AZG Armenian Daily #137, 22/07/2006
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“HERITAGE” PARTY INITIATES ROUND TABLE DEDICATED TO NAGORNO KARABAKH
CONFLICT DISCUSSION
The ‘Heritage’ party believes that any decline from the current
position in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement, any kind
of unilateral ceding will become a treachery. Vardan Khachatrian,
Secretary of “Heritage’ part, said at July 20 press conference. He
added that Armenia should pose upon Azerbaijan a counter-claim of
Getashen and Shahumian regions – against the claim by Azerbaijan to
return territories adjacent to Karabakh. Khachatrian stated that in
the nearest future his party will initiate a round-table discussion
on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and make the relevant statement.

EU Special Representative to Hold Talks with Armenian Leaders
PanARMENIAN.Net
21.07.2006 15:33 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ July 23-25 EU Special Representative for the South
Caucasus Peter Semneby will be in Armenia on a working visit, reports
the Press Service of the Armenian MFA. During his visit Mr. Semneby
will meet with Armenian President Robert Kocharian, Speaker Tigran
Torosyan, Defense Minister Serge Sargsyan, FM Vartan Oskanian,
Ombudsman Armen Harutyunyan and Central Electoral Commission Chair
Garegin Azaryan.
EU-Armenia cooperation within the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP)
will be the main subject of Peter Semneby’s visit.

OSCE MG: No Positive Steps of Karabakh Conflict Parties towards Each Other Yet
PanARMENIAN.Net
21.07.2006 15:38 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Yet there is not any positive step from the sides
of Nagorno Karabakh conflict to meet with each other, said Yuri
Merzlyakov, Russian co-chair of OSCE Minsk Group. Touching on the
disappointment of several politicians for not-invitation of Azerbaijani
and Armenian presidents by the leaders of G8 to the recent summit in
Saint-Petersburg, he noted that he does not “see any sense in inviting
the presidents to the summit.”
According to him, it is necessary to support the sides, when they
reach an agreement. “This question should not be considered at the
G8 summit,” Yuri Merzlyakov added. “We tried to come to an agreement
during last two meetings, but we did not succeed,” Merzlyakov said.
He emphasized that G8 called for Azerbaijan and Armenia to demonstrate
political will and prepare their peoples to peace, not war. Merzlyakov
stressed that the co-chairs of Minsk Group have presented proposals
for consideration by the conflict sides.
Besides, the diplomat ruled out that “it is always sensible to
organize next meetings between the sides and will are trying to do it,”
Trend reports.

Panorama.am
16:20 21/07/06
AMERICANS APPRAISE ARMENIAN RESCUERS
Joe Wheeler, colonel from the Kansas National Guard who is also
co-director of Rescue-2006 exercise told a press conference
today that Armenian rescuers are highly qualified. In his words,
despite of language barriers and differences in the system of troops
administration, the exercises are being held at the top level. He
also said the Armenian rescuers are skillful in quake administration.
Note: Rescue 2005 launched on July 14, 2006 at the Military Aviation
Institute under the ministry of defense. The exercises will run
until July 25. Some 250 specialists from 11 countries take part in
the exercise, including also experts from the International Committee
of Red Cross and UN. The training aims to launch coordinated actions
in case of disaster./Panorama.am/

GOLDEN APRICOT FESTIVAL RUNS SUCCESSFULLY
Panorama.am
18:46 21/07/06
Harutiun Khachatryan, director of Golden Apricot film festival,
summed up the festival in a press conference today. He said Pusan and
Rotterdam cross-border international festival heads have suggested
to become sister festivals.
Looking 6 days ahead, the organizers say the festival has accomplished
its main objectives. Armenian culture and history as well as a 10
minute film on the festival was many times shown on Euronews. The
sponsors are content with the festival, too. The government has
promised to increase budget funds for the festival next year and
the major sponsor has made a committment to fund the next year
program./Panorama.am/

REFUGEES HAVE TO PAY FOR ENTRY VISA TO ARMENIA
Panorama.am
19:37 21/07/06
Armenian nationals continue to arrive to Armenia from Lebanon. Tonight
two Armavia airliners arrived in Yerevan having 219 people on
board. Most of them are Lebanese citizens. On the Armenian boarder
many of them faced the problem of paying for visa. Press Secretary
of ministry of foreign affairs Vladimir Karapetyan explained that
“citizens of other countries have to pay $30 for entry visa as is the
usual procedure.” Another group of 128 will arrive in Yerevan through
Tel Aviv next Sunday, with 53 children among them. /Panorama.am/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

NO DISAGREEMENTS BETWEEN DEFENSE MINISTER AND ME: TIGRAN TOROSYAN
Panorama.am
14:10 22/07/06
“There are no disagreements between defense minister Serze Sargsyan and
me,” Tigran Torosyan, NA speaker, told 10th congress of the Republican
Party. He said talks on such disagreements are groundless. Speaking
about the enlargement of the part, NA speaker said that the process
takes place under the light of constitutional reforms and includes
all political forces. He said this may promote multy-party system
in Armenia./Panorama.am/

In Search of the Father: The Photography of Bruce Haley
By Adriana Tchalian and Hovig Tchalian
Critics’ Forum
7.22.06
Visual Arts
Bruce Haley is an American photographer with interests that span
a wide array of subjects. But he often returns to the one that,
judging from his work, seems to have captivated his mind, spirit and
conscience-the military and political conflicts around the world.
In 1994, Haley traveled to Nagorno-Karabagh during a cease-fire between
Armenia and Azerbaijan. Haley’s photographs from the trip masterfully
capture Karabagh’s desolate landscape-abandoned factories, dilapidated
buildings, and run-down neighborhoods, the ravages of years of war
and economic decline. But he has also captured the far less visible
but equally desolate emotional landscape of its inhabitants.
Much of that emotional desolation centers on the Armenian soldiers
fighting in Karabagh. Haley photographs them after a skirmish
or between battles, sitting quietly in small, scattered groups,
with no genuine leader among them. A telling contrast here is with
traditional heroic painting, of, say, the battle of Avarayr. There,
we might see the legendary Armenian general, Vartan Mamigonian,
striking his familiar heroic pose, clenching his sword across his
chest. Or we might see him leading his men to battle, as in the well-
known commemorative statue that depicts him alone, allowing us to
imagine his men falling in line behind him.
In Haley’s photographs, ironically, it is the soldiers who stand alone,
and we imagine their leader perhaps somewhere nearby, more noticeable
for his absence. Some of the images portray young soldiers wielding
guns, like children who have found their father’s rifles and are now
preparing to point them at the enemy. The absence of a patriarch is
doubly apparent in this case, suggesting as it does the loss of a
father on the battlefield as well as at home.
On the home front itself, we encounter further signs of domestic
devastation-rebellious kids running wild, out-of-work young men
wandering aimlessly in the mid-day sun. Scattered and confused,
they have an unruliness about them akin to the waywardness of orphans.
Haley has said that, while in Karabagh, he noticed how much Armenians
revered their writers, often displaying their photographs on their
walls. It is this absence of a patriarch-of a father figure, if
you will, be it a Vartan Mamigonian or a Barouyr Sevag- that Haley
captures so effectively.
Haley’s photographs recast the Armenian immigrant experience as the
loss of home as much as of homeland. In doing so, the images together
suggest that, although the outer devastation they capture is clearly
the result of warfare both physical and economic, symbolically,
it belongs equally to the inner world of a newly emerging diaspora.
Bruce Haley has documented conflicts all over the world including
Burma, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, and
Zaire. His images have appeared in Time, Life, U.S. News and World
Report, and The London Sunday Times Magazine, among others. In 1992,
he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for helping break the story of
the famine in Somalia.
All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2006
Adriana Tchalian holds a Masters degree in Art History and has managed
several art galleries in Los Angeles.
Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.
You can reach them or any of the other contributors to Critics’ Forum
at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
in this series are available online at To
sign up for a weekly electronic version of new articles, go to
Critics’ Forum is a group created to
discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora.

Harvard Portrait: Jens Meierhenrich
Harvard Magazine
July/August 2006
A very long bookshelf in Jens Meierhenrich’s Harvard office holds a
complete transcript of the Nuremberg trial of major war criminals, in
42 volumes. “I had to break the bank to buy them,” he says. But these
are essential references for the German-born, 33-year-old scholar,
who tells students that his “interest in genocide is both professional
and personal”; much of his research on genocide and transitional
justice is about “finding a lens to revisit my own country’s history.”
Meierhenrich, an assistant professor of government and of social
studies since 2005, has peered through that lens in South Africa
and Rwanda and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia in The Hague.
This fall, in Japan, he’ll investigate the Tokyo tribunal-General
MacArthur’s response to Japanese atrocities during World War
II. Beginning in 2008, Princeton will publish Meierhenrich’s
interdisciplinary trilogy on genocide.
“I’m little concerned about morality tales. We are all outraged by
genocide,” he says. “We need to understand not only why people kill,
but how they kill. Victims in the Armenian genocide, for example,
were crucified and had crosses tattooed on their foreheads. In Rwanda,
certain bodies were dumped in the river, sending them, symbolically,
‘back to Ethiopia.’ You can transmit a message in the way you kill.”
Meierhenrich has no bachelor’s degree, but after working for nearly
two years at research centers in South Africa, he won a Rhodes
Scholarship to Oxford, where he earned a D.Phil. in politics and
international relations.
Next came Columbia, and then the Kennedy School of Government. In
2002, he took a group of undergraduates to Rwanda for two months. This
summer, he’s doing it again.
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REPORT ON FIRES WAS EXTENDED TO NKR FOREIGN MINISTRY
Lragir.am
21 July 06
NKR Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports that on July 20, Deputy Foreign
Minister of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic Masis Mayilian received Field
Assistant of Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office
(PRC-i-O) Gunter Folk.
During the meeting Mr. Folk delivered NKR Deputy Foreign Minister a
report of the Office of the OSCE PRC-i-O on inflammations, which took
place in the contact-line zone of Azerbaijan and Nagorno Karabakh
armed forces.
As it was informed before on June 15, 2006, the NKR Ministry of Foreign
Affairs addressed to the Office of the OSCE Personal Representative
Chairman-in-Office with a request to conduct a monitoring in bordering
with Azerbaijan zone for giving real estimate to the situation and
making certain of the strained accusations of Baku on the alleged
burnings of the adjoining settlements on the territories controlled by
the Nagorno Karabakh Republic. On July 3-5 the OSCE mission conducted
a series of monitorings in the bordering zone. By the results of the
monitorings a corresponding report was prepared.
At present the document is being studied at the NKR Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and one can already ascertain that the OSCE mission did not
reveal any facts of damage caused by fire to the settlements, situated
in the NKR security zone, as the Azerbaijani side tried to present.