheh had three strings.
Different books mention to the completion of this instrument. For
example, one of the famous kamancheh players of Ghajar Period, Agha
Jan, the father of Mirza Habib Sama’ Hozur (very famous santoor and
tonbak player) had invented a kind of kamancheh that had strange
strings and keys and it had a long neck and he was used to play that
while was standing up and he had named that kamancheh, Majles-Ara!
Some famous kamancheh players in and after Ghajar Period are:
Khoshnavaz Khan, Agha Motalleb, Esmail Khan, Hossein Khan Esmail-zadeh,
Gholi Khan, Musa Kashi, Mirza Rahim, Javad Khan Ghazvini, Bagher
Khan Rameshgar, Alireza Changi, Mirza Gholamhossein, Safdar Khan,
Hossein entitled to Karim-Kur and his daughter, Vajiheh, Farmanfarma
the Uncle of Naser-al-Din Shah, Jamileh (the female student of Esmail
Khan), Ali Khan, Reza Khan Nikfar, Hossein Yahaghghi and his sister
Keshvar Khnum entitled to Farah-Lagha, Haig (Armenian kamancheh player)
and at last, Asghar Bahari.
According to some books that we brought some parts of them here,
we see that kamancheh was very popular and important in Persian
art and folk music. After the introduction of Western violin to
Iran, unfortunately everything changed! Though the forth string
was added to kamancheh after the introduction of violin to Iran,
but many instrumentalists put the kamancheh down and started playing
violin. It is interesting to mention that even most of the students of
Hossein Khan Esmail-zadeh such as Reza Mahjubi, Rokn-al-Din Mokhtari,
Abu-al-Hasan Saba, Ebrahim Mansuri and so on were violin player.
The reader may consider what Ruh-al-Allah Khaleghi, the famous
historian/composer/theorist says about kamancheh in his famous
historical book, Sargozasht-e-Musighi-ye-Iran:
‘The sound of kamancheh is nasal, while the sound of violin is closer
to nature! When the violin was brought to Iran, since it had four
strings, another string was added to kamancheh for imitating the violin
and since it was very similar to kamancheh, many kamancheh players
became violin instructors. Since violin was similar to kamancheh,
portable and its shape was more beautiful, therefore gradually replaced
by kamancheh and today nobody plays kamancheh. It is always natural
that the more complete instruments will be replaced by non-complete
ones. Similarly flute was replaced by ney and oboe by sorna.’
Anyway, there were some compassionate artists such as Aref Ghazvini
that was not happy for what was happening to Persian art music and
warned about the danger of abolishing the Persian art music and its
important instruments like kamancheh, santoor and tar.
One day Hasan Mashhun, Persian art music researcher, asked from one of
the most famous kamancheh players of his time: ‘Why did you put down
the kamancheh? We have lots of violin players, but kamancheh players,
one after another, are becoming old and disabled.’ That the master
replied: ‘There is no student of kamancheh.
People have become modern and play violin!’
It is obvious that using western instruments instead of Iranian
instruments is not necessarily a smart idea. As some ethno-musicologist
believe that there should be a difference between modernization and
westernization. Violin is violin and kamancheh is kamancheh. It is
clear that every instrument has its own value and there is no need
to discuss about that more.
As historians mention, the late Asghar Bahari, gave a new life to
kamancheh by playing this instrument in many concerts, gatherings,
radio and TV.
It is fortunate that today we have many kamancheh players in such a
way that today there is no need to be anxious about the abolishment
of the art of kamancheh playing.
The picture of Asghar Bahari, appeared in Jean During’s The Art of
Persian Music, pg. 114.
Woman playing the kamancheh in a painting from the Hasht-Behesht
Palace in Isfahan, Iran, 1669 (from Wikipedia).
Write a Letter to the Editor or Send an email to this author
More Persian Instruments Articles
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peyman Nasehpour was born in Teran, in 1974. He is a musician and plays
the Persian hand drums, including the tonbak, the ghaval and the daf.
He lives in Germany.
For more on Peyman, visit his website Rhythmweb.
This article was contributed by PEYMAN NASEHPOUR, Guest Contributor
for PersianMirror.

WB: 2 TRILLION USD COST OF BIRD FLU THREAT TO WORLD ECONOMY
Xinhua, China
2006-09-18 09:03:37
BEIJING, Sept. 18 (Xinhuanet) — The outbreak of a severe avian
influenza pandemic could cost the world economy up to 2 trillion
U.S. dollars, the World Bank warned Sunday.
“We estimate this could cost, in fact, certainly over 1 trillion
dollars and perhaps as high as 2 trillion dollars, in the worst case
scenario, so I think the threat, the economic threat, remains real
and remains substantial,” said Jim Adams, vice president for East
Asia and the Pacific and head of the bank’s avian flu task force.
Earlier estimates last year of about 800 billion dollars in economic
costs were basically written on the back of an envelope, he said at
a press conference during the International Monetary Fund and World
Bank annual meetings in Singapore.
“But more recent financial modelling had revealed a sharper threat
should the virus mutate and pass easily among people,” he also said,
adding a severe pandemic could cost more than 3 percent of the global
economy’s gross national product.
The World Bank has provided advice and financing totaling 150 million
dollars to projects to tackle bird flu in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Georgia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Moldavia, Nigeria, Tajikistan,
Turkey and Vietnam.
The international community has pledged to donate 2 billion dollars
to developing countries, and of this, 1.2 billion dollars has been
committed so far.
Asia has been hardest hit, with 127 out the 144 human deaths arising
from bird flu since 2003 occurring in East Asian countries, other
officials of the bank said.

BERLIN: TRANSCENDING A CITY’S DIVIDES
By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune
International Herald Tribune, France
Published: September 17, 2006
BERLIN For Hakan Sever, history comes with onions and garlic
sauce. From his family’s kebab cafe, not far from where the Berlin
Wall once stood, he has watched this city reinvent itself in one of
the most remarkable transformations of our modern world.
“Everything changes in this city all the time,” says Sever, 34, as
his knife zigzags down a cone of lamb that weighs 30 kilograms, or
66 pounds, and is roasting on a vertical skewer. “The only thing that
doesn’t change,” he adds, his blade resting for a moment in mid-air,
“is people’s appetite for doner kebab.”
It is 5:05 p.m. and an Oriental breeze is blowing through Kreuzberg,
an eastern slice of what used to be West Berlin. The area is home to
about 26,000 of Berlin’s 142,000 residents of Turkish origin, among
them Sever, a wiry man with an animated smile. He arrived in 1977,
aged 6, when he stepped off a plane from eastern Turkey to join his
parents. Twelve years later, he looked on as the Wall fell and East
and West melded into one.
Now he spends his evenings crafting doner kebab, Turkish bread stuffed
with roasted lamb and a choice of vegetables and sauces. His cafe
bears the resolutely un-Turkish name of Bistro Bagdad. A colorful,
hungry crowd gathers outside his window, a microcosm of the city’s
3.4 million inhabitants.
“Look, today I sell doner to everyone,” Sever beams, making a sweeping
hand movement. “Turkish people, German people, tourists – everyone
comes to eat doner.
If you want to meet this city, you don’t have to go anywhere. You
can just sit right here and wait. The city will come to you.”
Doner kebab long ago replaced bratwurst as Germany’s favorite fast
food, and kebab vendors have become an immutable feature of Berlin’s
restless cityscape.
There are now an estimated 1,300 of them, more than in Istanbul,
according to the German Doner Federation.
They feed the city and transcend its many divides.
Five minutes into his shift, Sever has already stuffed, wrapped
and sold three kebabs: one with chili sauce to an American tourist,
one with no sauce to a Turkish woman in a Muslim head scarf and one
with an extra-generous helping of onions to a Western woman with more
tattoos than clothes.
“Next!” Sever cries. “With or without sauce?
Garlic-yogurt-chili-herbs?”
Doner kebab arrived in Berlin in the late 1970s after the first oil
shock, when tens of thousands of Turkish workers lost their jobs. Some,
like his uncle in 1977, found new work by opening kebab booths.
Sever served his first kebab in Kreuzberg as a teenager in 1983. Then
the area was the farthest edge of the Western capitalist world; now
it is an increasingly gentrified part of central Berlin. The subway
station across the road from the family cafe, Schlesisches Tor,
was the last stop before the Wall.
The street opposite leading to the River Spree was a lifeless
cul-de-sac.
It took Sever an hour to get to work in those days because buses and
cars had to follow the winding contours of the Wall. Today it takes him
10 minutes to arrive from Wedding, a neighborhood north of Kreuzberg.
“There were hardly any cars here and now it’s like the motorway,”
he recalls, his eyes wandering over the busy crossroad to the river
and into the past.
The Turkish grocery shop at the corner has been there as long as
Sever can remember. But the trendy cafes, the fusion restaurants,
the tourists and the students idly sipping their lattes are new. The
streets of Little Istanbul, as the area is still known, have changed
as history unfolded. So have Sever’s customers.
In the early years, he sold kebabs to an unlikely mix of Turkish
families and squatters from the leftist punk scene who had little more
in common than a life literally on the margins of West German society.
In 1989, he sold kebabs and Coca-Cola to some of the first East
Berliners to stream across the border. He watched their hopeful faces
appear on the Oberbaum Bridge, a majestic red-brick structure that
served as one of eight checkpoints during Berlin’s years as a divided
city. Crossing the bridge that had been the end of the world for them,
the East Berliners would empty the shelves in the nearby supermarket
and patiently line up outside the bank on the corner for their welcome
money – 100 Deutsche marks, or about $50.
Scores of them, whole families, slept on the pavement outside Bistro
Bagdad in the first few days of that memorable October, anxious not to
lose their place in line. One mother and her daughter ordered a Coke
with their kebab. When the girl tried to open the can, Sever recalled,
the mother grabbed her hand to stop her. “She told her it was for
Christmas, can you imagine?” he said. “I will never forget that.”
Sever then headed east in a kebab van, eager to learn more about
the other half of his adoptive home country, a place that felt as
foreign to him as to any West Berliner at the time. But when angry
youths with shaved heads shouted racist insults at him during a wave
of xenophobia in eastern Germany in the early 1990s, he decided to
leave and never go back.
“They told me to go home and to stop stealing their jobs,” he said. “I
offered one of them work in my van, by the oven. He lasted all of five
minutes. I told him, ‘See, you don’t want my job, it’s not a fun job.'”
Fun it is not, to cut meat beside an oven that radiates heat of more
than 80 degrees Celsius (175 degrees Fahrenheit). But Sever said he
loves his work because of the constant contact with people.
“In here,” Sever tapped his chest bone, “I carry the life stories of
my customers.” He likened kebab vendors to 24-hour psychiatrists who
provide succor for everyone from the lovelorn to those having trouble
digesting the tectonic shifts of the last two decades.
Backpacking tourists find their way to Sever’s booth after visiting
the so-called East Side Gallery on the other side of the river, which
is in fact not a gallery but the longest remaining stretch of the
Berlin Wall, adorned with paintings and graffiti. Taxi drivers stop in
before the evening shift. Techno aficionados come to eat when other
people sleep. There is Berlin’s legendary army of eternal students,
its growing unemployed population, its gangs of young Turkish men
and its many eccentric artists.
Many of them are poor and many would not want to live anywhere else.
Kebabs here are cheaper than in any other West European capital,
Sever says; indeed, the basic doner costs [email protected] in Berlin, ~@4 in
Paris. Lattes and rents are cheaper, too. International investors
are still buying property and half the world’s cranes are divided
between Shanghai and Berlin, tour guides will proudly tell you.
“All that building work,” Sever said. “What will the city look like
when they are done?”
Sever does not have a German passport and Germany, he says, is not
home. Neither is Igdir, the Turkish village near the Armenian border
where he spent the first seven years of his life.
His home is Berlin.
“Ich bin ein Berliner,” he joked, and he meant it.
He described his bond with his adopted home city as a happy arranged
marriage, like the one with his cousin Meleg. His father brought her
over from Anatolia 11 years ago and she is now the mother of his two
children, 9-year-old twins.
“There is no passion in an arranged marriage, but you face life
together, you share life, you build respect and your roots intertwine,”
he explained. “Then one day maybe you wake up and you love.”
His roots go deep in Berlin. He was taught by the same primary school
teacher who is now teaching his children. He supported Germany in
the recent soccer World Cup; a small German flag still adorns his
Volkswagen. He wears socks in his sandals as only Germans seem to do.
But he is all too aware that many Germans still think of Turks like
him as guests, not permanent residents.
“When my father arrived in Germany in 1963 as a guest worker, he was
greeted with flowers at the airport – and now they want to get rid
of us,” he said and broke into a self-confident chuckle. “But when
we Turks set up shop somewhere we don’t leave.”
When Sever finishes his shift at 11 p.m., he counts his tips: a
disappointing [email protected], or $1.40. But then he becomes protective of
the city and his customers.
“People in Berlin have no money. It’s O.K.,” he said, his smile back
in full force. “If they were rich, maybe they would stop coming to
eat my doner.”

GREECE REBUFFS TURKISH CRITICISM OVER MUSLIM MINORITY TREATMENT
Agence France Presse — English
September 17, 2006 Sunday 9:16 PM GMT
Greece on Sunday rebuffed Turkish claims that Athens is violating the
rights of the Muslim minority living along its northeastern border,
telling Ankara that it should instead concentrate on human rights
reforms at home.
“Turkey…has undertaken the obligation to meet specific conditions
and commitments before the European Union,” the Greek foreign ministry
said in a statement.
On Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Greece
should respect the right of its Muslim minority to elect its own
religious leader, known as a mufti, or risk reciprocal measures
from Ankara.
“If Greece respects its own minority rights and has expectations
from Turkey on this issue, then its should also fulfill its own
obligations,” Erdogan told an assembly of Turks from northeastern
Greece, the Anatolia news agency reported.
“This issue must be resolved. If not, there are things Turkey could
do under the principle of reciprocity,” he said.
The issue arose after the recent death of Mehmet Emin Aga, a senior
ethnic Turkish Muslim who for years acted as mufti to the Muslim
minority in the face of opposition from the Greek authorities, who
nominated a rival mufti.
Greek courts convicted Emin Aga repeatedly in the past decade
for illegally acting as a mufti, leading to protests from the
international human rights group Amnesty International and Greek
rights organisations.
Erdogan on Saturday charged that Greece’s treatment of its Muslim
minority of about 100,000, which lives in the northeastern Thrace
region bordering Turkey, amounted to a violation of the human rights
criteria of the European Union of which it is a member.
“Our aim is to allow our kinsmen to benefit from their rights under
bilateral and international agreements as respected and equal citizens
of Greece,” the prime minister said.
On Sunday, the Greek foreign ministry said Athens treated all its
citizens equally, and accused Ankara of seeking excuses to disguise
the sluggishness noted in its EU-mandated reforms.
Turkey itself is under pressure from the European Union, with which it
began membership talks last year, to improve the rights of minorities,
including its sizeable Kurdish community and non-Muslims.
Predominantly Muslim Turkey is home to small groups of Jews and
Christians, mainly Orthodox Greeks and Armenians, most of them
concentrated in Istanbul.
Istanbul is also home to the The Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarchate,
which represents the 250 million Orthodox worshippers in the world.
Ankara plays no part in the elections of the patriarch, but refuses to
recognise the patriarchate’s ecumenical title and says it represents
only Orthodox Greeks in Turkey.

TURKEY NOT TO OPEN BORDER WITH ARMENIA – AZERI TV
ANS TV, Baku, in Azeri
17 Sep 06
[Presenter] The local executive authorities of Turkish towns bordering
on Armenia do not have the power to decide weather the border with
Armenia should open or not. The border can open only if the Turkish
government decides to do so. And Ankara is adamant to keep the border
closed, Kars mayor Mehmet Ufuk Erden has said in response to Kars
municipality head Naif Alibeyoglu’s calls for the opening of the
border. Susambar Agamaliyeva, a special ANS correspondent in Kars,
has more.
[Agamaliyeva, by phone] A municipality head does not have the power
to reopen Turkey’s doors to Armenia. He cannot speak on behalf of
the Turkish government, Kars mayor Mehmet Ufuk Erden has told ANS.
Erden said the eastern gate between Turkey and Armenia was opened in
1992. But the Turkish government decided to close it a year later.
Under the current circumstances, the Turkish state is keen to keep
the gate closed, Erden said.
The Kars mayor also said that the International Caucasus Festival
was organized by the Kars municipality, not by the Turkish government.
The festival opened on 15 September and closed today. Azerbaijan
boycotted the festival two days ago.
A delegation from Armenia presented the Azerbaijani dances “Tarakama”
and “Cutcu” and Qara zurna [musical instrument] as Armenian.
The International Caucasus Festival was funded by the non-governmental
Soros Foundation and some other international organizations. The event
was organized by the Anadolu Culture Society and the Kars municipality.
The main goal of the Armenian lobby was to have a resolution adopted
on the reopening of the border at the end of a conference that was
held in parallel. But the conference did not adopt such a resolution.
Turkish society and ordinary Turks are opposed to the Armenian
delegation’s visit and to the opening of the border with Armenia.
They condemn the idea of opening the border.
Susambar Agamaliyeva, reporting from Kars, Turkey.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

MOSCOW’S NEW SCHOOL LOOKS WEST
by Della Bradshaw
Financial Times
17 September 2006 Sunday 7:36:59 PM GMT
It is not often that a brand new business school sets up shop, let
alone one that has the vocal support of national government and the
financial support of local and international businessmen. But then,
not everywhere is Moscow and not every business school founder commands
the respect of Ruben Vardanian, chairman and chief executive of Troika
Dialog, the investment bank.
At just 38, Mr Vardanian, born in Armenia, is already head of Russia’s
biggest investment company, has been named Russia’s Entrepreneur of
the Year (2005) by Ernst & Young, and has even been the subject of
a business school case study on leadership, written by Manfred Kets
de Vries, the veteran Insead professor. Now he has decided that what
Russia needs is a world-class business school and he is going to make
sure it happens.
On Thursday, it is hoped that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin
will lay the foundation stone for the new school, to be called the
Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, in Skolkovo on Moscow’s western
fringes. Mr Putin is so pleased with the plan that he has declared
the school a “national project”.
Mr Vardanian has not only wooed the Russian president. He has persuaded
12 like-minded Russian business oligarchs and two non-Russian investors
each to stump up $5m (GBP2.66m) to finance the school. These include
Shiv Vikram Khemka, vice-chairman of the Sun Group in India and an
MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; and
Roman Abramovich, probably most famous outside Russia as the owner
of the English premiership soccer club Chelsea.
Mr Vardanian says his first reason for establishing the school was
personal. “My son is 11 years old. My kids should at least have the
choice of studying in Barcelona, London, the US or Moscow.”
Second he says the main resource that Russia is missing is people:
“Russia’s future lies in its people, not its oil and gas.” He believes
that emerging markets such as China, India and Russia are becoming
more interesting, not only for natives of those countries who want
to return home but for companies too. “More foreign companies want
to set up in Moscow,” he says.
While Russian universities have a powerful academic reputation in the
sciences, they have no history in teaching western-style management.
About 110 MBA programmes are already taught in Russia, says Mr
Vardanian. “It’s name is an MBA, but…” he shrugs.
Mr Vardanian, a great bear of a man, visited 18 business schools
worldwide before deciding how he wanted the Moscow school to be run.
What he didn’t want, he says, is a school where professors taught
students in order to fund their own research. Instead, he decided on
a business school along the lines of IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland?
“very business-orientated, practical. We’re doing a lot to link the
business education to the reality.”
Three of the founding donors have already been persuaded to give
annual master classes at the school, which will be run like a business,
not a university.
Mr Vardanian plans for the school to have executive short programmes in
2007 with a pilot 25 or 50 students enrolled on the 18-month full-time
MBA programme in 2008. The campus, which has been designed by David
Adjaye, the London-based architect who also designed the Nobel Peace
Centre in Oslo, Norway, will open in September 2009.
“The concept is to have everything in place by 2012,” says Mr
Vardanian. The plan is to break even in 2015.
Professors will be paid as if they were working on Wall Street or
in the City a salary with bonuses. The tenure system, beloved of US
academic institutions, is out.
Coming from a family where his father and grandfather were professors
of architecture and history respectively, Mr Vardanian understands
the appeal of an academic life, but he believes researching and
teaching history is very different from researching and teaching
management. “For business education [the tenure system] is the wrong
concept. The main problem is trying to build a new school on a new
concept.”
One of the biggest differences between the Moscow School of Management
and more traditional business schools will be the school’s emphasis on
developing leaders who are risk-takers. While other schools may judge
the success of their programme by the corporate clout that their alumni
hold, the Moscow school believes a sign of success will be if 20-25 per
cent of graduates own their own businesses five years after graduation.
“We want to encourage more people in Russia to take risks,” says Mr
Vardanian. Some $40m of the initial funding will go into a venture
fund to finance new ventures.
Another difference is that the school will teach initially in English
but eventually in four languages English, Russian, Spanish and Chinese.
Finding the right faculty will be the tough part, says Danica Purg,
founder and dean of the IEDC-Bled School of Management in Slovenia
and a member of the advisory board for the Moscow school. “The biggest
challenge for them [the Moscow school] is to match their big ambitions
with reality. They need to develop their own professors.
They will need a lot of academic support,” she says.
Schools in other developing countries, notably China and India,
have secured their reputation by attracting home Chinese or Indian
professors who were trained in the US or Europe every top business
school employs Indian and Chinese nationals. The same does not apply
to Russian nationals.
For example, the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, with which Mr
Vardanian says the Moscow school already has close links, was set up
with help from two US schools, the Wharton School of the University
of Pennsylvania and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern
University. Dipak Jain, now dean of Kellogg, was previously dean
at ISB.
Without similar emotional ties or very large sums of money the new
Moscow venture is unlikely to find support from the US.
For this reason, Mr Vardanian is seeking partnerships in other emerging
markets, notably South America.
That said, the remuneration for faculty will be competitive with
top international business schools, but Professor Purg believes it
will not be the money that persuades faculty to teach there. “In my
experience professors don’t go where there is money but where there
is a challenge.”
Mr Vardanian will hope she is right. He is planning to appoint 10
Russian professors and 20 non-Russian professors along with 70-100
visiting faculty, largely from business schools in other emerging
economies.
Most significant in the hiring process is the dean’s job or, to
be more precise, the appointment of two deans, one Russian, one
non-Russian. The Russian will be Andrei Volkov, deputy minister for
science and education and head of the education expert group for
Russia’s presidency of the Group of Eight industrial nations.
Headhunters Heidrick & Struggles have been appointed to find the
second co-dean and an announcement is expected next spring. Mr
Vardanian will remain as president of the school.
Widely regarded as the one of the most respectable of Russia’s
self-made men, Mr Vardanian has continually expounded the need for
stronger corporate governance in Russia. The school will practise what
it preaches, he says. “The school needs to show success, transparency
and corporate governance. It needs to be well-managed.”
This will be corporate governance Russian-style, however. Mr Vardanian
has no intention of handing over the reins altogether, but he and the
two co-deans will form the triumvirate that manages the school. “The
triangle needs to work together well,” he says.
Compromise will be the order of the day.
Whether the school will be able to attract a high-calibre international
dean under these strictures is debatable, particularly as the co-deans
will also report to the board. “The manager is there to execute the
plan and he has to report to the board. We have to show that we are
like any other company.”
“The problem,” he concedes, “will be getting someone who wants to
play by these new rules.”

KHALIFA GREETS ARMENIAN PRESIDENT
Emirates News Agency
September 17, 2006 Sunday 7:35 AM EST
President H.H. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan has sent a
congratulatory cable to President Robert Kocharian of Armenia on his
country’s independence day.
A similar cable to the Armenian leader was also sent by H.H Sheikh
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and
Ruler of Dubai.

NOVELIST TRIED FOR INSULTING ‘TURKISHNESS’
UPI
September 17, 2006 Sunday 1:04 PM EST
A Turkish female novelist who is nine months pregnant goes on trial in
Istanbul this week accused of insulting “Turkishness” in a best-selling
novel.
Elif Shafak, 34, who is expected to give birth any day, will be
tried because a character in “The Bastard of Istanbul” describes the
massacres of Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire as “genocide.”
Most of the world accepts that description of the mass killings. But
the Turkish government claims the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of Armenians from 1915-1917 were a result of inter-ethnic strife,
disease and famine.
While other Turks have faced charges for referring to the massacre
as genocide, Shafak is the first to be prosecuted for words spoken
by a fictional character, The Times of London reports.
“Shafak’s novel is not a work of literature. It is Armenian
propaganda,” said lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz of the ultranationalist
Union of Jurists, which initiated the case.
Shafak said she was determined to face the charges, despite her
pregnancy.