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.

THE LIKE TAKES THE LIKE, LOVE WILL COME LATER
Lragir.am
21 July 06
The citizens of Armenia may wonder why Andranik Margaryan and Serge
Sargsyan are gathering senior and junior officials and members of
parliament in the Republican Party and making them Republicans.
Businessmen, governors, ministers, members of parliament become
members of this political party. The answer is evident. They are made
Republicans to serve the political, which is the same as the personal
interests of Andranik Margaryan and Serge Sargsyan. It is also clear
to the first-grade children of schools, the directors and teachers
of which are “annexed” by the Republican.
But people, and especially children, who have not managed to study
the peculiarities, everyday life and relations of the Armenian elite
yet, wonder whether it is impossible that the ministers, businessmen,
senior and junior officials and members of parliament serve Andranik
Margaryan and Serge Sargsyan without becoming Republican. The question
is interesting, if not a core question. In fact, why do they order
everyone to become members of the Republican Party? Perhaps, they
are in doubt. They suspect that one day these officials, businessmen,
ministers will betray them. One day they will serve someone else than
Andranik Margaryan and Serge Sargsyan. Margaryan and Sargsyan fear
that these people will not serve them.
But does membership solve the problem of no loyalty? Andranik Margaryan
and Serge Sargsyan know that it does not. How can a person be loyal
if he has already betrayed a political party? Or how can a person be
loyal if he was forced into the Republican Party? How can a person
be loyal if he becomes member of the Republican Party to be in the
center of force? What if another center of force appears? How are they
going to keep this person in the Republican Party. These people will
betray Andranik Margaryan and Serge Sargsyan as soon as the first
opportunity arises, and they will not have any moral rights against
the betrayers. They can only use legislative bars against betrayal,
like in Russia, for instance. A member of one faction cannot go to
another faction. Russians thus tried to prevent betrayal. In Armenia
they can adopt this model. The problem is, however, that betrayal is
not an external phenomenon, it only has, but it also may not have
an external manifestation. Betrayal first occurs in one’s soul and
mind. And it is not a primitive or void philosophy to crush against
the Nzhdehian ideology of the Republican Party of Armenia.
Betrayal is a highly concrete notion. Both Andranik Margaryan and Serge
Sargsyan know this. Otherwise, how can they explain why six years
ago Andranik Margaryan demanded within a circle of other people the
resignation of Serge Sargsyan, who led the administration of someone
else, whereas now he shares his party “bed” with this man? And the
more people they admit to the part, the more the mistrust of Andranik
Margaryan and Serge Sargsyan towards these people and each other will
grow. And together they will suspect everyone, because they perfectly
know everyone, they also know each other well and they also know that
the others know them well too. A membership ticket is not a guarantee
that a parliamentarian businessman or an official who became member
of the Republican Party will remain faithful to the party. Even if
he became member of the political party voluntarily, he knew that if
he did not enter the party, he would be suspected as well.
The presumption of faithfulness is not accepted in the Armenian
elite. And by failing to join they would miss the historical chance
of betrayal. Meanwhile, they know very well that the holy of holies of
processes in Armenia is betrayal. You can do everything early or late
but you have to betray on time. Nobody is to blame. They are taught
to do so, therefore they do not trust “pupils” and call them to the
party later to be able to accuse them of betrayal of their “bosses”,
“guardians”, “teachers”. They force them into cohabitation, hoping
that love will come later.
HAKOB BADALYAN

REPUBLICAN PARTY WON’T SWEAT FOR IT
Lragir.am
21 July 06
The Republican Party is in good health, stated Rep. Member of
Parliament Armen Ashotyan at the Pastark Club, the day before the July
22 extraordinary assembly of the Republican Party. He even advised
other political forces, which predict sickness of the Republican, to
repeat the Republican step of consolidation. Armen Ashotyan thinks
that effective activities in the political sphere of Armenia is no
longer possible without this.
“First of all, in my opinion, people who speak about a political
crisis in Armenia, a crisis of the political system, and relate it to
our assembly, are concerned about their political crisis, their own
careers, because it is clear that a political fist, which is forming,
will form tomorrow, will leave little space for the other players,”
says the Republican member of parliament.
He thinks that the consolidation of the Republican is characterized
by obviously positive tendencies, which are visible, and others also
noticed them. For those who fail to notice, Armen Ashotyan describes,
“All that is going to happen means that the political sphere in
Armenia is headed for consolidation. It means that the imperfection
of the political system persisting in Armenia at last has a chance
to be reshaped, regrouped, and appear to the voter and the public
in a more concrete form,” says Armen Ashotyan. His logic refers to
downplaying the factor of personality in the political sphere of
Armenia, or in other words, his partisanization, when the political
personality factor Serge Sargsyan starts making his actions fit in
the framework of a political party. Armen Ashotyan believes that the
Republican Party thereby sets a new record, and the other political
parties have to keep ups.

LET DASHNAKTSUTIUN ATTEND TO ITS PROBLEMS
Lragir.am
21 July 06
On July 21 Republican Member of Parliament Armen Ashotyan gave this
piece of advice to the ARF (Dashnaktsutiun), their coalition partner
and to all the other political parties. With regard to possible
pre-election controversies between the rightist Republican and
leftist Dashnaktsutiun, Armen Ashotyan said, “Until May 2007 every
political party, everyone must attend to their political problems,
let Dashnaktsutiun think out its actions, and the other political
parties theirs. We have our goal, our program, the Armenian society
is known as a conservative society, and our resource is that Armenians
are conservative by nature, by thinking, and there is every condition
for the rating of Republican to grow in 2007,” stated Armen Ashotyan.

Sargsyan: Speaking of Presidency Plans Hard Now
PanARMENIAN.Net
21.07.2006 13:50 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian Defense Minister Serge Sargsyan will make
a decision on putting forward his candidacy or not for the post of
the President after the parliamentary election in 2007, he stated
in an interview with RFE/RL. “At present speaking of presidency
plans is hard. I never worked for any post,” Sargsyan said. He
explained that his decision will be conditioned by the returns of the
parliamentary election. “If the Republican Party of Armenia collects
21-22% of grassroots votes, I will consider it satisfactory, if 25% –
good. If the party gains over 25%, it will be an excellent outcome,”
Sargsyan said.
At that he noted he is not going to resign, as there are no reasons
for that. “Why should I resign? It is senseless. Did I work bad? If
I did, the President should make a corresponding decision himself,”
Sargsyan remarked.