Accepting the Past Will Set Us Free
Talin Suciyan reflects on the groundbreaking Armenian conference and the
liberating effect that the open discussion of this history will have for
Turkey and for the Armenian diaspora.
BIA News Center
10/10/2005
By Talin Suciyan ([email protected])
BIA (Istanbul) – Are we able to admit the fact that after the departure
of Armenians this country became barren; ideologically, artistically,
politically and by every means socially? Can this society admit that we
need to be able to express this issue, and that the Armenian Diaspora
needs to hear it?
The recent “Ottoman Armenians During The Last Period Of The Empire:
Scientific Responsibility And Democracy” conference was realized as a
result of great efforts, and was an event of extraordinary properties,
meanings and references. Under our current conditions we are in, the
importance of this event can be approached from many different angles,
and people have been writing about if from every perspective.
I would like to take this chance to reflect on these two days, in which
many different disciplines complemented each other, while shedding light
on some old questions and presenting new ones. With the vast amount of
information and comments presented on this one particular period in
history, this conference shook its audience and lifted a huge dead
weight that was bearing on the shoulders of this issue.
The questions at the beginning of this article are asked in response to
Elif Safak’s paper and they are very important ones related to this
moment. Can we leave aside the never-ending polemics and claims–” it is
genocide or not”-and “they massacred us, the numbers of victims are such
and such,” and look at our present situation, where Safak directs her
attention?
Safak, in her paper, presents an extraordinary mix of her authorial and
academic identities. Her presentation on the life and works of feminist
Armenian writer Zabel Yesayan was prepared with the scrutiny of an
academic and the elegance of a writer of literature. She concluded it
with a quotation from a novel. Safak relays to us the answer of a
question which is asked of the hero of the novel: What would an Armenian
survivor of the events of 1915 like to hear from the Turks ?
He replied ” I would like to hear that after we left, their country
became barren”. Safak, directing this sentence to us, continued: “Yes,
after you left, our country became barren ideologically, artistically,
politically and every means socially, we have the need to say this, as
the Diaspora has the greater need to hear it “. In the end she presented
an approach that passed beyond the Armenian Diaspora’s, which dictates
‘You have to recognize the genocide first; then we start talking’ or the
official Turkish thesis, which claims ‘Genocide didn’t happen, in fact
they massacred us’.
Safak continued; saying that today the people of Turkey, having lost
their Armenian neighbors (except roughly 60 thousand people living)
should acknowledge that as a result of this loss, we became lonely and
barren. Today we should start mourning for this loss: “The mourning of
their absence, and that which made us barren”.
Feelings
Like Melisa Bilal said, can we integrate feelings into our social and
intellectual systems without the confines of nationalism? Can we recall
the feeling of times that we lived together? As she said, can people who
are living in this country really understand that Armenians in Turkey
were made homeless and that they are lost? Not all were necessarily made
homeless by means of deportation, but as Bilal defines it, “they were
uprooted from their language, religion, history at the very place they
had been living, [and entered a] state of homelessness by means of
estrangement. ” And indeed like Hrant Dink said, having been uprooted
and scattered around the world, as Bilal says, when they are constantly
searching for a surname with an ‘ian-yan’ suffix at the back credits of
every film, in reality they are searching for a piece of themselves.
Today, are the people of Turkey capable of understanding all of feelings?
Weight
Can we rethink the phrases that entered in to our language, particularly
those which carry the traces of negative historical weights? As in the
example Fethiye Cetin provided, why is it that while lifting a heavy
load, we say “It is heavy as an infidel’s corpse.” Are we able to ask
ourselves the question, “Why is the corpse of an infidel is that heavy?”
Paranoia and Trauma
As Erol Koroglu said in his presentation ‘Examples of forgetting and
remembering in Turkish literature: The breaking points of silence’,
Armenian-ness is an identity that is constantly kept at the threshold,
at at the same time we have the incapability of not being able to
describe it as different as well as familiar. This gives way to an idea
that makes Armenians traitors and enemies. Can we think over this idea
and accept it as a social paranoia? Hrant Dink is right to say that the
antidote to this paranoia is the democratization of Turkey. This process
not only would cure the paranoia in Turks, it would also help heal the
trauma that the Armenians live with.
Amnesia
Elif Safak directs our attention to writer Zabel Yesayan. When she
escaped the events of 1915 and settled in Baku, she started to write her
memoirs. This demonstrates her importance in preventing a social amnesia.
In contrast, Etyen Mahcupyan emphasized how the State, by its constant
repetition to Turkish people that they are a people whose memory is very
short and that Turkey is a country that should always look to the future
and not to the past, constantly creates space for communal amnesia . In
response to the victim’s attitude of ‘not letting it to be forgotten and
talking about it’ the perpetrators covers themselves to an extent that
they reache a point where even talking about events becomes frightful.
At this point, can the victim, with the comfort to speak, help the
perpetrator?
Empathy
As Aysegul Altinay says, Fethiye Cetin’s book “My Grandmother”, Takuhi
Tovmasyan’s book “Be Your Meals Cheerful” and Osman Koker’s “Armenians
In Turkey 100 Years Ago” books, follow a therapeutic approach which can
lead people to create an environment where empathy can grow, opening the
way to cry and laugh together. Following this approach, can we multiply
these examples so that we can exercise more empathy in this direction?
Defence and getting tired of being right
Halil Berktay describes the mood of Turkish foreign policy: defence by
means of digging a trench so deep that it became a synonym for being
stuck at the bottom of the trench, and therefore foreign policy became
enslaved by the trench. Temel Iskit, a former diplomat with a career of
40 years, agreed with Berktay’s characterization.
Iskit states that Turkish foreign policy was mortgaged by the Armenian
Question, because the ” power policy” that Turkey was following required
an absolute obligation to be right. He added, “During 41 years of
service I got tired of always being ‘right’.”
“We won’t do it”
Cemil Kocak presented an interesting story on Ruseni Bey and his place
in the Special Organization (Teskilat-i Mahsusa). Ruseni Bey coined a
definition of nationalism that stated “Societies grow/get nurtured by
eating one another.” Against this outrageously nationalistic statement,
is it too difficult to say ‘No, we won’t do it’? As Halil Berktay points
out, isn’t it about time that spanner needs to be thrown in the
clockwork of these spine-chilling historical repetitions– a repetition
that starts with “Every Armenian is a Tashnak Guerilla” and continues as
“Every Kurd is a PKK member”?
Purification
Berktay also told of an unfinished novel written by Omer Seyfettin
between 1912-13, named “Primo Turkish Child II”. Can we wake the hero of
this novel from his dream? In the dream, he sees a crescent moon and a
star in the sky, meanwhile he feels a wetness on his feet. This wetness
is the blood of Turkish enemies-and as he walks in their blood, he
notices the reflection of the moon and the star on the surface .
Departing from this point, Berktay continued to say that the red colour
of Turkish flag does not symbolize the blood of Turkish martyrs (as we
are always told), but actually comes from the blood of our enemies. We
can purify ourselves of this history of hatred and violence. We can get
out of pools of blood and set out to a new journey, in which the moon
and the stars won’t spare their light to illuminate our road, and with
the knowledge that at the end of a clear starry night, the coming day
will be sunny and hopeful.
Liberty
“This meeting will liberate us,” said former Health Minister Cevdet
Aykan, who compiled the memoirs of old people he knew. As Cem Ozdemir
stated, the realization of this conference will relax Europe as well as
Turkey . Turkey’s initiation of this talk on the “Armenian issue”–which
Europe saw as a burden to Turkey’s process of democratisation–will
lighten this load for Europe as well as Turkey.
It is time to acknowledge these loads, to recognize them, and to be
liberated from them. We will feel relaxed by means of liberation from
them. We passed the threshold and we are on that road now. We will
continue to move forward slowly but surely.
Mourning
As I was talking with historian Christoph Neumann, he draw my attention
to the point that during the conference there had rarely been talk of
mourning–only once or twice. He said, “Why is there no talk of
mourning?” …meaning not the mourning of events 90 years ago, but the
mourning of our state in the present, the mourning of our loneliness.
Maybe by acknowledging our present loneliness slowly, we can go back
from the present to the past and try to see more clearly how we were
made so lonely in the first place?
Despite all the insistences of amnesia, contrary to our state of
defensiveness due to unresolved traumas, we would be able to find the
path to empathy. By acknowledging the lost and deported ones, we could
start to sympathize with their sensitivities. And by getting rid of our
paranoia and trauma from historical burdens in our language and
consciousness, could we not turn back even just for a moment to our true
feelings, and mourn?
To Pass the threshold, pass beyond the ‘genocide’
Has any threshold been passed? Surely the answer is yes. This conference
has been the embodiment of that very crucial move. The conference has
led us pass the threshold of Turkey’s democratization progress, the
threshold of scientific freedom in universities, the threshold of
freedom of expression, the disappearing threshold of being unable to
speak, the threshold of endless arguments about ‘who massacred who’ and
‘is it or is it not a genocide’–and even past the thresholds of
hardened, polarized and immobile identities.
Today we reached a different point, because during these past two days
whoever witnessed this historical event tried to understand amnesia,
empathy, trauma, paranoia and what actually happened. While they
examined and scrutinized all these issues with the help of many
different disciplines, we mourned for our present day a little, we
became purified a little, and we became little more liberated. We
listened, we thought and we learned–and then we learned more, thought
more, and listened more.
Now, it is time for this experience to leave the confines of the
building where the conference was held and spread, so even more people
can rethink what they had already known and learn to listen more.
Because this conference has liberated us, it provides hope that there
will be many others. It is this very hope that will make our roads
intersect.
__________________________________
(Tr anslation: Arman Sucuyan)

BOOKS: THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION BY ROBERT FISK
The Independent, UK
Oct 17 2005
Robert Fisk of the ‘Independent’ is one of the best-known journalists
in the world, with a passionate sense of justice and a knack for
being in the right place at the right time.
Neal Ascherson looks on in admiration at his old friend and colleague
Robert Fisk is the sort of reporter who walks in the opposite
direction. I first came across him as an absence, 30 years ago in
Belfast. We, the pack, had spent the day waiting for the big Paisley
briefing, but where was Bob? It turned out that he had gone off alone
to the battlefield of the Boyne, to see what the place and the past
would say to him. In the first Gulf war, he enraged “pool” colleagues
under Army control by hiring an old car, putting on a borrowed helmet
and driving down forbidden roads until he reached the front. When a
“facility trip” is laid on for the press corps, Fisk stays behind,
suspecting – usually rightly – that it’s to get the hacks out of the
way while something interesting happens.
Right at the end of this book, he describes himself sitting in the
roadside mud with an Iraqi family, watching as a 40-mile convoy of
American armour thunders up Highway Eight towards Baghdad. For Fisk,
it’s a moment to reflect on Roman and American empires which have a
visceral need to “project power on a massive scale”. For the reader,
it’s almost a caricature: the journalist who wants to see the world
from down in the muck with the victims, rather than from a tank turret
as an “embedded” correspondent.
Today, Robert Fisk is one of the best-known reporters in the world.
Long before 11 September, he had an enormous following of readers who
had come to regard him as the only journalist consistently describing
the Middle East “as it is”. He has also accumulated a pack of vengeful
enemies, longing to discredit and silence him. Not all of them are
Israelis or American diplomats. Some are fellow-journalists, maddened
by his gift for being in the right place at the right time.
(The bomb which changed Near-Eastern history went off down his street
in Beirut; the dead man with his socks still burning turned out to
be his friend Rafiq Hariri, ex-prime-minister of Lebanon…)
For the last 30 years, Fisk has been covering an enormous arc of
territory which is not just “the Middle East” but reaches from the
Moroccan Atlantic to the Punjab with a northward extension into the
Balkans. Almost all the peoples who live there are Muslim. All of them,
without exception, have been the objects of imperial conquest and
colonialism, of cultural suppression and big-power frontier-drawing.
This is a book about what Fisk saw, heard, thought and wrote in those
years. It is not an autobiography. Apart from his relationship with
his parents, the door on his private life is locked. Neither is it a
complete chronicle. Having just written a separate book about them,
Fisk leaves out the experiences in Lebanon which generated some of
his best-known writing (his accounts of the Israeli shelling of Qana
in 1996, for instance). But what remains is overwhelming.
This is a very long book, allowing Fisk to interleave political
analysis, recent history and his own adventures with the real stories
which concern him. These are the sufferings of ordinary people under
monstrous tyrannies or in criminal, avoidable wars. Fisk reported
the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war of 1991, the Palestine intifadas,
the Taliban rule in Afghanistan and its sequel as the Americans and
their allies invaded in 2002, the terror regimes of Saddam, the Shah
and the ayatollahs, the frenzy of bloodshed in Algeria as Islamists and
security forces competed to slaughter the innocent, and – of course –
the Bush-Blair war against Iraq and its outcome. His chapter on the
1915 Armenian genocide, still unpardonably denied and evaded and not
only by Turks, revives his famous report from Syria when he stumbled
across the mass graves at Margada (see extract, above).
The source of most of this horror, for Fisk, is the post-1918 carve-up
of the Middle East between European powers. “We” – Britain, France
and much later America – are responsible. Subtly, Fisk weaves this
sense of guilt around his own ambiguous feelings for his father,
a young officer in the Great War for civilisation who became at
once a cold, bullying husband and a stiffly proud parent. Shame for
that generation’s imperial mistakes, he seems to feel, is heritable,
and when he is attacked and almost killed by an Afghan refugee mob,
Fisk’s impulse is that they are not to blame. He might have done the
same to a Westerner, in their place.
All the same, the cumulative impact of these terrible accounts
of massacre, torture and almost unimaginable ruthlessness may not
be what Fisk wants. The case against “Us” (the West) diminishes;
the unjust impression that this is a zone of endemic savagery grows
stronger. He writes with a marvellous resource of image and language.
His investigative reporting is lethally painstaking (see how he
pieces together the biography of an American missile which somehow
came into Israeli hands, was fired at an ambulance and killed an
innocent Lebanese family).
But the sense of inescapable doom which builds up in this book is
misleading. What’s missing is a sense that it’s not just Fisk but
most of the world which finds Western policy crazy. Fisk includes here
several unforgettable, marvellously observed meetings with Osama bin
Laden. Maybe he should try his talents on a meeting with George W Bush.
Robert Fisk is the sort of reporter who walks in the opposite
direction. I first came across him as an absence, 30 years ago in
Belfast. We, the pack, had spent the day waiting for the big Paisley
briefing, but where was Bob? It turned out that he had gone off alone
to the battlefield of the Boyne, to see what the place and the past
would say to him. In the first Gulf war, he enraged “pool” colleagues
under Army control by hiring an old car, putting on a borrowed helmet
and driving down forbidden roads until he reached the front. When a
“facility trip” is laid on for the press corps, Fisk stays behind,
suspecting – usually rightly – that it’s to get the hacks out of the
way while something interesting happens.
Right at the end of this book, he describes himself sitting in the
roadside mud with an Iraqi family, watching as a 40-mile convoy of
American armour thunders up Highway Eight towards Baghdad. For Fisk,
it’s a moment to reflect on Roman and American empires which have a
visceral need to “project power on a massive scale”. For the reader,
it’s almost a caricature: the journalist who wants to see the world
from down in the muck with the victims, rather than from a tank turret
as an “embedded” correspondent.
Today, Robert Fisk is one of the best-known reporters in the world.
Long before 11 September, he had an enormous following of readers who
had come to regard him as the only journalist consistently describing
the Middle East “as it is”. He has also accumulated a pack of vengeful
enemies, longing to discredit and silence him. Not all of them are
Israelis or American diplomats. Some are fellow-journalists, maddened
by his gift for being in the right place at the right time.
(The bomb which changed Near-Eastern history went off down his street
in Beirut; the dead man with his socks still burning turned out to
be his friend Rafiq Hariri, ex-prime-minister of Lebanon…)
For the last 30 years, Fisk has been covering an enormous arc of
territory which is not just “the Middle East” but reaches from the
Moroccan Atlantic to the Punjab with a northward extension into the
Balkans. Almost all the peoples who live there are Muslim. All of them,
without exception, have been the objects of imperial conquest and
colonialism, of cultural suppression and big-power frontier-drawing.
This is a book about what Fisk saw, heard, thought and wrote in those
years. It is not an autobiography. Apart from his relationship with
his parents, the door on his private life is locked. Neither is it a
complete chronicle. Having just written a separate book about them,
Fisk leaves out the experiences in Lebanon which generated some of
his best-known writing (his accounts of the Israeli shelling of Qana
in 1996, for instance). But what remains is overwhelming.
This is a very long book, allowing Fisk to interleave political
analysis, recent history and his own adventures with the real stories
which concern him. These are the sufferings of ordinary people under
monstrous tyrannies or in criminal, avoidable wars. Fisk reported
the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war of 1991, the Palestine intifadas,
the Taliban rule in Afghanistan and its sequel as the Americans and
their allies invaded in 2002, the terror regimes of Saddam, the Shah
and the ayatollahs, the frenzy of bloodshed in Algeria as Islamists and
security forces competed to slaughter the innocent, and – of course –
the Bush-Blair war against Iraq and its outcome. His chapter on the
1915 Armenian genocide, still unpardonably denied and evaded and not
only by Turks, revives his famous report from Syria when he stumbled
across the mass graves at Margada (see extract, above).
The source of most of this horror, for Fisk, is the post-1918 carve-up
of the Middle East between European powers. “We” – Britain, France
and much later America – are responsible. Subtly, Fisk weaves this
sense of guilt around his own ambiguous feelings for his father,
a young officer in the Great War for civilisation who became at
once a cold, bullying husband and a stiffly proud parent. Shame for
that generation’s imperial mistakes, he seems to feel, is heritable,
and when he is attacked and almost killed by an Afghan refugee mob,
Fisk’s impulse is that they are not to blame. He might have done the
same to a Westerner, in their place.
All the same, the cumulative impact of these terrible accounts
of massacre, torture and almost unimaginable ruthlessness may not
be what Fisk wants. The case against “Us” (the West) diminishes;
the unjust impression that this is a zone of endemic savagery grows
stronger. He writes with a marvellous resource of image and language.
His investigative reporting is lethally painstaking (see how he
pieces together the biography of an American missile which somehow
came into Israeli hands, was fired at an ambulance and killed an
innocent Lebanese family).
But the sense of inescapable doom which builds up in this book is
misleading. What’s missing is a sense that it’s not just Fisk but
most of the world which finds Western policy crazy. Fisk includes here
several unforgettable, marvellously observed meetings with Osama bin
Laden. Maybe he should try his talents on a meeting with George W Bush.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ARMENIA IS RATHER ATTRACTIVE COUNTRY FOR INVESTMENTS, ARLEX INTERNATIONAL’S DIRECTOR AFFIRMS
Noyan Tapan News Agency, Armenia
Oct 17 2005
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 17, NOYAN TAPAN. The cooperation of South Caucasian
businessmen and trade among the countries to some extent can contribute
to the solution of conflicts existing in the region. US Ambassador
Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to RA John Evans declared this at
the “Common Future” regional forum organized by the American Chamber
of Commerce in Armenia. J.Evans also noted that the governments
should also assist the development of business contacts in the
region. According to the US ambassador, first of all it’s necessary to
have “fair” courts for attracting foreign investments and development
of business in Armenia and the reforms carried out in the judicical
sphere of Armenia can promote development of business.
In the affirmation of RA NA Speaker Artur Baghdasarian, Armenia
still needs to attract foreign investments and the state must form an
atmosphere of mutual confidence in the sphere of economy. According to
him, the legislative field of Armenian economy is almost completely
formed and favorable conditions are created for free economic
relations. A.Baghdasarian also noted that a continual struggle against
corruption must be carried out for development of business.
In the opinion of Tomas Samuelian, Director of the Arlex International
legal-consultative organization, a simple legal field must be created
for development of business and attraction of foreign investments in
Armenia. Besides, according to him, Armenia’s complicated tax system,
in particular, superfluous bureaucratism, still hampers attraction
of foreign investments. According to T.Samuelian, it’s easy enough
to implement activity in Armenia if we exclude some bureaucratic
difficulties and in difference to a number of countries, no patronage
of the authorities is necessary here.
Armenia is rather an attractive country for investments and, in
particular, the Armenian culture, as well as international recognition
by means of the Spyurk contribute to it.

BAGHDASARYAN DOESN’T THINK ARMENIAN LEGAL SYSTEM IS HAMPERING COUNTRY’S DEVELOPING
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
Oct 17 2005
YEREVAN, October 17. /ARKA/. Armenian National Assembly Speaker
Arthur Baghdasaryan doesn’t think Armenian legal system is barring
the country from developing, he said at A Common Future conference
in Yerevan. At the same time, he noted that the system needs a major
reformation to become a guarantor of lawfulness in the country.
Baghdasaryan stressed the importance of the crackdown on corruption
and economic mergers having monopolistic ambitions. “We have to
do whatever necessary to develop free economic market and form
offshore investors’ trust”, the lawmaker said. In his opinion,
favorable environment for investments is already created in Armenia,
but to retain this status Armenia should increasingly build up the
crackdown on corruption. “Government should become a partner to an
entrepreneur”, Baghdasaryan said. That’s why it is necessary to rid
the republic of corruption, he said. He attached a great importance to
struggle aginst corruption pointing out the need of rooting out it to
pave the way for free development of economic market and creation of
independent legal system, in which an entrepreneur will feel himself
shielded by the law.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

GHARIBJANIAN: RA FM NEEDS FINANCIAL MEANS FOR IMPLEMENTING PURPOSEFUL STRATEGY
Noyan Tapan News Agency, Armenia
Oct 17 2005
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 17, NOYAN TAPAN. So much money is to be invested in
the foreign policy that it is possible to implement some strategy.
Gegham Gharibjanian, the RA Deputy Foreign Minister stated this at the
October 14 joint sitting of the NA Standing Committees on Financial,
Credit and Budget Issues and Foreign Relations, dedicated to the
discussion of the 2006 draft state budget.
He mentioned that it’s only within the current year that the Ministry
was able to implement some mission programs: particularly, organization
of the Yerevan conference dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the
Armenian Genocide and publication of its materials, organization of
events dedicated to the 90th anniversary in a number of countries.
Gegham Gharibjanian mentioned that the Ministry prepared and spread
a special certificate with the help of which Armenian participants of
international conferences will be able to give a proper counterblow to
Azeri and Turk participants’ misinformation. According to him, during
the next year work in that direction will continue and giving necessary
information, including to deputies as well, will become periodical. The
Deputy Minister emphasized the necessity of a more close cooperation
between the Ministry of Foreing Affairs and the Parliament, regular
contacts and exchange of information among diplomates and deputies.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

AGHASI AIVAZIAN’S 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATED
Noyan Tapan News Agency, Armenia
Oct 17 2005
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 17, NOYAN TAPAN. The 80th anniversary of Aghasi
Aivazian, a prose-writer, script-writer and director, was celebrated
at the Yerevan Cinema House on October 14. Officials, artists were
present at the ceremony.
Aghasi Aivazian entered the literary field in 1960 and became one
of classics of the Armenian literature by his original works and
particular way of thinking, prose-writer Perch Seytuntsian mentioned.
“The writer’s life and work may be characterized as a great love
towards life and living, fighting and creating, towards his people,
Fatherland and culture,” Perch Zeytuntsian said.
Aghasi Aivazian is an author of numerous books, scripts. The
“Triangle,” “Lighted up Lantern” and other films were shot at the
“Hayfilm” movie studio by his sripts. The last film on Aghasi
Aivazian’s scenario remains the film “Secret Advisor” shot in 1988.
“At present there are interesting ideas, ready works which can become
good films,” Aghasi Aivazian mentioned. He informed that he’s going to
publish a new book where works of last few months will be included in.
Aghasi Aivazian wrote a number of plays which were staged at theaters
of different cities of Armenia, and “Aralez” was staged just by the
author himself.
RA President Robert Kocharian, Prime Minister Andranik Margarian
sent messages of congratulation on the occasion of Aghasi Aivazian’s
jubilee. During the event, pieces from films on A.Aivazian’s scenarios
were presented as well as parts extracts from his works were read.

MAYOR OF YEREVAN: YEREVAN, VENICE TO SIGN AGREEMENT ON COOPERATION IN CULTURE IN NEAR FUTURE
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
Oct 17 2005
YEREVAN, October 17. /ARKA/. Yerevan and Venice will sign agreement
on cooperation in culture in the near future, Mayor of Yerevan
Yervand Zakharyan told journalists at the photo exhibition “Armenian
memories in Italy”. He said that this agreement will be signed
in two months. He said that photo exhibition held at the Yerevan
Municipality is only one link between Armenia and Venice. “We hope
we will strengthen relations between our cities, including trade and
economic cooperation”, Zakharyan said. Over 20 foreign cities are
the twin-cities of Yerevan.

BOOK “VAZGEN I CATHOLICOS OF ALL ARMENIANS” RELEASED
ARKA News Agency, Armenia
Oct 17 2005
YEREVAN, October 17. /ARKA/. The book entitled “Vazgen I Catholicos of
All Armenians” has been released at the Holy Echmiadzin on the occasion
of the 10th anniversary of his death. The book was released by the
Department for Interchurch Relations with the blessing of Catholicos
of All Armenians Garegin II with the sponsorship of the USA-based
Armenians Ruth and Nshan Terteryan. The book contains all information
on Vazgen I’s life and activities. The edition contains numerous
pictures. The book also includes RA President Robert Kocharyan’s
address to the participants in last year’s commemoration meeting on
the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Vazgen I’s.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

MONUMENT DEDICATED TO MEMORY OF VICTIMS OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE TO BE ERECTED IN FRESNO
Noyan Tapan News Agency, Armenia
Oct 17 2005
FRESNO, OCTOBER 17, NOYAN TAPAN – ARMENIANS TODAY. Fresno Mayor Alan
Autry announced this week his commitment to build a monument in the
near future dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Armenian
Genocide. The announcement was made on October 10, in Fresno City Hall,
during the meeting with His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great
House of Cilicia. In addition to the Pontiff, present were a large
group of representatives of the Fresno Armenian American community.
According to the Information Department of the Catholicosate of
Cilicia, in City Hall, His Holiness conducted an opening prayer during
a city council session. During the council session, Mayor Alan Autry
offered His Holiness the symbolic key to the city. Upon receiving the
key, His Holiness commented that “my hope is that this key will also
unlock the hearts of all the various cultures so that we may share
and work together to build stronger and closer communities living
together in peaceful coexistence.” The Pontiff said that the United
States is the leading example of the possibility of this reality.
The Catholicos had a very busy schedule in Fresno that included
visits with the students, administration and parents of the Armenian
Community School of Fresno on October 11 where the Pontiff stressed
the critical role that Armenian schools play in preserving our culture
and identity as well as imparting our traditions and values.
His Holiness attended a reception and gave a speech at Fresno Pacific
University that also received media attention by local TV stations and
the Fresno Bee. The speech focused on the diversity of cultures that
coexist in the United States as a model. His Holiness also brought
forth the example of intolerance and how that manifested itself in the
Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government. Since
the U.S. has always stood for tolerance, human rights and justice,
he emphasized, “The U.S. Congress must recognize the Armenian Genocide
and thereby demand justice for this crime against humanity.”
In his speech His Holiness discussed state of Christianity in the
Middle East using the Armenian experience and the Armenian Genocide as
an example of what can happen when the idea of peaceful coexistence
with different cultures and religions is shattered. He also outlined
the dynamic role the church plays in Middle Eastern societies including
politics where it pursues matters of justice, peace and human rights
as well as imparting human and family values.
Plans for erecting a Genocide Monument in Fresno is yet another
step in the road toward justice and proper recognition of the 1915
genocide committed against the Armenian people by the Ottoman Turkish
government. It comes on the heels of several other recent positive
developments on this issue including the passage by the U.S.
Congress’ House International Relations Committee of two resolutions
recognizing the genocide as well as the recent resolution passed by
the European Parliament calling for Turkey to recognize the genocide
prior to being considered for admission into the union.

OTOLARYNGOLOGICAL DEPARTMENT OF “ARABKIR” MEDICAL CENTER REPAIRED AND RE-EQUIPPED
Noyan Tapan News Agency, Armenia
Oct 17 2005
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 17, NOYAN TAPAN. The otolaryngological department
and operating-room of the “Arabkir” medical complex were repaired
at the expense of 88 thousand USD given by the Development and
Cooperation Agency of Switzerland and the “Aznavour to Armenia”
charitable fund. As Spartak Ghazarian, Executive Director of the
Complex, mentioned at the ceremony of department’s opening, the repair
will enable to bring the medical services rendered at the complex in
correspondence with the requirements of the modern medicine. According
to him, henceforward otolaryngological operations can be made in the
reequipped operating-room with a general anaesthetic instead of the
former local one.
S.Ghazarian also informed that 2000-2500 children are operated on at
the department every year.