NEW TRIAL OF ARMENIAN-TURKISH EDITOR BEGINS IN ISTANBUL
source:
Journal of Turkish Weekly, Turkey
May 17 2006
Hrant Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian origin, is accused of
“attempting to influence the judiciary” when his newspaper ran articles
criticizing a law that makes it a crime to “insults Turkishness.” The
law has been used to indict writers and intellectuals, including Dink
himself and novelist Orhan Pamuk, for commenting on the mass killings
of Armenians by Turks around World War I.
Turkey denies claims by Armenians and others that the killings amounted
to genocide.
The cases against Pamuk and Dink have raised concerns about freedom
of speech in the European Union, which Turkey aspires to join.
Three other writers from the “Agos” newspaper, including Dink’s son,
also went on trial today.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

SPECIALISTS TRY TO RESUME SEARCH FOR A-320 FLIGHT RECORDERS AT SEA
by Lev Nezdorovin
ITAR-TASS News Agency
May 17, 2006 Wednesday
Notwithstanding bad weather specialists are trying to resume the search
for the flight recorders from the Armenian Airbus-320 passenger plane
that crashed into the Black Sea off Sochi on May 3.
“The swell on the sea is increasing and it is beginning to rain in
the search area. And yet the ship Navigator is trying to position
itself and sink the RT-1000 apparatus for work on the seabed,” an
official at the search operation technical support headquarters told
Itar-Tass on Wednesday.
On Tuesday work was interrupted by a strong side wind that constantly
carried away the Navigator, which is operating the RT-1000. The wind
subsided at about midnight and the apparatus was lowered to the seabed
between 1 a.m. (2100 GMT) and 6 a.m. (0200 GMT) but no flight recorders
were found.
Silt on the seabed complicated the work, covering the video camera
and the searchlights. The team had to raise the apparatus several
times to clean them. It takes 40 minutes for the apparatus to sink
and as much to come back to the surface.
The apparatus had not participated in such operations before. It
raised only geological samples weighing up to 20 kilogrammes and did
not work at such depths.
The device is capable to lift fragments of a plane weighing up to
12 kilogrammes and the two flight recorders, each weighing seven
kilogrammes, the head of the Federal Agency for Sea and River
Transport, Alexander Davydenko, said.
The RT-1000 is a system consisting of control and lifting equipment
and the apparatus itself with photo and video equipment and a hydraulic
manipulator operating in all directions.
Davydenko said, “It will take two to three days to lift [the flight
recorders]. Everything will depend on the weather.”
He said the operation would involve several groups of 18 people. Each
will work for eight hours.
The Navigator’s crew obtained the first television image of the flight
recorders lying at the depth of almost 500 metres, using the top-notch
research complex Kalmar.
The Kalmar equipment was provided by the department for salvage and
emergency operations based in the port city of Novorossisk.
The designer of the complex, the Russian corporation Tetis-Pro,
made the Kalmar for the Russian Navy. When the A-320 crashed, the
complex, which includes a sonic depth-tester having the functions of
a side-looking sonar, was still in the phase of testing.
The Kalmar is capable of tracking down objects at the depths of down
to 600 meters.
The flight recorders are lying on the seabed 496 metres from the
surface and about five metres apart. “The visibility is sufficient
for the work to be done,” the minister said.
Flight recorders used on aircraft of the Airbus-320 type withstand
the depth of up to 6,000 meters for 30 days, experts from the French
air crash investigation bureau said.
They said that flight recorders’ radio beacons keep working during
the 30-day period.
One of the flight recorders registers flight parameters, including the
speed, height and direction of the flight and the autopilot operation,
each second. The other gadget records conversations in the cockpit.
Each flight recorder weighs 10 kilograms, including a seven-kilogram
armoured casing for the gadget. The casing can withstand water pressure
at a depth of 6,000 meters, the temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius,
and the compression of 2.2 tonnes.
The bureau retrieved flight recorders from the depth of over 1,000
meters in the Red Sea in January 2004, when an Egyptian plane crashed
near the Sharm-el-Sheikh resort. The rescuers were using a Scorpio
deep-water apparatus.
A technical commission investigating the Sochi air crash, which is
led by the CIS Interstate Aviation Committee, has asked French experts
to help find A-320 flight recorders.
Of 113 people who were abroad the plane, 51 bodies have been found
so far.
The Airbus A-320 of the Armenian airline Armavia plunged into the
Black Sea as it was making a landing manoeuvre in the early hours of
May 3. The accident claimed the lives of 113 people.

US OFFICIAL SAYS ARMENIA-AZERBAIJAN AGREEMENT MAY BE NEAR
by Alexander Plakhov
ITAR-TASS News Agency
May 17, 2006 Wednesday
A State Department official said on Tuesday they were optimistic
about the possibility of a peace agreement between Azerbaijan and
Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“The two sides are closer to an agreement than they have been in the
past,” said Matthew Bryza, State Department European affairs expert.
He spoke to a meeting of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus,
which was convened to examine humanitarian suffering in the region
a dozen years after the war over Nagorno-Karabakh ended.
Bryza said the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments will have to show
political courage to bridge the final gaps. “We look at these next
couple of months as a real window of opportunity,” he said.
Earlier, Anne Derse, who is nominated ambassador to Azerbaijan, said
Washington hopes that Azerbaijani President Ilkham Aliyev and Armenian
President Robert Kocharyan will reach agreement on Nagorno-Karabakh.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

THE NEW PRESIDENT OF ACADEMY SAYS THERE IS NO NEED TO HURRY
Lragir.am
17 May 06
The new president of the Academy of Sciences Radik Martirosyan thinks
it is pointless to carry out hasty reforms in science in Armenia,
reports the news agency ARKA. At the same time, Radik Martirosyan says
science in Armenia is facing serious challenges and needs outlooks
for reform and research. A financial reform is of prime importance
for the academy. “It is wrong to rely heavily on government funding,
new sources of funding are needed,” said Radik Martirosyan, namely
participation in various international programs.

BELARUS TO HOST MEETINGS OF CIS EURASIAN BLOC, CIS SECURITY BODY IN MAY, JUNE
Belapan news agency, Minsk
17 May 06
Belarus will host a meeting of the Integration Committee of the
Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC, member states are Belarus,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and a
session of the EAEC Interstate Council at the level of the heads of
government on 18-19 May, the Belarusian news agency Belapan reported
on 17 May, quoting the first deputy foreign minister of Belarus,
Vasil Puhachow.
All member states will be represented by prime ministers, except for
Kyrgyzstan, which will be represented by the president’s envoy for
integration issues, the news agency added. The meeting will focus on
efforts to create a customs union within the EAEC framework, Belapan
reported, quoting Puhachow.
Belarus will also host summits of the EAEC and the Collective Security
Treaty Organization (Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan
and Tajikistan) at the level of heads of state on 23-24 June, Belapan
said, quoting Puhachow.

VIC: GENOCIDE STATEMENT PART OF FREE SPEECH: BRACKS
Australian Associated Press Pty. Ltd.
AAP Newsfeed
May 16, 2006 Tuesday 11:18 AM AEST
A Victorian MP’s parliamentary speech accusing Turkish people of
ignoring acts of genocide more than 80 years ago is a sign of free
speech at work, Victorian Premier Steve Bracks says.
Jenny Mikakos, the parliamentary secretary for justice, whose ethnic
background is Greek, has accused Turkey of ignoring the killing of
hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks between 1916 and 1923.
In a short speech to the Victorian upper house during the last session
of parliament, Ms Mikakos reportedly said: “On May 19, the Pontian
community in Victoria and around the world will commemorate the 87th
anniversary of the Pontian genocide that occurred in present-day
Turkey.
“Between 1916 and 1923, over 353,000 Pontic Greeks living in Asia
Minor and in Pontus, which is near the Black Sea, died as a result of
the 20th Century’s first but less-known genocide,” Fairfax reported
her as saying.
“Over a million Pontic Greeks were forced into exile. In the preceding
years, 1.5 million Armenians and 750,000 Assyrians in various parts
of Turkey also perished.”
Two Labor MPs of Turkish descent, Adem Somyurek and John Eren,
interjected but Ms Mikakos continued speaking.
“The Turkish government must begin the reconciliation process by
acknowledging these crimes against humanity. The suffering of the
victims of the Pontian genocide cannot and will not be forgotten,”
she said.
The comments, made under a system of 90-second free statements for
MPs established by the Bracks government, have outraged Turkish and
Jewish groups.
But Mr Bracks today said Ms Mikakos, one of two members for the safe
Jika Jika province in Melbourne’s north, was free to make the speech.
“Free speech is something that we uphold, and I understand that,
and the freedom to criticise someone who makes a statement is also
appropriate as well,” he told Southern Cross Broadcasting.
“As to the interpretation of those events, that is a matter which,
really, other people can judge, but this is something she obviously
felt passionate about.
“It’s up to her. She is a member of parliament who can submit those
things to the parliament.
“But equally, people have the right to vigorously disagree with her
point of view.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

QUOTE UNQUOTE
The Cairns Post (Australia)
May 15, 2006 Monday
He who speaks the truth must have one foot in the stirrup. – Armenian
proverb.

THE DOORS ARE CLOSED
by Shlomo Avineri
The Jerusalem Post
May 16, 2006, Tuesday
Is Israel treating refugees fleeing murderous regimes the way European
governments treated Jews fleeing the Holocaust? The author is a former
director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
We should be ashamed about those 50 black refugees from the Darfur
region in Sudan fleeing murderous and genocidal Arab militias.
They reached Israel and what did the Jewish state do? It put them in
jail under an antiquated military ordinance without access to lawyers
or recourse to the basic principles of the rule of law. If it hadn’t
been for some human rights organizations which brought the case before
the Supreme Court no one would know of their existence and arbitrary
and brutal incarceration.
One must realize what is happening in Sudan – something the police
and military authorities apparently don’t know about.
In Darfur the black population is being subjected to ethnic cleansing
murder and rape at the hands of government-backed Arab militias.
Nobody knows the number of people killed – tens of thousands probably
more – but UN sources admit that almost two million people have
become refugees.
The reason given by our security and police authorities for the
Darfurians’ arrest is that they are citizens of an enemy country.
This is technically true – but as the Holocaust historian Professor
Yehuda Bauer told the court in his deposition on their behalf –
German Jews fleeing Nazism were sometimes viewed as “enemy citizens”
by the Allies. Indeed many of them were put in detention camps by
the British authorities when they reached the United Kingdom.
To imagine that the Jewish state is as blind to the plight of refugees
fleeing from their own murderous government as European governments
were in the l930s and 1940 should make any one of us deeply ashamed.
THE COURT was also told that the refugees who entered Israel illegally
are being held pending their deportation. But to which country should
they be deported? To which country can they be deported? Back to
Sudan whose government has been murdering them?
It may be that the agreement recently signed in Abuja Nigeria between
the Sudanese government and some of the black insurgents will be
implemented and a modicum of peace achieved. The record though is not
good. As in the past the world community has done little about Darfur
– and not for lack of knowledge. But with the US bogged down in Iraq
there is little support anywhere for a robust threat of the use of
force to stop the Sudanese government continuing its ethnic cleansing.
Israel can do little to help or alleviate the enormous suffering of
the millions of refugees. But it can – it should – grant asylum to
those refugees who have reached our shores.
In the 1970s prime minister Menachem Begin granted asylum to
shipwrecked Vietnamese boat people picked up by an Israeli commercial
vessel; in the 1990s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin granted asylum to
a number of Muslim Bosnian refugees from the wars in the Balkans.
It may not be an accident that in the latest cases of ethnic cleansing
and near-genocide it has been Jewish groups and individuals in the
US and Europe who have spoken out most forcefully for more vigorous
Western intervention on behalf of those threatened and victimized.
In the Balkans the victims were mostly Muslims – Bosniaks Kosovo
Albanians – but true to the universalistic premises of Jewish
ethics this did not stop Jewish people from feeling empathy and a
moral obligation to help. In Darfur everyone is Muslim – the Arab
victimizers as well as the black-African victims – but this does not
matter as the issue is not one of political calculus but of basic
moral responsibility: We are our brothers’ keepers.
As a state Israel has over the years had to balance political
calculations with moral precepts. Not always did it emerge from the
equation with flying colors. Our ambivalence about apartheid in South
Africa as well as a reticence regarding the historical reckoning
regarding the Armenian genocide are not exactly shining examples of
ethical behavior in international affairs.
But these complexities are not relevant in the Darfur case where the
way we treat the refugees should be addressed on the only meaningful
plane – that of basic humanitarian compassion.
It is a moral duty for Israel a nation built by refugees to follow
this example. Otherwise all the lofty talk about “Never again” and
“the world’s silence” is mere hypocrisy.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have a
chance to make the world a little less cruel for a small number of
people: This is what tikkun olam is about.
GRAPHIC: Photo: SUDANESE CHILDREN. The region has been the scene of
what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. (Credit: Ap)

THOMAS DE WAAL: IT’S TERRIBLE TO THINK OF PANDORA’S BOX WHICH WILL OPEN, IF MILITARY ACTIONS RESUME IN NAGORNO KARABAKH
Yerevan, May 17. ArmInfo. The resumption of military actions in
Nagorno Karabakh will be disastrous for the whole region. Thomas De
Waal, author of “Black Garden. Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace
and War” book, editor of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting,
said in the interview to ArmInfo.
He stated that the war that ended in 1994 was also a tragic one,
as Nagorno Karabakh spent 10 years for restoration of the ruins. He
added that the technology of that war was quite primitive as, compared
with the current military potential of both sides.
“Certainly, if a new stage of war unfolds, that will happen at the
initiative of Azerbaijan. But, I also know that some “Armenian hawks”
in Karabakh dream of “the last round” of the war, in which they will
take the final victory by blowing up the Baku-Seyhan pipe line. It’s
terrible to think of Pandora’s box that may open in that case. I,
being a person who knows and loved this region, think this is a
horrible scenario,” Thomas De Waal stated.
In response to the question, whether the continuing information war
is a result of the open or secret instructions from the authorities of
both republics, he said that both the mass media and the authorities of
Armenia and Azerbaijan are to be blamed for the current situation. “The
presidents and the Foreign Ministers of both countries meet in
third countries for discussion of serious mutual concessions in the
settlement process. While in their own countries they fight rhetorical
wars against each other and allow the official mass media sources
fight an information war,” he said. At the same time, he thinks that
the society doesn’t listen to an alternative viewpoint and lives
in a black and white world. Thus, the sides fail to begin a public
dialogue about the common future of Armenia and Azerbaijan. As for
the position of super powers in the Nagorno Karabakh issue, he said
that the foreign states are really for the peace in this region.

HIGH-RANKING REPRESENTATIVES OF USA STATE DEPARTMENT CLAIM OF THEIR OPTIMISM CONCERNING AGREEMENT ACHIEVEMENT FOR KARABAKH CONFLICT SETTLEMENT
Yerevan, May 17. ArmInfo. High-ranking officials of the USA State
Department claim of their optimism concerning achievement of agreement
between Armenia and Azerbaijan for the Karabakh conflict settlement,
the “Svoboda” Radio Station informs with reference to the “Associated
Press”.
“The parties are close to the agreement achievement as never before”,
the USA deputy State Secretary on issues of Europe and Asia Matthew
Brise said during the meeting with the members of the Armenia’s
support group of the USA Congress. He noted that the governments of
Armenia and Azerbaijan have to show political courage to eliminate
the last disagreements. “We consider the coming months as a real
“window of possibilities””, Matthew Brise said.
According to another high-ranking representative of the State
Department, David Appleton, one of the evidences of progress is
the fact that Azerbaijan appealed to the UN Agency for Problems of
Refugees with a request to develop programs of return of the forced
migrants after the conflict settlement.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress