DANIEL FRID TO VISIT YEREVAN AND BAKU
Prime News Agency, Georgia
March 9 2006
Tbilisi. March 09 (Prime-News) – Daniel Frid, Deputy Secretary of
State on Europe and Eurasia, will visit Yerevan and Baku.
Sean McCormack, official representative of the US Department of State,
stated about that to journalists.
According to him, Daniel Frid will visit the region the next week.
Aim of the visit will be to discuss results of the recent meeting
between Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents in France.

CONGRESSMAN URGING U.S. PRESIDENT ADMINISTRATION TO BALANCE MILITARY ASSISTANCE TO ARMENIA, AZERBAIJAN
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
March 9 2006
YEREVAN, March 9. /ARKA/. Congressman Frank Pallone is urging U.S.
President Administration to balance military assistance to Armenia
and Azerbaijan. Armenian National Committee of America told ARKA News
Agency that the Congressman made this statement speaking Wednesday
in the U.S. House of Representatives. He intends to file motion to
the U.S. Senate’s appropriate committee asking to restore balance of
military assistance to Armenia and Azerbaijan and proposing greater
economic assistance for Armenia and humanitarian aid for Nagorno
Karabakh.
Pallone thinks it is very important to state to Azerbaijan and Turkey
that ethnic genocide, illegal blockade of sovereign state and constant
aggression against Armenian people are unacceptable.
The U.S. President Administration intends to give $3.5mln to Armenia
and $4.5mln to Azerbaijan in 2006 fiscal year as military assistance.
Under this program $790 thousand and $885 thousand will be allotted
to Armenia and Azerbaijan for military trainings and exercises.
Turkey started transport and economic blockade of Armenia in 1992.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE TO TOUR ARMENIA, AZERBAIJAN SOON
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
March 9 2006
YEREVAN, March 9. /ARKA/. Assistant Secretary of State for European
and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried to tour Armenia and Azerbaijan
newt week, Sean McCormack, Spokesman of the US State Department,
told journalist in Washington, as RIA Novosti news agency reports.
McCormack said one of the aims of the Fried’s trip is to discuss
results of Armenian and Azerbaijani Presidents’ recent meeting in
Rambouillet.
The presidents met on February 10, 11 in Rambouillet, France, for
talks on Karabakh conflict settlement.
Armenian side estimated positively the meeting despite no agreement
has been signed there. The sides decided to continue negotiating in
March in Washington.

THE US DEPARTMENT OF STATE EVALUATED THE ROLE OF AZERBAIJAN AS A TRANSIT TERRITORY
Source: TURAN news agency (Baku), March 4, 2006
Translated by A. Ignatkin
Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
March 9, 2006 Thursday
According to the annual report “2006: International Drug Control
Strategy” by the US Department of State, Azerbaijan is located along
the traffic routes from Afghanistan and Central Asia to West Europe
and from Iran to Russia and West Europe. Local production of drugs
does not amount to too much but consumption is growing. Role of
Azerbaijan as a transit territory grew enormously several years
ago when the so called Balkans Route was closed. According to
the government of Azerbaijan, drugs shipped via the country are
mostly drugs made in Afghanistan. The main routes run in the
following manner: Afghanistan-Iran-Azerbaijan-Georgia-West
Europe; Afghanistan-Iran-Nagorno Karabakh and occupied
territories of Azerbaijan-Armenia-Georgia-West Europe;
Afghanistan-Iran-Azerbaijan-Russia; Afghanistan-Central Asia-Caspian
Sea-Azerbaijan-Georgia-West Europe. Azerbaijan has 611 kilometers of
state border with Iran, but its border guards are poorly trained or
equipped for proper border protection. Iranian and other traffickers
make use of this situation.
The Azerbaijani police force lacks equipment for and experience in
combating terrorism. Authors of the report maintain that control of
the Azerbaijani-Iranian border is not sufficient to dam the flood
of drugs. Corruption in Azerbaijan is blamed as one of the serious
reasons impeding the war on drugs. Anti-corruption structures of the
Azerbaijani prosecutor’s office are quite limited in their capacities
and understaffed. Azerbaijan subscribed to the major international
conventions and accords on the wars on corruption, organized crime,
and traffic. In 2005, the United States provided advice and material
assistance to the Azerbaijani Service of Border Guards and Customs
Committee to boost efficiency of control over illegal traffic and
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Official Washington
intends to continue its assistance to Azerbaijan in these spheres,
the report stated.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

MEDIA ADVISORY: MEETINGS WITH ARMENIA NATIONAL ASSEMBLY DELEGATION
ITAR-TASS News Agency
March 9, 2006
A delegation of the National Assembly of Armenia will visit the Russian
Federation on March 13-16. The visit will be held within the framework
of participation in the 10th session of the Interparliamentary
Commission for Cooperation. Deputy Chairman of the National Assembly
of Armenia Vagan Ovanesian will head the delegation.
Members of the delegation will take part in 10th session of the
Interparliamentary Commission for Cooperation at the State Duma, 1,
Okhotny Ryad Street, Gerbovy hall at 10.00 on Tuesday, March 14.
Speaker of the Federation Council Sergei Mironov will meet with
Ovanesian at the Federation Council 26, Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street,
room 701a at 16.30 on Tuesday, March 14.
Members of the delegation will meet with members of the State Duma
Committee for CIS and Russian Diaspora Relations at the State Duma
at 10.00 on Wednesday, March 15.
Please contact the press service of the Federation Council before
14.30 on March 14 to confirm your coming to the meeting and for
further information (ph: 692-5604, 692-1877, 692-7525).

AZERBAIJAN, ARMENIA TRADE ACCUSATIONS ABOUT FIRE ATTACKS
by Sevindzh Abdullayeva, Viktor Shulman
ITAR-TASS News Agency
March 9, 2006
The Azerbaijani Defence Ministry said that two villages in the
Kazakhsky district of Azerbaijan came under a fire attack from across
the border.
“The shooting stopped only after return fire,” the ministry’s spokesman
Ilgar Verdiyev told Itar-Tass on Thursday.
“On the whole, the positions of the national army located in this
districts have been shot up four times over the past 24 hours. The
shooting was done from two directions – from the Idzhevansky and
Noyamberyansky districts of Armenia. There are no losses among our
servicemen,” Verdiyev said.
Meanwhile, an Itar-Tass correspondent in Yerevan said that the Armenian
Defence Ministry spokesman Colonel Seiran Shakhsuvaryan had denied
the fire attacks on Azerbaijani villages.
“The statements by the spokesman of the Azerbaijani Defence Ministry
does not correspond to reality,” he said.
He said that a “number of cases have been registered in the recent days
when units of the Azerbaijani army violated the ceasefire regime and
shot with firearms on border positions of the Armenian armed forces,”
Shakhsyvaryan said.

AN ARTISTIC TREK ACROSS A SURREAL LAND OF SAND AND SELF-DISCOVERY
By Kathryn Shattuck
The New York Times
March 9, 2006 Thursday
Late Edition – Final
As snow fell lightly on Broome Street in SoHo one evening last month,
three women in their 40’s sipped tea inside an artist’s studio and
charted a journey through unfamiliar territory. The landscape, viewed
on an iMac monitor, was at once barren and lush, its undulating sands
and craggy outcroppings morphing into gently rhythmic waves. It could
have been anywhere.
But to the cellist Maya Beiser, the composer Eve Beglarian and the
visual artist Shirin Neshat — each laying claim to a different
piece of the broader Middle East — this curious terrain born of an
18-month odyssey of music, art and, not least, self-awareness was
specific and unique.
The fruit of their travels, “I Am Writing to You From a Far-Off
Country,” will be presented by Ms. Beiser at Zankel Hall tonight
as part of “Almost Human,” a program in which she draws comparisons
between the sound of the cello and the human voice. After new works
by Brett Dean, Joby Talbot and Michael Gordon, the second half will
be devoted to “Far-Off Country,” Ms. Beglarian’s 40-minute setting
of a poem of the same name by the Belgian Surrealist Henri Michaux,
with video by Ms. Neshat.
Though “Far-Off Country” was written by a man, the voice is
a woman’s. In 12 letters to an unspecified listener — a lover,
perhaps, or a god — she describes a place of wind and water and
“inexorable weather,” where leaves are separated from their trees and
“dwarfs are born constantly.”
“I am writing to you from the end of the world,” she says. “You must
realize this.”
Ms. Beiser first came to “Far-Off Country” as a teenager in her own
distant land, on a kibbutz in northern Israel between Nazareth and
the Sea of Galilee.
The poem haunted her, she said, after her move to the United States,
where she studied at Yale, and later, as she traveled the world
performing.
More recently, she found an English translation of the poem and
decided to produce a setting of the work for “Almost Human,” to make
the words her own.
“I had wanted to work with Eve for a long time, and this gave me
an excuse,” she said of Ms. Beglarian, an experimentalist whose
work often interweaves electronics, spoken word and even dance and
theater. “I think she has a phenomenal way of working with text and
incorporating that with music.”
Ms. Beglarian said: “That was really meaningful to me. I know what
it’s like to love a text and not yet know what form it should take.”
That form slowly revealed itself as the women dissected the poem line
by line to find a common starting point.
“It’s a really bizarre country that this woman finds herself in,”
Ms. Beglarian said, “and yet as you travel through the poem you realize
that the far-off country she is describing is the country we’re
in. I was looking for a combination of strangeness and otherness,
and I found this in Armenian music because of how Armenian culture
lies at the intersection of the East and the West.”
Drawing from Christian liturgical music and chants, Ms. Beglarian
created a deeply layered composition that requires Ms. Beiser to recite
the poem while playing, accompanied by a recorded instrumental track. A
mezzo-soprano, Alexandra Montano, adds recorded and live vocalises.
The connection to Ms. Beglarian’s heritage, so obvious in retrospect,
did not come to her immediately. Though her father was Armenian and
lived in Tehran for part of his childhood, he did not immerse his
children in the culture of his youth. “Only toward end of his life did
it become clear to me how important his Armenian-ness was to him,”
she said. “This is the first time I’ve incorporated what was his
music into my work.”
But how to convey the poem’s otherworldliness visually? The women
turned to the Iranian-born Ms. Neshat. Ms. Beglarian felt she had the
fierceness and sensitivity to respond in a powerful way to the text,
and Ms. Beiser proposed that she join their collaboration.
“For me, it was a chance to expand my own vocabulary and my own
themes,” Ms. Neshat said. “I felt that this collaboration from three
women from three different cultures could be very poignant in a way.”
Still, “I have to be very honest that I had not been to Israel, I had
never collaborated with anyone from Israel, and when Maya approached
me, I was wary,” she said. “We have in Iran in many ways been
brainwashed since childhood about certain cultures and religions. But
I thought, if I don’t do something about the way I’m programmed and I
don’t take that responsibility to negotiate and collaborate and open
up about those people I feel are strangers to me, it’s never going
to happen. These days more than ever, I feel that culture can be a
tool of peace and mediation and negotiation and understanding.”
Ms. Neshat began to imagine the place the poem’s narrator was
describing.
“It was clear to me this was a world unlike any other world,”
she said. “I was really after this sort of landscape not common to
the eye.”
She considered the Moroccan desert, but when one of her
cinematographers announced he was traveling to Israel, she asked him
to film the landscape of Ms. Beiser’s home.
“Of course, I come from the desert too,” Ms. Neshat said. “But I was so
shocked when he came back. I thought, ‘My God, is this what all these
people are fighting for, this barren land? This is so ironic.’ The
space was so abandoned, and yet there was this energy about it,
in emotional and political ways, that charged me.”
How “Far-Off Country” is interpreted — as a specific destination or
a spiritual excursion or even as a woman’s secret and often painful
existence inside herself — is ultimately in the eye of the beholder,
Ms. Beiser said. But to these three artists, the lessons are far
larger than that.
“That’s the message for me in all of this, that yes, we are connected
to where we come from and that’s important, but in the end we all
transcend that if we let ourselves go into a deeper kind of place,”
Ms. Beiser said. “I think women need to say much more in this
way. Because if we make our voices heard, maybe then there will be
less of that horrible stuff in the world.”
From: Baghdasarian

45,000-MAN STRONG ARMY IS LUXURY FOR ARMENIA – DEFENSE MINISTER
Interfax News Agency
Russia & CIS Military Newswire
March 9, 2006 Thursday 1:07 PM MSK
A 45,000-man strong army is a luxury for Armenia, the country’s Defense
Minister and Security Council Secretary Serzh Sargsyan said at a news
conference with Russian reporters.
“At the present time we are strengthening and reforming our Armed
Forces, based on the current military and political environment and
the fact that most of the personnel are in trenches along our borders,”
Sargsyan said.
According to him, this is the main cause of the slow reform. He said
that the Armenian Armed Forces primarily comprised motorized rifle
units and a small air force. “We operate five motorized rifle corps,
independent artillery units, and air defense brigades. We do not
have any combat arms or separate general staffs. There is a common
headquarters, exercising command and control over all units. At the
present time our Armed Forces are manned with about 45,000 servicemen,
which is too many for Armenia, featuring a population of three million.
However, we have to maintain such a force,” he emphasized.
The situation in the South Caucasus remains quite tense, and the
Nagorno Karabakh conflict is yet to be settled, the minister went on.
“Given all these we try to use the well-armed combat-capable Armed
Forces as a deterrent,” Sargsyan said.
Commenting on current cooperation with Russia, he noted that he
appreciated both military-political and other types of cooperation.
“We have the necessary legal and historical bases, and will continue
working in this sphere,” Sarkisyan said.
At the same time he emphasized that Armenian-NATO relations did not
undermine the Russian-Armenian cooperation in the least. “We have
to be aware of military arts of other states, and combat experience
of other armed forces. We do wish to cooperate with other states,
including NATO member-states. Our goal is to field armed forces,
meeting international standards, by 2015,” Sargsyan said.
He underlined once again that existence of Russian military bases in
Armenia, as well as strategic agreements, depended on Armenia’s wishes.
Armenia hosts the Russian 102nd military base, manned with about
5,000 servicemen.
Commenting on the feasibility of re-deploying Russian combat materiel
from Georgia to Armenia, Sargsyan said that materiel, deployed at
Russian military bases in Georgia and Armenia, was Russian property
and it was up to Russia where to deploy and transport its property.
“I do not think the Russian Defense Ministry needs our assistance in
this case, and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said that part
of the materiel would be transported to the 102nd base until further
notice,” Sargsyan said.

ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN ACCUSE EACH OTHER OF CEASE-FIRE REGIME VIOLATIONS
Source: NEWSru.com, March 6, 2006
Translated by A. Ignatkin
Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
March 9, 2006 Thursday
Armenia and Azerbaijan accuse each other of cease-fire regime
violations. Seiran Shakhsuvarjan, Armenian Deputy Defense Minister’s
Press Secretary, claims that the Azerbaijani army bombarded the
settlement of Megrab in the Taush district on March 14, and Armenian
positions in the Idjevan district in northeastern Armenia on March 5.
Trenches of the Armenian army in the Vai district in southwestern
Armenia came under fire that night too.
Shakhsuvarjan said that the Armenian side had not sustained any
casualties or returned fire on this occasion. ITAR-TASS news agency
reported him as saying, however, that Private Arsen Zakevosjan, 19,
sustained a fatal wound in bombardment of the Idjevan district on
March 3.
Official Baku denounced all accusations. Official spokesman for the
Azerbaijani Defense Ministry, Ilgar Verdiyev correspondents that
“the Azerbaijani forces did not open fire on March 4 and 5.” “On the
contrary, it was our positions in the Kazakh district of Azerbaijan
that came under fire on four occasions in the course of the last
twenty-four hours,” Verdiyev said. Trenches of the Azerbaijani army in
the settlement of Gushchu Airym (Kazakh district) came under machine
gun fire from the Armenian territory on March 5. Positions in the
settlement of Kyzyl Dajily were fired upon from the village of Berkaber
(Idjevan district of Armenia) the following night. Positions of the
Azerbaijani army in the villages of Jafarely and Ashyg Askipara
came under fire that same night. No casualties were sustained,
Verdiyev said.

US PROBLEMS WITH PUTIN
By Dimitri Sidorov And Bill Thomas
UPI Outside View Commentators
United Press International
March 9 2006
WASHINGTON, March 9 (UPI) — The recent visit to Moscow by leaders
of Hamas should not be viewed as just another attempt by the Kremlin
to create confusion in Washington.
The Hamas meeting, coupled with Russia’s agreement to sell arms
to the terrorist group now in charge of the Palestinian Authority,
indicates something much more problematic in U.S.-Russia relations,
namely Moscow’s desire to return to the Middle East with a well-planned
campaign to unite all parties dissatisfied with American policy in
the region.
In fact, the Kremlin’s latest moves suggest that Russian President
Vladimir Putin may be reviving the cold war-era Primakov Doctrine.
Originated by former Soviet hard-liner and current Putin adviser
Yevgeny Primakov, the strategy was designed to challenge the United
States and its NATO allies on every major political and strategic
front.
Some Kremlin experts in Washington believe Russia has only a reactive
foreign policy, responding to events as they occur without any specific
long-term agenda. But an arms sale to Syria, a missile deal with Iran
and the get together with Hamas hardly fit that pattern.
All of this indicates a growing political struggle between Washington
and Moscow. “U.S.-Russia relations are clearly headed in the
wrong direction,” concluded a new report by the Council on Foreign
Relations. The Kremlin wants to be a player again in the old Soviet
sphere of influence, and its ambitions have gone largely unchecked
by a White House preoccupied with Iraq.
Moscow has insinuated itself into the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict;
become an obstacle in territorial disputes going on in independent
Moldova and Georgia; increased political pressure in Ukraine, trying
to reverse its failure in last year’s presidential election; and
formed an alliance with Uzbekistan after a popular revolt and the
expulsion of the U.S. military from that country.
Following a trial run in the ex-Soviet republics, the Kremlin has
turned its full attention to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.
Unlike the Soviet policy of backing rogue terrorist groups, Putin
and his Kremlin colleagues have set out to create a support network
of rogue nations dedicated to frustrating the United States and
its allies.
Helped by the war in Iraq, Moscow has strengthened ties with several
neighboring countries unhappy about Washington’s policies, particularly
Iran where American and European resolve faces a crucial test.
For more than a decade the White House tried unsuccessfully to persuade
Russia to end its nuclear cooperation with Iran. American suspicions
about “peaceful, financially based” relations between Moscow and Tehran
grew stronger when Russians began work on an Iranian nuclear facility.
Moscow has not only continued to assist with Iran’s potentially
threatening nuclear program, the Russian government has some in the
West convinced it can be trusted to enrich Iran’s uranium, though
talks on the matter between Russian and Iranian negotiators have so
far gone nowhere.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration seems uncertain about what its next
move should be. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice still insists the
United States “has very good relations with Russia, perhaps the best
we’ve had in the long time.” The report issued by Council of Foreign
Relations sharply disagrees with that assessment.
So does a former CIA official, citing the administration’s lack of
leverage with Moscow as one reason for escalating tensions over Iran.
At this point the Russians are pretending to cooperate, he added. The
moment of truth will come when Kremlin strategy shifts to outright
opposition, in other words when the Primakov Doctrine gives way to the
approach perfected by longtime Soviet Foreign Ministry Andrei Gromyko,
whose penchant for defying the United States earned him the nickname
“Mr. Nyet.”
And that’s when Washington’s real problems begin.
—
(Dmitry Sidorov is the Washington correspondent for Kommersant Daily.
Bill Thomas is the author of “Red Tape: Adventure Capitalism in the
New Russia” and other books. They are writing a book on US-Russia
relations.)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress