ARKADY I. VOLSKY, 74, FOUNDER OF RUSSIAN BUSINESS LOBBY, DIES
By Andrew E. Kramer
The New York Times
Published: September 13, 2006
MOSCOW, Sept. 12 – Arkady I. Volsky, a confidant of the Soviet leader
Mikhail S. Gorbachev and founder of Russia’s most prominent business
lobby, died here on Saturday. He was 74.
The cause was complications of leukemia, according to the Union of
Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the business lobby he founded in
1991 and directed until last year; it became known as a club for the
Russian oligarchs.
Mr. Volsky belonged to a generation of officials whose careers
straddled the breakup of the Soviet Union. He worked under four Soviet
general secretaries and three Russian presidents and served as a
peace negotiator in two wars. His successor at the business lobby,
Aleksandr N. Shokhin, described him as “a man of the Soviet system
who was accepted by the capitalists.”
Mr. Volsky grew up an orphan in Dobrush, Belarus, in the 1930’s and
worked on the floor of the Zil truck and limousine plant in Moscow,
eventually becoming the factory’s party boss.
Then, Mr. Volsky had his biggest career break without even interviewing
for the job. It came under Yuri V. Andropov, the former K.G.B. chief
who became general secretary, Mr. Volsky recalled in a recent interview
with the newspaper Kommersant, republished on Tuesday.
Mr. Andropov called Mr. Volsky to his Kremlin office; the two had
never met. “My legs felt like cotton,” Mr. Volsky said. Mr. Andropov
said simply he would appoint the younger man as his top economic
adviser. Mr. Volsky said he replied, “Maybe I should tell you about
myself first.” To which, Mr. Volsky recalled, the former spy chief
replied: “Do you really think you know more about yourself than I
know about you?” He started work the next day.
Mr. Volsky rode out the choppy Soviet leadership struggles of the
early 1980’s to become a close aide to Mr. Gorbachev, serving as
a peace negotiator during the Nagorno-Karabakh war between ethnic
Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
Earning his democratic credentials, Mr. Volsky was a supporter of
the dissident Andrei D. Sakharov. His ties with Communist factory
bosses, meanwhile, led him to found the business lobby in 1991, which
paradoxically was seen as a group opposed to capitalist reforms
because of the party background of its members. But soon enough
Russian industry was privatized, and Mr. Volsky began representing the
interests of the new owners, the rich businessmen known as oligarchs.
The Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs now represents the big
mining and energy businesses.
“He was always very flexible; he was friendly with any regime,
Gorbachev, Yeltsin or Putin,” Irina M. Khakamada, a political reformer,
said in a telephone interview.
In his political work, under President Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Volsky
opened a negotiating channel with the Chechen rebels. It made headway,
though a separate Russian team reached a cease-fire deal before
Mr. Volsky’s group.
Mr. Volsky is survived by his wife, Lyudmila; one son; one daughter
and six grandchildren.

UNSPECIFIED NUMBER OF POSITIVE DOPING TESTS AT EUROPEANS, IWF SAYS
International Herald Tribune, France
The Associated Press
Published: September 13, 2006
BUDAPEST, Hungary There were an unspecified number of positive
doping tests at the European weightlifting championships, the sport’s
governing body said Wednesday.
The International Weightlifting Federation recently received the
results of the doping tests from the laboratory in Cologne, Germany,
and was still in the process of dealing with the testing of “B”
samples and other appeals, IWF secretariat Monika Ungar said.
“I can confirm there were a number of positive tests and we expect
to have the names and other information available within weeks,”
Ungar said.
Ungar was speaking after French sports daily L’Equipe reported that
Ninel Miculescu of Romania and Nizami Pashayev of Azerbaijan tested
positive at the competition in May in Wladislawowo, Poland, and were
banned by the IWF for two years. Miculescu won the silver medal in
the 69-kilogram category, while Pashayev won gold at 94 kg.
L’Equipe said 10 others also tested positive, including Henadzi
Aliashchuk of Belarus and Ashot Danielyan of Armenia, who has tested
positive in the past and risk being banned for life.
The other eight were identified as Alexandru Brantan of Moldova,
Natig Hasanov of Azerbaijan, Oleksi Kolokoltsev of Ukraine, Vladimir
Smorchov of Russia, Florin Veliciu of Romania, Dmitry Voronin of
Russia, Dovile Blazunaite of Lithuania and Valentina Popova of Russia.
BUDAPEST, Hungary There were an unspecified number of positive
doping tests at the European weightlifting championships, the sport’s
governing body said Wednesday.
The International Weightlifting Federation recently received the
results of the doping tests from the laboratory in Cologne, Germany,
and was still in the process of dealing with the testing of “B”
samples and other appeals, IWF secretariat Monika Ungar said.
“I can confirm there were a number of positive tests and we expect
to have the names and other information available within weeks,”
Ungar said.
Ungar was speaking after French sports daily L’Equipe reported that
Ninel Miculescu of Romania and Nizami Pashayev of Azerbaijan tested
positive at the competition in May in Wladislawowo, Poland, and were
banned by the IWF for two years. Miculescu won the silver medal in
the 69-kilogram category, while Pashayev won gold at 94 kg.
L’Equipe said 10 others also tested positive, including Henadzi
Aliashchuk of Belarus and Ashot Danielyan of Armenia, who has tested
positive in the past and risk being banned for life.
The other eight were identified as Alexandru Brantan of Moldova,
Natig Hasanov of Azerbaijan, Oleksi Kolokoltsev of Ukraine, Vladimir
Smorchov of Russia, Florin Veliciu of Romania, Dmitry Voronin of
Russia, Dovile Blazunaite of Lithuania and Valentina Popova of Russia.
BUDAPEST, Hungary There were an unspecified number of positive
doping tests at the European weightlifting championships, the sport’s
governing body said Wednesday.
The International Weightlifting Federation recently received the
results of the doping tests from the laboratory in Cologne, Germany,
and was still in the process of dealing with the testing of “B”
samples and other appeals, IWF secretariat Monika Ungar said.
“I can confirm there were a number of positive tests and we expect
to have the names and other information available within weeks,”
Ungar said.
Ungar was speaking after French sports daily L’Equipe reported that
Ninel Miculescu of Romania and Nizami Pashayev of Azerbaijan tested
positive at the competition in May in Wladislawowo, Poland, and were
banned by the IWF for two years. Miculescu won the silver medal in
the 69-kilogram category, while Pashayev won gold at 94 kg.
L’Equipe said 10 others also tested positive, including Henadzi
Aliashchuk of Belarus and Ashot Danielyan of Armenia, who has tested
positive in the past and risk being banned for life.
The other eight were identified as Alexandru Brantan of Moldova,
Natig Hasanov of Azerbaijan, Oleksi Kolokoltsev of Ukraine, Vladimir
Smorchov of Russia, Florin Veliciu of Romania, Dmitry Voronin of
Russia, Dovile Blazunaite of Lithuania and Valentina Popova of Russia.

BOOKS TOWERING INFERNO
By Greg Goldin
LA Weekly, CA
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 – 12:00 pm
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship
Illustration by Mitch Handsone On the last page of The Fellowship:
The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship, we
are told that without the Greco-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, there
“very likely” would have been no Fallingwater, no Johnson Wax building,
no Guggenheim Museum. This claim is bold, and something new. Frank
Lloyd Wright was many things – unkind and uncaring toward his children,
violent and abusive of his wives, relentlessly egotistical among
his peers and apprentices, profligate and exploitative – but he was
no stooge.
The teachings of an occultist who happened to be his third wife’s guru
had as little to do with the 20th-century icons he produced as they
had to do with his own, homegrown monomania. Despite page after page of
attempts to link America’s greatest architect to the Montenegro-born,
self-proclaimed healer, it becomes obvious that Wright wasn’t taken
in by the muddle of Buddhism and Sufism that Gurdjieff promoted at
his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, in Paris.
Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman, the authors of this long,
ramshackle discourse on the seamy side of Frank Lloyd Wright
and his Taliesin Fellowship, themselves provide sufficient proof
to contradict their own final assertion. In 1950, Wright’s wife,
Olgivanna, and their daughter, Iovanna, urged all the apprentices at
Taliesin to read Gurdjieff’s All and Everything. The architect, ever
imperious, “countered by buying an entire carton of his own American
philosopher-sage Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings and giving them out to
the apprentices.” He then declared that Emerson would be “obligatory”
reading at the Fellowship. How refreshing, and a fitting anodyne –
except that this recital of Wright’s clearheadedness is colored black
by the authors’ equation of Emerson’s followers to Gurdjieff’s. Which
is a sneaky way of bolstering their point: Frank Lloyd Wright was
under the sway… of someone.
Alas, the authors are stuck in a trap of their own making. The
Fellowship is an intriguing slog because it is about a genuinely
fascinating cult figure: Frank Lloyd Wright. Dozens of his apprentices
traipse through the book, forming lifelong devotions to Wright –
devotions that he almost never reciprocates. Why did they become
and remain his partisans, his boys, as he called them? Why did they
sacrifice their own talent and happiness to slave away in Wright’s
studio, their ambitions stunted, their ideas crushed? Why did they
literally wait on him, hand and foot, as cooks and carpenters,
chauffeurs and secretaries – paying him tuition for the privilege?
His son, Lloyd, a talented architect, wrote to his father, saying
that the fellowship “is in fact and principle a very sorry business
all around. And the sorriest part of it is the feudal business of
your students. That will make them ashamed of themselves and you if
they think and have any perspective and if they don’t they will go
thru life… as cowards and fools. God help your school if this is
what it turns out. You wonder why your pupils are such washouts.”
Every word of this assessment is true, yet Wright carried on
unscathed. “He lived from first to last like a god: one who acts but
is not acted upon,” Lewis Mumford said, and he too was right.
Mumford, who was Wright’s early champion and oftentimes friend (he
persuaded Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to include Wright
in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1932 exhibit, “The International
Style”), said he possessed “the insolence of his genius.” Like it
or not – and he was more than occasionally unlikable – Frank Lloyd
Wright was one of those protean 19th-century figures able to tower over
the 20th century. Goethe’s model of the self-taught man who remakes
the world reverberated continuously in Wright’s mind. Beethoven’s
symphonies rang in his ears as he drew his buildings. Ruskin’s sense
of beauty limned his own. Wright was also a born huckster, in a line
of great American con artists stretching from Benjamin Franklin to
Mark Twain. He shared their uncanny instinct for deception, for making
up a persona who was strictly for public consumption.
The early tragedy of his life (his second wife and two of her
children were axed to death after a servant set Taliesin aflame),
his philandering, his illicit and bohemian lifestyle, were tabloid
news. But these events were, for the most part, a sideshow.
Architecture was the center of Wright’s life, and little else troubled
or distracted him. Perhaps this is one of the marks of genius. Another
is the ability to see your vision realized. Frank Lloyd Wright never
backed down, never acceded to a client’s wishes. He was an absolutist,
with unshakable faith in his designs. That was, arguably, his greatest
gift, and he made it manifest any number of times in the face of
powerful opposition.
So, at Fallingwater, he was warned against cantilevering the house
over the rocks at Bear Run.
More concrete, more steel, the engineers said. Wright persisted,
persuading his client, Edgar Kaufmann Sr., to build Wright’s house
Wright’s way. Fallingwater, of course, is an acknowledged (if
crumbling) masterpiece; the second half of Wright’s career, which
began after 20 years without a paying client, was launched from that
precarious work out in the woods of southwestern Pennsylvania. At
the Johnson Wax building, Wright was told by Racine officials that
his inverted, cone-shaped columns would collapse, but he got his way
by building a demonstration column and piling it high with sandbags
and rocks far outweighing the proposed load, then, cane in hand,
walking under the perilously overburdened column as if on a Sunday
stroll. At the Guggenheim, he stuck to his unprecedented spiral, which
pushed the limits of both conventional museum walls and concrete work,
waiting nearly 13 years for the museum to begin construction.
For such a man, and such accomplishments, there would always be a
steady supply of aspiring acolytes. Once at Taliesin, apprentices were
subject to Wright’s all-encompassing will. Unflinchingly, he would
tell you how to dress or whom to marry. He would mete out favors;
he would instigate punishments. He was the master. To live in a
world of one great man’s conception, apart from the confusion and
ambiguity of the outside, was like a gift. To some, the confinement
was liberating. Others simply fled.
In such a place, though, there could be no room for a competitor
hawking self-abnegation as a form of personal fulfillment. Frank Lloyd
Wright called Gurdjieff “the Devil and the God,” and he was abundantly
clear when he told his wife, “You’re not going to turn this into a
Gurdjieff Institute. Not while I am alive.” Olgivanna had to wait
until he died, and even then, The Fellowship says, she failed.
Taliesin is forever associated with Wright. Gurdjieff remains on the
margins, where he belongs.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

REPRESENTATIVES OF TWO POLITICAL-MILITARY BLOCKS PARTICIPATE AT A PEACEKEEPING EXERCISE IN MOLDOVA
puls.md
12.09.2006
>From September 11 to 29, a multinational peacekeeping exercise within
the Partnership for Peace Program, “Cooperative Longbow/Lancer 2006”,
will take place in Moldova. The exercise will involve approx. 1
housand military men and 50 civilians from 21 countries.
Together with the representatives of 9 NATO member-states, military
men from 3 out of the 6 member-states of the Collective Security
Treaty Organization – Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and also from
the member-states of the Partnership for Peace Program. The United
Arab Emirates, Bosnia, Qatar and Serbia will participate as observers.
The main goal of the exercise is to promote the interoperability
of the military forces from various countries during peacekeeping
operations in crisis situations and humanitarian assistance operations.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded on April
4, 1949. The NATO block involves 26 member-states from Europe and
North America.
The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) was founded on May
15, 1992. The members of the CSTO are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.
Moldova is not a member of any political-military block, and its
neutrality status is stipulated in the Constitution. The Republic of
Moldova joined the “Partnership for Peace” Program in March 1994 and
participates in its
activities together with all the CIS countries, Mongolia and some
European states. In 2006, Moldova signed the Individual Action
Plan Moldova – NATO, which does not provide for its joining to the
North-Atlantic block, and the degree of cooperation is inferior to
those stipulated in similar treaties of NATO with Ukraine and Russia.

KENYA: OUR PEOPLE HAVE A LONG HISTORY OF SELF-HATRED
Koigi Wamwere
allAfrica.com
September 13, 2006
The East African Standard (Nairobi)
OPINION
Since the white man set foot in Kenya in the 19th century, consciously
or unconsciously, Africans have had to wrestle with the problem
of self-image.
Like other people, our self-image is what shapes our destiny. Before
slavery and colonialism, we lived at peace with the world and ourselves
and had no problem with our self-image.
But when the white man came, enslaved and conquered us, he embarked
on a process of eroding our self-image and pride to maintain his
conquest. Through laws, the media, religion and education, he taught
us that we were inferior and he superior. Now we accept our inferiority
and self-hate and seek more.
Knowingly, we get less African the more we imbibe foreign education
and religions. The Mzungu has certainly bewitched us!
For many years, freedom fighters resisted cultural conquest while
loyalists, home guards and the Western-educated accepted it. At
independence, Kenyans thought that with the exit of the white man and
the coming of independence, they would recover not just their stolen
lands but self-image. They were wrong.
When colonialism formally ended in 1963, the white man’s cultural and
ideological conquest did not vanish. African caricatures of Western
political parties, civil service, parliaments, courts, schools,
churches and media perpetuated, promoted and perfected the white
man’s ideology.
Today, our inferiority and regard for foreigners as superior to us
is total and instinctive. Indeed, the older our independence gets,
the more mentally enslaved we become, not by the efforts of the West
but our own.
And most unnaturally, the more enslaved, the more we loathe
liberation. We now have become a nation of self-haters and
self-enslavers. And here, I am not talking about individual
self-hate. You may love yourself, but be a self-hater if you believe
your kind is less able and others are better.
The malaise of our collective inferiority has sunk into depths
of great shame. We have lost our confidence. We seek foreigners’
approval in what we do and say. We consider something said only when
foreigners say it. When they walk half-naked in New York or Paris,
we walk naked in Nairobi. Whom they crown, we make a hero. Whom they
attack, we kill. We seek them to anoint us as leaders. Without them,
we feel impotent!
Oppressed nations look up to the youth for salvation.
For youth to liberate, however, they must desire freedom more and be
less mentally shackled.
Unfortunately, this is not so in Kenya and I hope I am wrong.
When I look at three recent generations – Mau Mau freedom fighters,
perpetuators of the White man’s values after independence and today’s
youth – the oldest are the best, the youth the least inspiring.
Black Europeans are, however, our worst enemies. They made a whole
generation – their children – robots in the delusion that they can
be white. Their worst crimes are adulation of foreigners and things
foreign, worship of money, self-interest, ethnic myopia and mind
conformism.
A good example will suffice. Recently, the Kenya Football Federation
kicked out our national team, Harambee Stars, out of the Moi
International Sports Centre, Kasarani, and invited the better-known
Cameroon’s Indomitable Lions to practise at Kenya’s best stadium.
Instead, the national team was taken to Ruaraka, a field not as good
as Kasarani. It mattered little that at the time, Harambee Stars was
preparing for a match with Eritrea. In the end, Kenya lost to a team
that had been dismissed as minnows.
I was surprised that the media found it odd. What KFF did is what
we all do all the time. Though United States Senator Barack Obama
has done nothing spectacular other than that he has a Kenyan father,
when he visited Kenya recently, our media put him at a pedestal with
Jesus, the Superstar.
They followed him wherever he went, covering his speech at the
University of Nairobi live and generally giving him inordinate coverage
in the papers and on television.
The Kenyan media gave Senator Obama coverage they or American media
would never give a Kenyan MP, President, Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai
or South African nationalist and former President Nelson Mandela or
any of their own.
Momentarily, I thought they believed an American senator means
president-elect and not the American equivalent of a Kenyan MP. When
they said they found him, “a born leader, star quality with youthful
looks and deep-voiced”, I wondered why the qualities in Obama were
not noticed in the other countries he visited, including South Africa.
Mr David Mendell, the American journalist travelling with him said of
the senator in South Africa: “He could walk down the street without
any trouble. A few people noticed and said: ‘This is that senator’,
but nothing more.”
Why did the Kenyan media see more in Obama than others? This is because
he, like the Indomitable Lions, is foreign and successful. That is
what we worship. Before Senator Obama were the Artur brothers.
For weeks and months, all we heard from the media before some ended
in their laps was Artur Margaryan and Artur Sargysyan.
The notoriety of the Armenian brothers may have deserved some coverage,
but no Kenyan equivalent can get pages and pages of coverage, week
after week.
The foreign suspects got far more coverage than the good works of great
Kenyans such as Prof Ngugi wa Thiongo, Prof Ali Mazrui or Dr Calestus
Juma would ever get. To our media, flamboyant foreigners with suspect
credentials deserve preference over unassuming Kenyan greatness!
I cannot conclude without mentioning Sir Edward Clay, the former
British High Commissioner, another foreign darling of Kenyan
media. When Clay lambasted corruption, Kenyan media gave him tonnes of
coverage as if they were hearing it for the first time. They applauded
more loudly than when a Kenyan said the same.
We may agree with whatever foreigners say, but there is something
seriously wrong if an issue makes sense and a song sounds sweet
only when a foreigner says or sings it. It is time we stopped being
parrots and apes of other people. Otherwise, we will remain behind,
poor and crippled.

NO PROGRESS IN SEARCH FOR SCHOOL FIREBOMBER
By Janice Arnold
Staff Reporter
The Canadan Jewish News
September 14, 2006
MONTREAL – The perpetrator of a Molotov-cocktail attack on a chassidic
boys’ school in Montreal over Labour Day weekend remains at large
despite the act having been videotaped by the school’s surveillance
camera and despite a $5,000 reward offered by an anonymous donor for
information leading to his arrest.
The images released by police show, from an angle, a masked
black-haired man, seemingly in his 20s and apparently alone, wearing
a beige top and beige pants reaching to below the knees. He is seen
lighting an accelerant and throwing it through a glass panel of the
main entrance of the Skver community’s Toldos Yakov Yosef school in
the city’s Outremont neighbourhood shortly after midnight on Saturday,
Sept. 2.
In the last frame, he removes his hood-like mask as he flees.
School and Jewish community officials told a press conference last
week that they’re confident and grateful police are putting the
necessary resources into their investigation.
The community and police, however, differ on the motivation for
the crime.
Police have so far not labelled the incident a hate crime, because
of the absence of evidence such as graffiti or phone calls, and are
treating it as arson.
But Canadian Jewish Congress, B’nai Brith Canada and Toldos
leaders are convinced the perpetrator deliberately targeted a
Jewish institution. No one was in the school at the time. About a
dozen teenaged students had left the building only about 20 minutes
beforehand.
Damage was limited to the school’s vestibule because sprinklers put out
the fire and the fire department responded quickly, school director
Binyomin Mayer said. He thanked the school’s non-Jewish neighbours
for immediately alerting police and coming to see if anyone was on
the premises.
The school reopened the next day, but it estimates it will cost
$150,000 to repair damage and add new security features.
Asked if he thought there was a connection between the incident and the
recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Rabbi Reuben Poupko, co-chair of the
Montreal Jewish Security Advisory Committee, told reporters that it’s
“a fair question to wonder whether the gathering of 15,000 Quebecers
under the flag of Hezbollah – unfortunately further legitimized by
the presence of politicians – creates an atmosphere where fanatics
draw the conclusion that violence against Jews is somehow acceptable.”
He said many in the community have been asking themselves that
question. Rabbi Poupko was referring to the Aug. 6 demonstration
against the recent war in which three politicians – Bloc Quebecois
leader Gilles Duceppe, Parti Quebecois leader Andre Boisclair and
federal Liberal MP Denis Coderre – participated prominently.
At the press conference, held three days after the firebombing,
community officials asked that political leaders forcefully denounce
the Toldos attack. But reaction was slow and scattered, unlike the
firebombing of United Talmud Torahs’ library in April 2004, when
politicians at all levels, including then-prime minister Paul Martin,
immediately condemned the act. (Prime Minister Stephen Harper has
yet to issue a statement.)
Duceppe was one of the first politicians to condemn the incident and
affirm that Quebecers do not tolerate any such “hateful act whoever
it is directed at, or for whatever reason.” Boisclair soon after
denounced the incident as well.
Quebec Premier Jean Charest said: “No one can determine at this point
if it was motivated by hate.
But nonetheless I think it is important that all Quebec see very
clearly on this issue that we are a society of tolerance, that we
are a society that encourages free speech and that we should not and
cannot tolerate these kinds of acts.”
Federal Liberal leadership candidate and Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison
visited the school to express his revulsion against what he called
an act of “terrorism” against children and education.
NDP leader Jack Layton likewise stated: “How could someone be so
callous as to attempt to strike terror into the hearts of young
children?”
Alex Werzberger, president of the Coalition of Chassidic Organizations
of Outremont, pointed out there is an Armenian church and school two
blocks away from Toldos, as well as a French school on a nearby block,
which suggests to him that the perpetrator had “his pick of schools”
but went for the Jewish one.
“You can’t put any other spin on it than anti-Semitism.”
Werzberger said there hasn’t been a serious anti-Semitic incident in
Outremont for a long time, nor has there been any recent contentious
issue, such as disputes over shul locations, parking problems or an
eruv, which were all prominent several years ago.
“Other than someone yelling ‘damned Jews,’ which is almost a daily
occurrence, there has been nothing,” he said.
FEDERATION CJA, which co-ordinates community security, is re-evaluating
security at Jewish schools and other institutions in the wake of
the incident, but it did not raise its threat-assessment level as a
result of the incident. It continues to call for “heightened vigilance”
and implementation of existing procedures.
Since the UTT firebombing, the federation has had a full-time community
security director, Michel Bujold, formerly in charge of security at
Concordia University. He was on the Toldos crime scene about three
hours later.
After UTT, Combined Jewish Appeal raised $2.3 million specifically
for security, and all 40 school and day-care sites were assessed by
a U.S security professional. Toldos was found to be at risk and CJA
heavily subsidized the installation of a surveillance camera. The
school, located a former industrial area that is now mainly home to
condominiums, has been defaced with swastikas in the past. Its girls’
school is down the street, as is a Belzer chassidic school.
CJC Quebec region chair Jeffrey Boro said it will be determined if
additional security at the schools is needed. Rabbi Poupko said the
incident proved that the security structure in place worked well and
the community’s investment paid off.
The psychological damage from the attack may last a while, Mayer
said. Some Toldos students, especially those between six and 12, are
showing signs of anxiety and counsellors have been hired to help them.
Toldos has about 250 boys from age three to 16, Mayer said. There
are about 200 Skver families in Montreal.
Originally from Ukraine, the community is headquartered near Spring
Valley, N. Y., where its Grand Rebbe, David Twersky, lives.
Boro, a criminal lawyer by profession, admitted that no matter how
many layers of security are in place, there’s no way to totally
prevent acts such as the firebombing.
“What we have to do is educate people. Civil discourse is the rule
of the day. We have to continue outreach programs and show people we
are not so different.”
The UTT firebombing was immediately called a hate crime by police
because of a note left at the school, but the perpetrator was not
charged with a hate crime.
Sleiman El-Merhebi, 20, was released from a federal prison in May
after serving two-thirds of a 40-month sentence.
A date for his mother’s trial is to be set Sept. 25.
Rouba El-Merhebi Fahd is charged with being an accessory after the
fact of her son’s crime.

COURIC SLIPS TO THIRD PLACE
By Jacques Steinberg
The New York Times
Published: September 13, 2006
On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
more evening news viewers chose to watch “NBC Nightly News With
Brian Williams” than the broadcasts of his two main competitors,
Charles Gibson on ABC and Katie Couric on CBS, according to
preliminary figures from Nielsen Media Research released yesterday
by the networks. Mr. Williams’s program drew an estimated 8.3 million
viewers, more than the estimated 7.9 million who watched “World News”
with Mr. Gibson, and the estimated 7.5 million who saw Ms. Couric,
on her fifth night. All three programs were pre-empted in some parts
of the West Coast on Monday by President Bush’s address, and yet
Mr. Williams’s audience was still bigger than the average number
he drew last week (about 7.1 million a night), as was Mr. Gibson’s
(6.9 million a night). Ms. Couric, who easily won the ratings race
last week with an average of 10.2 million viewers a night, was down
substantially on Monday.
JACQUES STEINBERG
Stolen Munch Paintings to Be Displayed Soon
Stolen and recovered, the Edvard Munch paintings “The Scream” and
“Madonna” will go on view once more at the Munch Museum in Oslo in
the fall even before they are restored, Agence France-Presse reported
yesterday.
Because of enormous interest in the paintings, “the museum will
display them, in their current state, to the public and the media,
for a short period,” a statement said. Both paintings were damaged
but “are in better shape than expected,” said Jorun Christoffersen, a
museum spokeswoman, who added, “They will need some major restoration
work.” A photograph, above, released by the museum on its Web site,
, showed that the lower left corner of “The
Scream” was crumpled, and that “Madonna” had a scratch and a tear
in the canvas. The paintings, stolen in 2004 in broad daylight,
were recovered two weeks ago. The police have not said how they
retrieved them. Before they were recovered, three men were convicted
of complicity in the theft.
Ratings Ride Coattails
President Bush’s 17-minute address on Monday night fell smack in
the middle of the second part of ABC’s contentious “Path to 9/11”
mini-series, with Harvey Keitel. But the thematic synchronicity, which
also extended to a 9/11 “Primetime” afterward, may have helped lift
ABC to No. 1 for the night, averaging about 12 million viewers over
all, according to Nielsen’s estimates. CBS inserted the president’s
9 p.m. speech into a lineup of repeats: “How I Met Your Mother” (5.9
million) at 8, “The New Adventures of Old Christine” (5.5 million)
at 8:30, and “Two and a Half Men” (7.6 million) after the speech. A
repeat of “CSI: Miami” (8.3 million) followed, propelling CBS to No. 2
for the night. On Fox, the interruption may account for some of the
drop-off for “Vanished” (5.9 million), which paled in comparison
with the solid audience at 8 for the serial drama “Prison Break”
(8.8 million).
That episode, which included the bloody death of the escapee Abruzzi
(Peter Stormare), led over all for the hour among adults 18 to
49. NBC’s “Dateline” (6.1 million) from 8 to 10, which paused for
Mr. Bush’s speech, could not compensate for a “Medium” repeat at 10
(4.8 million), which drove the network to a subdued last place for
the night. BENJAMIN TOFF
Turkish Novelist Faces Trial
A prominent Turkish novelist who faces trial next week for “insulting
Turkishness” says the case is the first to pivot on words uttered by
fictional characters, Reuters reported. The novelist, Elif Shafak,
above, a feminist who writes in English and Turkish, has been charged
in connection with her new novel, “The Bastard of Istanbul.” The case
is being followed closely by the European Union, which says Turkey
must foster more freedom of expression as a condition of membership.
Ms. Shafak, 34, is scheduled to give birth during the week the trial,
set for Sept. 21, is to begin. She has been charged under a provision
of Turkey’s penal code that has been used against several journalists
and authors. Ms. Shafak said that to date the article “has never been
used against fictional characters.” “In that sense this is a new step,”
she said, “and it’s quite surprising and upsetting, because if they
keep doing this, no one can write novels in this country anymore;
no one can make movies, even.” In her novel, Armenian characters
make disparaging comments about Turks and refer to the genocide of
Armenians during the Ottoman Empire, a massacre denied by Turkey.
Bush ‘Assassination’ Film Acquired for Wide Release
Newmarket Films, the company that handled Mel Gibson’s “Passion of
the Christ,” has acquired the distribution rights to “Death of a
President,” the provocative Gabriel Range pseudodocumentary that
depicts the assassination of President Bush, Reuters reported.
Newmarket is expected to give the film a wide release in the next
few months. It was seen recently at the Toronto International Film
Festival and is to be shown next month on Channel 4 in Britain. “We
portrayed the horror of assassination,” said Mr. Range, who said he
had received five or six death threats as a result of his movie,
which has evoked protests from some conservatives. “I don’t think
anyone would get the idea of assassinating Bush from this film.”
Accolades
Britain will pay tribute to the Beatles in January when it issues a set
of six stamps featuring album covers from their most famous recordings,
above, the BBC reported. The collection includes “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band,” “Abbey Road,” “Help!,” “Revolver,” “Let It Be”
and “With the Beatles.” …
The European Film Academy will honor Roman Polanski, 73, with
its lifetime achievement award at ceremonies in December in
Warsaw. Mr. Polanski’s films include “Chinatown” and “The Pianist,”
winner of the 2002 Academy Award for best director. Mr. Polanski fled
the United States in 1977 after pleading guilty to having sex with
a 13-year-old girl. … Shi-Yeon Sung, a 31-year-old South Korean,
has become the first woman to win the Sir Georg Solti International
Conductors’ Competition, held every two years in Frankfurt,
Agence France-Presse reported. In the finale of the competition,
which attracted 500 applications from 72 countries, Ms. Sung led the
Frankfurt Opera’s Museumsorchester in Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet”
fantasy overture; after being named the winner of the $19,000 first
prize, she conducted Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture.
Footnotes
The opening concert of the New York Philharmonic’s 165th season will
be telecast live tonight to a large screen suspended in Josie Robertson
Plaza at Lincoln Center, where the performances of Beethoven’s “Egmont”
Overture, Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos in E flat and Beethoven’s
“Eroica” Symphony may be seen and heard free of charge. The concert,
led by Lorin Maazel and featuring the pianists Emanuel Ax and
Yefim Bronfman, will be broadcast nationally on “Live From Lincoln
Center.” … A Yiddish-language version of the Neil Simon comedy
“The Sunshine Boys,” in a staged reading starring Theodore Bikel and
Fyvush Finkel, will be presented by the National Yiddish Theater –
Folksbiene for a single performance at 4 p.m. Jan. 7 at Symphony
Space. Directed by Isaiah Sheffer, the translation by Miriam Hoffman,
which had its premiere in Tel Aviv in 2001, will be presented with
English and Russian supertitles. … The London-based organization
Lost Musicals will present what is billed as the first New York
revival of the original, full 1929 Broadway book and score of the
Cole Porter musical “Fifty Million Frenchmen” for four performances
at Florence Gould Hall beginning at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday. It will also
be performed on Sept. 24, Sept. 29 and Oct. 8.

SO LONG, FAREWELL
By: Barbara & Scott Siegel
TheaterMania
Sep 13, 2006
Charles Aznavour
(© Jean-Baptiste Mondino)
When Charles Aznavour sings “Yesterday When I Was Young” at Radio City
Music Hall on September 18 and 19 in the last two concerts he will ever
give in New York City, the audience will likely be weeping. Aznavour,
who has nurtured a passionate fan base all over the world, is 82 years
old — and though he is ready to say goodbye, those fans don’t want
him to go.
Armenian by birth and French by attitude, this iconoclastic
songwriter/singer never succumbed to the entreaties of American record
executives who urged him to write simpler pop songs. His lyrics are
rich and colorful, and his music is vibrant, no matter if the song in
question is a melancholy ballad or a driving, up-tempo declaration of
life. The composer of nearly 1,000 songs, Aznavour will be hard-pressed
to choose among them for his final New York concerts; the audience
will want to hear so many more than he could possibly perform.
We recently called Aznavour in Paris and spoke with him about his
farewell tour. He was open and candid about what is sure to be a
memorable experience.
THEATERMANIA: How will you design your song list? Will it be different
than other shows because this is your farewell concert?
CHARLES AZNAVOUR: It’s going to be what you call “The Best Of.” I’m
going to sing what the public wants to hear. Why sing new songs? People
sing new songs when they have something to promote. I’m not promoting
anything. I’m just coming to say, “That’s it.”
TM: Are you still writing new songs?
CA: Yes, but I don’t think the public wants to hear something new
when I’m coming for the last time.
TM: Do you realize the impact you’ve had on people’s lives?
CA: It touches me very much. I’m very moved by that.
But the impact comes from the songs. The entertainer in me is less
happy than the writer in me.
TM: When you were last in New York, you spoke on stage about a musical
you were writing. Whatever became of that?
CA: Right now the producer is trying to find the money to present it
in Canada. It played in Germany and in Hungary. It has been translated
into English but it hasn’t been done in France — not yet. Meanwhile,
there’s an American producer working on a show about the songs I’ve
done. The same thing is happening in other countries. I have the
funny feeling that I’m beginning to be “recognized.” “Known” and
“recognized” are two different words. “Known” is people come to see
you as an entertainer; “recognized” comes from what I have written
and what I have done.
TM: Are you retiring because of your health?
CA: I feel well, but I don’t know what condition I will be in in a
few years. I’m 82 and it’s time to retire slowly but surely. What
I prefer to do is to write. I write every day of my life. I will
never be bored. When I end my performing career, I will write plays
and musicals.
TM: What happens after your New York concerts?
CA: I will go to a few more cities in America; then I will start my
farewell tour in Spanish. I will also go to Armenia and Japan. The
last shot will be in French.
A good farewell concert Tour should take four years, at least.
TM: Since the final concerts will be in French, will you come back
to North America to perform in Quebec?
CA: Yes, I will go back to the French part of Canada for the French
part of the tour. But I will not come back in English. English is
not the easiest for me.
TM: Edith Piaf sang “Non, je ne regrette rien.” Do you have any
regrets?
CA: I have no regrets. I did more than what I ever dreamed I would do
in my life. I had a very difficult beginning — very difficult. But
once I got going, I never went down after that. I’ve been blessed.
–Boundary_(ID_rQaRDqNQVAX4Jux8rM0uKw)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

THE CURSE OF RADICAL ISLAM AS A POLITICAL RELIGION
AINA
Assyrian International News Agency.
Posted GMT 9-13-2006 14:33:17
“Muslims must . . . educate their children to Jihad.
This is the greatest benefit of the situation: educating the children
to Jihad and to hatred of the Jews, the Christians, and the infidels;
educating the children to Jihad and to revival of the embers of Jihad
in their souls. This is what is needed now . . .” –Sheikh Muhammad
Saleh al-Munajjid, an imam in Saudi Arabia.
“Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not
disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of
[other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country
in the world . . .” –Ayatollah Khomeni (1902-1989), religious leader
of Iran
“The leader who needs religion to govern his people is weak . . . We
have to rid ourselves of superstition.
Anybody is free to believe in anything, but we need freedom of
thought.” –Ataturk (1881-1938), founder of modern Turkey.
Some readers have told me that I do not write enough about the
political side of Islam, especially as it relates to the mixing of
religion and politics and to the fringe element of radical Islam which
is supportive of international terrorism. As a matter of fact, I have
written extensively on the question, but in French (see my 2001 book
“L’Heure juste”). Here, then, is my position on this topic.
All proselytist religions tend to mix politics and religion
because one of their objectives is to control how people think and
behave. On this score, I would say Islam (“submission” or “surrender”
in Arabic) doesn’t fare well, because it tends to institutionalize
a symbiosis between politics and religion. It is a religion that
tends theoretically to concentrate temporal and spiritual authority
in a single entity. Structurally, in Islam, the Caliph and the Sheik
are supposed to be the same person, wielding spiritual and political
powers over the people. Mind you, something approaching the same result
prevailed in Christianity after the 4th century, when the Church and
the Throne formed close alliances, the clergy confirming the power of
kings and emperors, and the rich and powerful aristocracy protecting
the equally rich and powerful religious hierarchy. It is only with
the advent of the Renaissance that Christian Europe began talking
about democracy as the most humanist form of government.
The more progressive and modern Muslim countries that have advanced
the most economically, socially and politically, such as Turkey,
Malaysia or Indonesia, are those that have rejected the unhealthy,
near complete mixing of religion and politics that is called for by
fundamentalist Islam. In other Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia
and Qatar, a more extreme brand of Islam prevails. This movement in
Sunni Islam, (the dominant form of Islam), is called Wannabism or
“Salafism,” and it distinguishes itself by not only refusing Western
values and ideologies, such as nationalism, socialism and capitalism,
but also by rejecting the Western concepts of freedom, liberty,
economics, constitutions, political parties, revolution, social
justice and the very idea of a rationalist, secular culture. The other
minority branch of Islam, Shia Islam can also be considered extremist,
especially in contemporary Iran, in the sense that it reserves to the
clergy a dominant political role in an Islamic country. It is mainly
concentrated in Iran, although Shiites also live in Iraq, Lebanon,
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.
It can be argued that before Islam, which appeared in the early part of
the 7th Century, Arab civilization was more advanced and more peaceful
than after the imposition of the new faith through violence. It had
participated fully in the rich Greek, Assyrian, Persian, Chaldean and
Babylonian civilizations, to which we owe mathematical breakthroughs,
such as the concept of zero found in the Greek and Hindu decimal
systems and the Pythagorean Theorem in Babylonian mathematics.
Regarding Islamic respect for science, it has to be said that one
of Muhammad’s successors, the Caliph Omar of Damascus, distinguished
himself by having centuries-old literary treasures destroyed, besides
setting afire the large Egyptian library of Alexandria, a wonder
of the Ancient World. Caliph Omar is reported to have justified his
order to destroy the books in the library of Alexandria by saying that
“they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy,
or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.”
Since many religions have theologies that stress so-called divine
revelation over human reason, it is not surprising that religious
extremists can be opposed to human intellectual progress, especially
if such progress is perceived as a threat to their political power. Not
surprisingly also, such a bias against the human intellect and against
scientific achievements is bound to have a detrimental influence
on the economic, social and political development of countries that
embrace such an attitude. Indeed, the absence of intellectual freedom
and censorship are the two biggest enemies of human progress.
During the 9th and 10th centuries, Islamic civilization redeemed itself
somewhat by having many ancient scientific and philosophical tracts
translated from ancient languages, especially Greek, into Arabic.
It is these translations which were imported into Europe and which
played such a central role in bringing about the European Renaissance,
from which Western civilization still draws most of its inspiration.
Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Muhammad
(c. 570–632), in the 7th century, the means of Muslim expansion
was always the sword and military conquest. Islam, at least at the
beginning, was not a “religion of peace,” to mimic the expression
used often by President George W. Bush. It was fundamentally a
military movement that used forced conversion to Islam to expand
its dominion. Muhammad began the first violent movement in Medina,
after a declaration of a Jihad against so-called ‘infidels’.
There, for example, the Jews who refused to convert to Islam were
driven from the land or beheaded.
Approximately 15 years later he marched on Mecca with an army of
about 20,000, and later against the Assyrians, the Armenians and the
Coptics in Egypt.
Those who converted to Islam were spared. Those who refused to convert
were beheaded. So much for a compassionate Islam.
It has been argued convincingly that the imposition of Islam upon
the Arabs was a regressive development.
With Islam, the Arab civilization lost much of the scientific
accomplishments and the tradition of intellectual vitality that it
had inherited from the Greek and Assyrian civilizations.
The fundamental question of the religious foundation of violence and
terrorism needs attention. It is the most pressing, because the world
is not going to tolerate very long being subjected to blackmail and
having its prosperity and freedom threatened this way.
It is no surprise that terrorist leaders use the mask of religion to
diabolize their enemies and to cloak their cruelties and atrocities
in a pious justification. The cover of religion to justify terrorism,
especially suicide terrorism, and the killing of innocent people
also has the advantage of making it easier to recruit so-called
martyrs and fanatics, if not utterly deranged people, who would not
be as easily mobilized for a purely political cause. That may be one
reason why today’s religious-based terrorism is more deadly than the
nationalist-based terrorism of 40 or 50 years ago.
Extremists in any religion can find passages in their ‘holy books’
that condone violence against others.
Suffice it to say that they overlook the book’s other teachings about
“peace,” “justice,” “kindness,” “courtesy,” and “compassion” toward
others, to concentrate on the admonitions which call for intolerance
and aggression against so-called “infidels.”
Some religious ideologues can reinforce the violent tendencies of
the most exalted people by emphasizing the most violent religious
teachings. For instance, an Egyptian scholar, Sayied Qutb, argued
in the 1950s, in his book of Quranic interpretation, entitled
“Fe-zelal-al-Qur’an,” that a state of permanent war is normal between
Muslims and non-Muslims, ignoring that the Qur’an (Koran) dictates
that its teachings be understood in full, not in bits and pieces
(Surah 20:114), as it relates mainly to individual morality, not to
politics. The religious-based Al Qaeda terrorist movement takes its
violent inspirations from such impractical subversive teachings. It
is part of the Jihadist ideology of hatred and destruction.
Faced with the threat of Islamist terrorism, the important task for
the rest of the world is to avoid antagonizing the moderate Muslims
who are largely in the majority in their countries. Both for reasons of
domestic support and for acceptance by the Muslim masses, governments
anxious to fight and contain international terrorism should, now more
than ever, retain the moral high ground and not be the aggressors. They
should reject the negative, misleading and self-fulfilling propaganda
rhetoric of “Islamo-Fascism,” “war of civilizations” or even worse,
of “war of religions,” and concentrate on concretely assisting Muslim
countries in acceding to modernity and prosperity, while supporting
their efforts in combating anti-modernity religious-based terrorism.
Therefore, to pursue a policy of openness, assistance and fairness
toward Muslim countries would seem to be the most just and the most
constructive approach, while simultaneously maintaining a firm attitude
against gratuitous international terrorism. Sad to say, this is not
the kind of rational and sophisticated policy being followed by the
current American administration, which seems bent on glorifying and
multiplying the most extremist Islamist organizations, while alienating
and silencing the most reform-minded people in the Muslim world.
On this score, the best thing the Bush-Cheney administration could
do in fighting international Islamist terrorism would be to announce
a phase out of its military occupation of Iraq, while persuading
its close ally, Israel, to end its own military occupation of
Palestine, and take concrete steps to solve once and for all the
rotten Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On the other hand, the worst thing the Bush-Cheney team could do would
be to start bombing Iran. The latter would be a most counter-productive
move and would feed both extremism and terrorism.
By Rodrigue Tremblay Online Journal Guest Writer
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University
of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@ yahoo.com. He
is the author of the book ‘The New American Empire’. Visit his blog
site at

JAPAN HUNTS FOR ENERGY
Ohmy News
Published 2006-09-13 15:26 (KST)
[Commentary] Resource-poor nation builds links with Central Asia
Resource-poor Japan is pumping no small amount of public funds into
its energy drive to secure foreign oil, gas and other resources, in a
desperate bid to ensure its energy security amid spikes in oil prices.
Ensuring stability of supply is a matter of life or death for the
world’s second-largest economy. The country imports virtually all of
its oil, with nearly 90 percent of that coming from the volatile Middle
East. Japan also buys almost all of its natural gas from abroad, making
it the world’s largest importer of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Public
financial support in the form of investment, loans, loan guarantees
and investment insurance is designed to encourage conservatively-minded
domestic firms to venture into high-risk projects abroad.
Alarmed by stubbornly high global oil prices and the global rush for
energy — led by China and India — Tokyo released in late May a new
strategy intended to ensure the country’s long term future. The New
National Energy Strategy calls for, among other things, strengthening
relations with resource-rich countries through measures such as
official development assistance (ODA) and free trade agreements (FTAs).
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made a whirlwind tour of Central
Asia recently, becoming the first Japanese premier to do so. The
historic visit has highlighted how passionately energy-strapped
Japan is wooing the region, which is rich in oil, gas, uranium and
other resources. Although no deals were signed on specific commercial
energy projects, Koizumi’s tour has laid the groundwork for increased
cooperation in energy and other areas.
In Kazakhstan, Koizumi and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev agreed
to expand political dialogue, personnel exchanges and cooperation on
the joint development of uranium mines and other natural resources
such as oil in the Central Asian country. In Uzbekistan, Koizumi
and Uzbek President Islam Karimov agreed to accelerate information
exchanges among both public and private sectors in the two countries
in jointly developing uranium resources in the Central Asian country.
Koizumi’s visit to Central Asia was one of his last overseas before
he steps down later this month, when his current three-year term as
president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) expires. To
ensure its energy security, Japan is desperate to diversify its
hydrocarbon sources in order to reduce its heavy reliance on the Middle
East for oil imports. As such, an obvious choice for the country is
to turn to the Central Asian and Caucasian nations.
One of the most important pillars of the New National Energy Strategy
is the fostering of more powerful domestic energy companies with
the ultimate goal of boosting the ratio of “Hinomaru oil,” or oil
developed and imported by domestic producers, from the current 15
percent to 40 percent of all oil imports by 2030.
To achieve this goal, the new strategy stresses the importance of
“drastically strengthening the supply of risk money” related to the
exploration and development of overseas oil and natural gas reserves
by domestic development companies. As such, the scheme emphasizes
the place for the government-affiliated Japan Oil, Natural Gas and
Metals Corporation (JOGMEC), among others, to supply cash for this end.
About three months after the release of the new strategy, the
government has begun to translate it into specific action. New public
funds have begun to flow into the energy development sector.
The government plans to increase the percentage of investments by
JOGMEC in combined Japanese investments, including those by private
firms, in high-risk oil, gas and other energy projects to 70 percent
from the current 50 percent, if necessary. At present, the first target
project is a project for an East Siberian oilfield. The subsidy plan
is designed to enable Japan to secure concessions linked to these
fields, near Lake Baikal, countering Chinese attempts to persuade
Russia to send Siberian oil to China.
Japan and China have lobbied for alternative routes for the East
Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline.
Although major Japanese oil explorer Inpex Corp. and a handful of
trading houses have considered joining the East Siberian oilfield
project, they are waiting for a guarantee from the Russian government
that the pipeline will be built to the Pacific coast, from where oil
can be tankered to Japan. Tokyo has asked the Russian government to
sign an intergovernmental agreement pledging that it will build the
entire 4,188-km pipeline from Taishet to a location near Nakhodka,
a port city on the Pacific.
However, Moscow has rejected the Japanese request and instead
has talked only of the importance of exploring and developing the
untapped reserves of East Siberia in order to provide the oil to
fill the pipe. The suspicion exists that the ESPO may only reach
so far as Skovorodino, the midpoint, which is near the Chinese
border. Russian state-run pipeline monopoly Transneft started building
the Taishet-Skovorodino phase in late April. It expects to finish
this in 2008. No decision has been taken as to when construction on
the second half will take place, however.
Government-funded Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI)
decided recently to underwrite Japanese companies’ insurance in
13 high-risk countries. This list, which became effective as of
mid-August, includes Libya, Angola, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville),
Cameroon, Gabon, Dominican Republic, Armenia, Macedonia, Senegal,
Tanzania, Tajikistan, Niger and the Central African Republic.
Meanwhile, Inpex Holdings — Japan’s largest oil and gas exploration
company, which includes both Inpex Corp. and Teikoku Oil — has said
it is in talks with NEXI on the possibility of an insurance scheme
to cover the risks associated with the massive Azadegan oilfield
development project in Iran, should economic sanctions against the
Islamic state arise over its nuclear program. Iran is already on
NEXI’s list of countries eligible for underwriting.
Oil and gas are not the only resources that whet Japan’s
appetite. Japan is also stepping up its drive to secure uranium
abroad as global demand for nuclear power rises amid spikes in oil and
gas prices and growing environmental concerns. Nuclear power plants
generate much less carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas widely
blamed for global warming, than fossil fuel-fired facilities. Japan
is already the world’s third-largest nuclear power nation in terms
of the number of civilian nuclear reactors in operation.
The government-affiliated Japan Bank for International Cooperation
(JBIC) recently signed a loan agreement with APPAK, a subsidiary of
Kazakhstan’s Kazatomprom.
This is the first time that JBIC has provided loans for an overseas
uranium project. Kazakhstan has the world’s second-largest uranium
resources and Kazatomprom is the world’s fourth-largest uranium
producer. Sumitomo Corp. and Kansai Electric Power Co.
have stakes in APPAK of 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. NEXI
has also underwritten insurance for the uranium project. JBIC also
recently signed separate agreements with Kazatomprom and Uzbekistan’s
Ministry for Foreign Economic Relations, Investments and Trade on
forging a comprehensive strategic partnership.
The Japanese government’s strong backing for domestic energy
companies engaged in foreign exploration and production of oil and
gas marks a clear policy reversal. JOGMEC was established in early
2004 as a successor to state-owned Japan National Oil Corporation
(JNOC), which was set up in the 1960s to pioneer Japan’s drive to
boost energy security. JNOC was disbanded, however, after piling up
an immense amount of debt through loans and investments — worth a
total of about 2 trillion yen (US$17 billion) — to help domestic
firms participate in wasteful exploration projects abroad.
There are some concerns that JOGMEC might fall into the same trap
as JNOC. Hopefully, Tokyo will have learned its lesson from the
failure of JNOC. The government will never be allowed to throw its
money around as carelessly as it once did. It must select target
projects for financial support. Also, Japanese firms should take
steps to hedge risks themselves — such as joining forces with each
other and with foreign firms — when investing in high-risk projects,
instead of simply replying on public funds.
JOGMEC faces a delicate balancing act of pumping risk money into
promising Japanese energy projects abroad actively and effectively
while pulling the plug on them without delay if they prove to be
unprofitable, in order to minimize losses.