`Union for the sake of Armenia’ Party reached Chambarak

ArmRadio.am
27.05.2006 15:45
`Union for the sake of Armenia’ Party created its next cell in
Chambarak, Gegharkunik marz. During the meeting with the initiative
group of the Party residents of the city presented their problems and
expressed the hope that these would find their solution.
One of the major targets of the `Union for the sake of Armenia’ Party’
is regional development, which envisages serious consideration of the
problems in marzes of Armenia.

Armenian, Azeri presidents to meet in Romania – presidential spokesman
Arminfo
26 May 06

Yerevan, 26 May: The press secretary of the Armenian president, Viktor
Sogomonyan, has confirmed a tentative agreement on the conduct of a
meeting between the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“The meeting of the presidents is actually planned for early June in
Bucharest. Most likely, the meeting will take place on the sidelines
of the Black Sea forum fixed for 5 June,” Sogomonyan said.

Azeri leader vows to liberate Armenian-occupied territories
Trend news agency
26 May 06

Baku, 26 May, Trend correspondent R. Abdullayev: Azerbaijani President
Ilham Aliyev made a speech on 26 May in Baku at an official ceremony
to mark Azerbaijan’s national holiday – the Day of the Republic, Trend
reports.
The head of state highly rated the establishment of the Democratic
Republic of Azerbaijan in 1918 and stressed the historical role of the
founders of Azerbaijan’s statehood.
Touching on developments that unfolded in Azerbaijan during the
collapse of the Soviet Union and on the threat of the repeat collapse
of national statehood, Ilham Aliyev pointed out that statehood was
preserved owing to the efforts of ex-President Heydar Aliyev.
The president pointed out that in the following period, Azerbaijan
became the most dynamically developing country, which was a direct
result of the successful policy of political-economic reforms carried
out by the republic’s leadership.
He said that Azerbaijan is strengthening its positions not only on the
regional, but also on the world scale. “Azerbaijan is implementing an
economic concept that aims to increase the welfare of the country’s
population,” Ilham Aliyev said.
The head of state also touched on the settlement of the
Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagornyy Karabakh conflict and stressed that
Azerbaijan is in favour of a peaceful solution to the problem. He said
that if Armenia’s nonconstructive position leads to a deadlock in the
negotiating process, “Azerbaijan should resolve the problem with its
own forces”.
President Aliyev clearly said that “Azerbaijan will not allow a second
Armenian state to be created on its territory” and added that “all the
occupied territories of Azerbaijan should be liberated without any
conditions”.

Armenian, Azerbaijan presidents to meet in Romania for first time
since failed France summit

AP Worldstream; May 26, 2006
The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet in Romania,
possibly next month, government spokesmen said Friday, for talks aimed
at resolving a nearly two-decade conflict over the disupted enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh.
Government officials in Yerevan and the Azerbaijani capital Baku both
confirmed that Robert Kocharian, of Armenia, and his Azerbaijani
counterpart, Ilham Aliev, were intending to meet, but gave no further
details.
The two Caucasus leaders are expected to attend a forum for Black Sea
countries scheduled for June 5 in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.
Talks held between the two presidents in France in February ended in
failure, despite international mediators’ efforts to push the leaders
to resolve Nagorno-Karabakh’s status.
The enclave is inside Azerbaijan but populated mostly by ethnic
Armenians, who have run it since an uneasy 1994 cease-fire ended six
years of full-scale fighting.
Sporadic border clashes have grown more frequent since the breakdown
of talks and the lack of resolution has hindered development
throughout the strategic Caucasus region.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Azerbaijan offers to sell gas to Europe
By Stefan Wagstyl, East Europe Editor, in Baku

FT
May 27 2006 03:00
Azerbaijan has offered to help Europe meet its long-term energy needs
and reduce its dependence on Russia by putting itself forward as a
potential source of natural gas.
Ilham Aliyev, president of the energy-rich Caspian nation, told the FT
Azerbaijan was ready to focus on mainland Europe as a potential future
market when planning new gas projects.
“Until last year we considered Turkey and Georgia as the only markets
for Azerbaijan’s gas,” said Mr Aliyev. “The situation has changed
now. We see that demand from Europe for additional gas becomes more
viable and we need to evaluate that.
“For us this is a new situation . . . But if there’s demand from
Europe we will consider it. To do that we need to review our
production and investment programme.”
Mr Aliyev’s offer comes amid widespread concern in the European Union
about energy security and calls for diversification. The search for
alternative gas sources has intensified since the contract dispute
between Russia and Ukraine last winter prompted a brief break in
supplies to some EU states.
Mr Aliyev said new gas developments would take time. Oil industry
executives in Baku agree, saying the country’s first big new gas
project was just nearing completion – the Shah Deniz offshore field
and the associated South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP) to Georgia and
Turkey.
Big potential new gas sources – if proved viable – would probably not
come on stream before 2015 – following the planned development of a
second stage of Shah Deniz.
Other potential sources – notably pipelines under the Caspian bringing
gas from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – could take similarly long to
develop.
Mr Aliyev said Azerbaijan was ready to play a transit role for both
gas and oil. His confidence stems from the near completion of two big
pipelines – the SCP, which will start transporting gas in the autumn,
and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to
Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, which is due to ship its first oil
soon. Mr Aliyev says proudly: “The pipelines are the biggest energy
projects in the world . . . This unique infrastructure integrates the
Caspian and the Mediterranean.”
Mr Aliyev ran Socar, the Azerbaijan state oil company, before
succeeding his late father, Heydar, as president. Heydar Aliyev, a KGB
boss and Communist party official in Soviet times, established an
authoritarian government that he controlled until his death in
2003. Ilham Aliyev took power in presidential elections that
international observers condemned as flawed.
The government ran into more criticism last year when the ruling party
won parliamentary elections by a landslide amid complaints of fraud
and harassment from opposition parties.
Mr Aliyev rejects suggestions his country is undemocratic and accuses
the foreign media of painting a false picture.
“I don’t say we have a perfect society,” he said. “Of course not. It
is not possible for a country to have the same level of democracy as
you have in western Europe. It’s not possible in 15 years . . . But
we have many achievements.”
Mr Aliyev argues rapid economic development – fuelled by energy export
revenues – will lead to a strong democracy.
Opposition politicians and human rights activists say this may not
happen if the wealthy business people around the president monopolise
money and power, as has happened in other energy-rich states. They
want the US and the EU to increase pressure on Mr Aliyev for
democratic reforms.
But Mr Aliyev thinks western leaders worried about oil and gas
supplies will be unwilling to destabilise Azerbaijan at a time of
rising tensions between the west and neighbouring Iran, which is home
to more than 20m ethnic Azeris.
There is also concern about Azerbaijan’s long-running dispute with
Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Iran builds biggest sea terminal in Persian Gulf
Khuzestan Provincial TV, Ahvaz
26 May 06
Text of report by Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Khuzestan
Provincial TV on 26 May
The country’s biggest passenger terminal was inaugurated in the port
of Khorramshahr simultaneous with the anniversary of the liberation of
Khorramshahr [during the Iran-Iraq war].
The passenger terminal is capable of transiting 800 passengers each
day and has been built in an area 600 sq.m. A sum of 25bn rials
[around 28m dollars] has been spent on the building of the terminal.
The biggest sea terminal in the Persian Gulf is equipped with special
facilities used at international sea terminals, such as: an
audiovisual information system, display equipment showing entrance and
departure of vessels, mechanized equipment facilitating the arrival
and departure of passengers and inspecting their luggage,
telecommunication equipment, pinpointing and extinguishing fires,
close-circuit cameras and computer equipment.
Moreover, passenger facilities have been envisaged such as departure
halls, transit, ceremonies, passport, VIP, Customs, Quarantine and
left luggage.
Khorramshahr is the closest port of the country’s southern economic
zone to the countries of Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia,
Georgia and Russia.

BOOK REVIEWS: Fiction – A melancholy journey
Financial Times; May 27, 2006
By Carmen Callil
HAV
by Jan Morris
Faber £16.99, 288 pages
Jan Morris published Last Letters from Hav 20 years ago. Short-
listed for the Booker Prize, it was – and is – a jewel of a novel,
posturing as a travel book about the magical Hav, a Mediterranean
city-state perched on an imaginary Anatolian peninsula in Asia
Minor. For this new book, Jan Morrishas taken her imagination back
there.
So evocative, detailed and realistic was her first fictional sojourn
in Hav that Last Letters elicited tourist inquiries and agonising map
research – where exactly was it, vis-a-vis Greece and Turkey, Lebanon
and Crete? Studies of post-colonial literature continue to pontificate
about its meanings; allusions in the novel are used to illustrate the
dilemmas of ethnicity and empire.
The fabulous city of Hav was a product of Jan Morris’s unique
combination of talents. Reading her is an almost physical experience;
an encounter with any of her travel writings – the Pax Britannica
trilogy for instance, her chronicle of the British Empire – is to be
whisked into the daily life of other worlds, to loiter alongside her,
to smell, see and encounter exactly what she does.
Nowhere is this more happily achieved than in the original novel. In
it, Jan Morris arrives in Hav in 1985, jumping out of a “huge
locomotive of dirty red with a cow-catcher and a brass bell” at the
frontier, to descend into the entirely plausible melting pot that is
Hav. Over the centuries it has beena bauble for conquest: tossed
about between Greek and Arab, Crusader and Turk, Russia and Germany,
Britain and France, housing myriad races ranging from Italian,
Armenian, African and hippy American to its own cave- dwellers, the
goat-munching Kretevs. Even the Chinese are there in their divine
House ofthe Chinese Master and Palace of Delights.
“Beneath the velvet skies” of the city, its inhabitants eat sea-
urchins by the barrel-load. They run a suicidal race across the roofs
of Hav, a jumbled confusion of architectural testaments to the many
nationalities. The flotsam and jetsam of centuries of foreign
domination provide Morris with the opportunity to use her vast
knowledge to juggle it all in the air and let it fall to the page in
entrancing patterns of wisdom, humour and charm.
While she never descends into outright whimsy, there is nevertheless
more than a touch of W.S. Gilbert in Morris’s fantasy – Sullivan is
representedin the writing, which is a symphony of the melodic phrases
and resonant adjectives that mark her style. A Welsh version of
Gilbert and Sullivan itmust be said, for Jan Morris is snappish about
the joyless British presence in her imagined city.
In 1985, as Jan Morris left Hav, there were black aeroplanes in the
sky and warships on the horizon. It is 2005 when she returns. In her
epilogue she says this sequel is as full of enigmas as its
predecessor, but it is hard to see any lack of clarity in her all-
too-clear account of what the Myrmidons – the new rulers of Hav – have
created after their “Intervention” in 1985. Most of old Hav is now
razed. Gone are the “smells of food, dirt, jasmine and imperfectly
refined gasoline”, replaced by the odourless certainties of the Holy
Myrmidonic Republic. Hav is now meticulously planned, bugged by hidden
devices, with buildings made of glass and steel and so much concrete
that even the dangling earrings of a receptionist seem to be made of
that substance. “All sanitised, all sham”, the fabled peninsula is
now criss-crossed with motorways, its rare fruit “snow raspberries”
are genetically modified and canned, the jumble of history has become
the lies of government, “institutional lying”.
This technological nightmare, one long, vulgar expansion of holiday
resort and airport, is slashed with Offices of Ideology, Leagues of
Intellectualsand an all-seeing 2,000ft Tower. The ideologies of
apartheid and of the US and China seep through Morris’s portrait of
the new Hav, now fully controlled by the Holy Cathars of the
Myrmidonic Republic. (Morris demonstrates her subtle understanding of
history in choosing the believers of this particularly unattractive
Christian heresy as the mindless perpetrators of the Myrmidonic
horrors that are now 21st-century Hav.)
In the epilogue, Morris states she had a sense of foreboding before
the “catastrophe on September 11”, but it is other government
“interventions” that seem to hover in the air in her new vision. This
melancholy contemplation of civilisation as ruled by globalisation and
fundamentalism, with its haunting sense of Welsh rage, offers little
joy and no hope. We must be grateful the original novel is still there
in all its engaging eccentricity, to remind us that its sequel of
despair may only be a hiccup of gloom in the long career of a
distinguished writer who has, perhaps, seen too much.
Carmen Callil is author of “Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family
and Fatherland” (Jonathan Cape).

Playing for high stakes in oil-rich Caspian region

Irish Times; May 27, 2006
Kieran Cooke
World View: Badri Balakhadze points to the freshly dug ground a few
metres from his farmhouse high up in the Caucasus mountains in the
Republic of Georgia.
“Pipelines under the soil are carrying millions of dollars worth of
oil and gas from the Caspian in the East to Europe in the West,” he
says. “The fuel threatens our villages and the pipelaying has
destroyed our lands. Yet we don’t get one cent – it’s as if we don’t
exist.”
More than a century ago Rudyard Kipling and others talked about the
“Great Game” in Central Asia – the spying and sparring between Tsarist
Russia and the British Empire for control of the region. Now a new
Great Game is being played out in the area – an increasingly tense
battle for resources, in particular vast energy reserves lying beneath
the Caspian Sea and below the inhospitable desert lands of surrounding
territories.
The oil pipeline close to Mr Balakhadze’s house is part of one of the
world’s biggest and most daring engineering projects, a 1,757km energy
link between the Caspian and the Mediterranean, snaking its way over
valleys and mountains from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, via
Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, to the port of Ceyhan on Turkey’s southern
coast. Just to fill a pipeline of such length will take up to five
months. An adjacent gas pipeline links the Caspian with the Black Sea
coast.
The aim of western oil giants, led by BP and heavily backed by the
financial and political muscle of the US and British governments, is
to transport ever increasing amounts of precious Caspian energy
through the pipelines to hungry western markets, avoiding routes
through Iran to the south and Russia to the north.
However, as the search for the world’s dwindling supply of fossil
fuels intensifies, others are determined that the West will not have
it all its own way in the Caspian region.
China has mounted a diplomatic and economic onslaught in the area in
an effort to gain a large slice of energy resources for its booming
economy.
Iran, which controls the Caspian’s southern shore, watches
developments closely, sending out gunships and fighter jets when it
feels its rights are under threat.
“The scramble to exploit the Caspian’s energy reserves is a
high-stakes game in what is a very volatile region,” says a political
analyst based in Tbilisi.
“To some the Caspian is the new El Dorado but it could easily become a
conflict zone. All the ingredients for trouble are there, with old
ethnic quarrels unresolved and, since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, new arguments over territorial boundaries in the area.”
A resurgent Russia, flush with funds from its own enormous energy
resources, is keen to regain economic and political influence in a
region that it has long regarded as its own backyard.
Georgia, a former Soviet satellite which has turned firmly pro-West in
recent years and is a key transit territory for Caspian energy going
to the West, has been a particular target of pressure from Moscow.
Russia recently banned, on health grounds, all imports of Georgian
wine and mineral water in what Georgia’s president, Mikhail
Saakashvili, described as an act of “economic sabotage”.
Earlier this year, in the middle of the coldest winter on record, a
mysterious explosion severed the pipeline carrying Russian gas to
Georgia: most of the country’s four million people froze for a week.
The newly independent, post-Soviet states which share the Caspian’s
waters argue with each other over territorial rights. Corruption and
human-rights abuses are common features of the region.
Turkmenistan, on the Caspian’s eastern shore, is presided over by
Saparmurat Niyazov or, as he likes to be called, Turkmenbashi – the
father of all Turkmen – an eccentric megalomaniac with a penchant for
littering his country with gold statues of himself and who recently
decreed that the days of the week should be renamed after members of
his family.
Niyazov has effectively sealed Turkmenistan off from contact with the
rest of the world – except, that is, for carrying on lucrative energy
deals with foreign energy companies.
Azerbaijan, where BP and other oil companies have invested billions in
recent years, is growing rich.
But while Ferraris and Maseratis buzz round the streets of Baku, many
people live in caves on the city outskirts. Opposition politicians
were beaten up and imprisoned during elections in Azerbaijan last
year. The government has earmarked increasing amounts of its new oil
wealth to building up its armed forces for a possible clash with
Armenia, its old enemy and next-door neighbour.
This is the second energy rush to hit the Caspian. In the mid-19th
century the world’s first commercially exploited oilfields started
production near Baku.
By 1900, the region was producing more than 50 per cent of the globe’s
oil.
Business tycoons like the Rothschilds and the Swedish Nobel family
made staggering amounts of money out of Caspian oil, building lavish
mansions in an area of Baku still known as “Boom Town”. The rise of
communism brought the boom to an end in the early years of the 20th
century.
Badri Balakhadze and his fellow farmers in the mountains of Georgia
are dismissive about the talk of energy wealth. They are more worried
about the threat of landslides in the area and what would happen if an
earthquake struck – most of Georgia is in a highly active seismic
zone.
“The Georgian government gets money from BP for the pipelines, but not
us,” says Mr Balakhadze.
“We weren’t even given any jobs on the project – they were all given
to outsiders. Our village is dying but no one seems to care. What use
is the oil and gas to us?”

FM of NKR will attend Armenian Independence celebrations in Cyprus

;pID=54&amp ;cID=4&s=2
25-05-2006
The Foreign Minister of Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgy Petrossian, will attend the
Armenian Independence celebrations at AYMA Football Ground. The original date
announced for this event was Sunday May 28, 2006 but it has been moved for
Saturday 03, June 2006 at 8:00 pm.

Critics’ Forum
Literature
An Archive in a Footnote: The Legacy Project
By Hovig Tchalian
Now that the tumult of events surrounding Genocide commemoration has
subsided, it is worth taking pause and considering the aftermath.
The inevitable moment after (especially once the celebrations of May
28th are also past) brings up the difficult but enduring question-
“What now?” or, more skeptically, “Is this all there is?”
An ambitious project, sponsored by the Hamburg Institute for Social
Research and The Rockefeller Foundation, offers perhaps the most
satisfying and propitious answer – allowing the act of remembrance
to outlive the moment of its inception. The Project consists
primarily of a website () that, as the site’s
own description puts it, “will build a global exchange on the
enduring consequences of the many historical tragedies of the 20th
century.”
In essence, the site archives the various reactions to the
historical tragedies of the previous century, in the hope of
preventing their future occurrence, or at least dampening their
detrimental effects on society. The website’s “events index”
provides a comprehensive alphabetical list of the nearly 25 “events”
included in the archive-from “African Conflicts,” Apartheid, the
Armenian Genocide and the “Cambodian Killing Fields,” through the
Holocaust and the struggles of “indigenous peoples,” to the two
World Wars.
Admittedly, the strand tying all these “events” together – the issue
of social injustice, broadly conceived – is somewhat tenuous. And
the categorization scheme may be suspect. (What about “indigenous
peoples” constitutes a set of “events”?) Perhaps a better way of
linking these various themes together is under the even broader
theme of remembrance, the complex “legacy” that gives the project
its name. According to the website, “the Legacy Project offers a
channel for mutual recognition across generations and geography.
Through scholarly research and innovative presentation, The Legacy
Project will create new – and shared – frameworks for cultural
expressions of loss, drawn from Africa, the Americas, Asia and
Europe. Our work will help define the language of human loss – its
forms, its symbols, its grammar. . . . The Legacy Project seeks a
collective, retrospective reflection on the losses that constitute
the legacy of the last century.”
The real value of the project – the genuine goal of active
remembrance and comparative historical study facilitated by the
creation of a central archive of various human injustices – is
overshadowed by the quite ambitious but nonetheless diffuse goal of
defining “the language of human loss,” a goal arguably more akin to
academic studies than to historical reality. The site nonetheless
admirably achieves its more modest goal of preserving the poems,
plays, speeches, films, historical commentary, and a host of other
reactions to the tragedies that have defined our century and the
prior one.
Unlike the more strictly historical mission of, say, the Zoryan
Institute, which carries out the important work of preserving the
commentaries of Genocide survivors and legal and historical
documents related to the event itself, the Legacy Project preserves
the reactions of the generations that succeeded them. By doing so,
it carries out the equally important work of archiving in one place
what would otherwise constitute a scattered series of footnotes,
the “secondary” memory of the historical events that record the
shock registered in the minds and hearts of more than a century’s
worth of indirect witnesses. In this sense, the website performs
the much-needed function of commemorating the act of commemoration
itself – testimony to the enduring will of those who would see the
tragedies halted and continual fodder for all of us looking for a
viable answer to the question with which we began, “What now?”
The selections included on the site are nothing short of
remarkable. As of the last viewing, the website includes virtual
exhibitions of “Frank Stella, the Polish Village Series;” “The “Art
of Afterwards;” and a study of “Echoes of the Guernica.” There is
also a “Virtual Symposium” of Holocaust-related issues, as well as
the discussions of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The
site also includes a searchable database of the various literary,
artistic and film materials included on the site. Excerpts of the
work of Armenian poet and writer Peter Balakian are represented, as
are the enigmatic and powerful historico-philosophical ruminations
of the German-Jewish cultural critic, Walter Benjamin.
Despite the Legacy Project’s sophistication and the breadth and
depth of its archives, there are nonetheless some glaring omissions
in its website content. A search for Atom Egoyan or his
film, “Ararat,” for instance, will return no results. And there is
a noticeable dearth of items about the Genocide more generally.
Luckily, the remedy is readily available. The website provides the
following email address for feedback and suggestions: legacy@legacy-
project.org. What better way to make one’s voice heard while
helping transform the footnotes of the Genocide and other historical
tragedies into a growing archive that will survive the few weeks of
their commemoration?
All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2006
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 him 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.