ARMINFO News Agency
October 7, 2005
ARMENIAN-GEORGIAN WORKING GROUP WILL BE FORMED TO PREPARE FEASIBILITY
STUDY FOR FOURTH POWER LINE ARMENIA-GEORGIA
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 7. ARMINFO. An Armenian-Georgian working group will
be formed shortly to prepare a feasibility study for construction of
a fourth power line Armenia-Georgia. Armenian Energy Minister Armen
Movsisyan told ARMINFO.
He said some $12-$13 million will be allocated for the project. The
main construction will be in the territory of Georgia. The
investments necessary for the works in the territory of Armenia are
insignificant. The minister said investment volume and the capacity
of the new power line will be announced only when the feasibility
study is ready.
To note, the fourth sitting of the Armenian-Georgian
Intergovernmental Commission foe Economic Cooperation convened in
Yerevan on September 29. The parties agreed to synchronize the power
systems of the two states, taking into account their parallel
operation with the power systems of Russia and Iran. Power-engineers
were instructed to form a working group for transfer of the Georgian
section of the power line “Ashotsk-Ninotsminda” for the account of
the Georgian party.

ARMINFO News Agency
October 7, 2005
US AMBASSADOR TO ARMENIA: USA INTENDS TO PROMOTE FAIR AND TRANSPARENT
ELECTIONS IN ARMENIA
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 7. ARMINFO. US Congress intends to allocate big
funds to improve the election system of Armenia hereby really
contributing to democratic elections in the country. US Ambassador to
Armenia John Evans said at the “Rose Roth” joint seminar of NATO PA
and the Armenian Parliament on the topic “Security in the South
Caucasus”. The four-day seminar opened on October 6 in Yerevan.
Regarding the Constitutional reforms, John Evans said that a great
work was done to work out the draft, which will balance the power
branches. Foreign ambassadors and representatives of international
organizations have already given their assessment of the draft.
Unfortunately, it has been harshly criticized as an interference into
the internal affairs of Armenia. We have just taken a favorable view
of the draft Constitutional amendments and noted that the choice
rests upon the Armenian people, the Ambassador said. He thinks the
referendum bar high enough – 1/3 of the total number of voters.
Ambassador Evans noted that since the independence of Armenia, the
USA has allocated $1.6 bln assistance to the country. The USA works
in three directions in Armenia: to ensure security and contribute to
settling regional conflicts; to promote economic development; to
develop democratic institutions.

ARMINFO News Agency
October 7, 2005
AZERBAIJAN DENIES ITS GUILT IN THE DELAY OF “NEW NEIGHBORHOOD”
PROGRAM IMPLEMENTATION
STRASBOURG, OCTOBER 7. ARMINFO. The head of the Azerbaijani
delegation, Samad Seyidov, denies that the EU-South Caucasus talks
about “New Neighborhood” program implementation were delayed because
of problems with Azerbaijan.
On the other hand, the EU Special Representative at South Caucasus,
Heikki Talvitie, on a joint press-conference with the Armenian
Minister for Foreign affairs, Vardan Oskanian, stated that the talks
with Armenia and Georgia on “New Neighborhood” program were delayed
because Azerbaijan had problems with one of the EU countries
(Cyprus).
According to Mr. Seyidov, the European Union works hard for
integrating Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan with the European
society. “All the problems, related with further integration, will be
easily resolved. The arguments against Azerbaijan are groundless and
I can’t see anything impeding the Caucasian-European integration,” he
said. -A-

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
October 7, 2005 Friday 10:29 AM Eastern Time
Self-determination should be Karabakh settlement basis-Kocharyan
By Tigran Liloyan
YEREVAN
The Karabakh conflict should be resolved on the principle of
self-determination of peoples, Armenian President Robert Kocharyan
told a joint press conference with Latvian leader Vaira
Vike-Freiberga on Friday.

Turan news agency, Azerbaijan
Oct 7 2005
Azeri court sentences three former POWs for high treason

The Azerbaijani court for grave crimes has sentenced three national
army servicemen to long prison terms for high treason, Turan news
agency has reported. The three were charged with desertion and
contacts with the Armenian intelligence service while in captivity.
The court sentenced Sgt Ruslan Bakirov and Pte Xayal Abdullayev to 12
and Pte Hikmat Tagiyev to 11 years’ imprisonment after they pleaded
partly guilty.
In February 2005, the three servicemen deserted from their military
unit and went to the Armenian-controlled part of Azerbaijan’s Tartar
District where they established contacts with the Armenian
intelligence service, Turan said. They were handed over to Azerbaijan
in May 2005 and then arrested and put on trial, the agency added.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Public Television of Armenia
Oct 7 2005
Cooperation with Russia, NATO guarantees Armenia’s security – defence
minister
[Presenter] The parties to the Karabakh conflict were very close to
reaching an agreement in 2001, but they failed to achieve a final
result. The mediators are tired of delays in the conflict settlement.
In order to settle the conflict, the Armenian and Azerbaijani
leaderships need to demonstrate political will and NATO and the USA
have sufficient will and resources to assist the conflict settlement,
the US ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, has said at NATO’s Rose
Roth seminar.
Armenian Defence Minister Serzh Sarkisyan spoke about conflicts in
the South Caucasus, noting that the armies of the region’s three
countries were established in wartime and are still far from
international standards. Armenia is in favour of regional cooperation
within the framework of the Partnership for Peace programme, an idea
which Azerbaijan has rejected. The minister said that now it is
necessary to achieve stable and guaranteed truce.
[Serzh Sarkisyan speaking at the Rose Roth seminar] Armenia is taking
an active part in various security projects in order to set up a
strong security system. Armenia is cooperating with the [CIS]
Collective Security Treaty Organization and NATO today, which allows
the Armenian armed forces to establish cooperation in line with
different international military standards. Armenian-Russian
bilateral military cooperation within the framework of the Collective
Security Treaty Organization and the development of cooperation with
NATO and the USA guarantee Armenia’s security.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Mediamax News Agency, Russia
Oct 6 2005
Armenia, Azerbaijan reach “unprecedented” rapprochement on Karabakh –
minister
Yerevan, 6 October: Armenia and Azerbaijan have reached an
“unprecedented” rapprochement of the positions on principled issues
of the settlement of the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict, Armenian Foreign
Minister Vardan Oskanyan said in Yerevan today. He said this at a
meeting with journalists after addressing the seminar entitled
“Security in the South Caucasus” organized by the NATO Parliamentary
Assembly and the Armenian National Assembly.
Oskanyan said that the future status of Nagornyy Karabakh, problems
of the territories [adjacent to Nagornyy Karabakh] and guarantees of
security were among the “principled issues”, regarding which the
sides had managed to get their positions closer.
The minister pointed out that “there is no a new completed
[settlement] package on the table [of negotiations], but there are
specific ideas”.
“After all, after beginning to debate all these elements in detail,
one could expect a written document,” Oskanyan said. He advised to
wait for the end of the November parliamentary election in
Azerbaijan, “after which the co-chairmen of the OSCE Minsk Group will
boost the negotiations”.
Commenting on the statement of his Azerbaijani counterpart that
Yerevan and Baku have reached an agreement on mine clearing, the
Armenian foreign minister said that official agreements have not been
reached yet.
The Armenian foreign minister also said that only the OSCE Minsk
Group had an “exclusive mandate” for the settlement of the Nagornyy
Karabakh conflict, but “the discussion of this problem within the
framework of other organizations is acceptable and may be useful”.
At the same time, Oskanyan stressed that the discussion of the
Nagornyy Karabakh conflict in various organizations and resolutions
adopted as a result of them “cannot replace the negotiations”.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

The Calgary Herald (Alberta)
October 7, 2005 Friday
Final Edition
Egoyan’s Truth lost in the layers: Bacon, Firth shine despite
narrative mess
by Jay Stone, CanWest News Service
Where The Truth Lies
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth.
Directed and written by Atom Egoyan
Rating 2 1/2 out of five
– – –
Director Atom Egoyan makes movies that are very much about the
moviemaking process: not cameras and film stock, but how a filmmaker
sees a story, how he plucks one narrative out of the multitudes that
surround any event.
At his best, in such films as Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter,
Egoyan’s elusiveness helps strengthen the story by giving us several
versions of it, allowing a mosaic itself to become a character, or a
mystery.
Author Russell Banks, who wrote the novel on which The Sweet
Hereafter was based, was undoubtedly thinking of Egoyan when he said
turning a book into a movie was like smashing a stained-glass window
and making a vase out of the shards. The trouble with this approach
is that it can also put so many layers between us and the story that
the movie becomes about the layers.
Ararat, a highly personal Egoyan film about the Armenian holocaust,
was filmed as a movie-within-a-movie, an approach that cooled the
passions disastrously: the anger or the mourning that must have
fuelled the desire to tell the tale in the first place was replaced
by a meditation on memory, and tragedy seemed like device.
The same problems arise with Where The Truth Lies, a neo-noir full of
highly watchable, lurid subject matter — Hollywood celebrity, a
murder mystery, lots of sex — that has become a jumble of confusing
viewpoints and chronologies.
This is Egoyan’s biggest movie to date ($25 million), featuring the
biggest stars he has ever worked with in Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth,
but the combination of accessible material and name talent has
overwhelmed his vision. You can almost feel Bacon and Firth aching to
break through the layers of technique.The result is artificial and,
in the last reel, absurd.
Bacon and Firth play Lanny and Vince, a famous comedy/singing act of
the 1950s who enjoy a gaudy, Vegas-style success, access to many
lovely women and a wise guy’s knowledge about the benefits of
celebrity.
However, there is a scandal in their lives when a blond turns up dead
in their hotel bathtub.The act dissolves, Lanny and Vince stop
talking to one another, and the mystery of the blond is never solved.
Years later, a reporter named Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman,
overwhelmed by the task) sets out to write a tell-all book that will
unveil the mystery.
At the end, we finally learn what happened with Lanny and Vince, and
the upshot turns out to be such an ancient movie joke that you wonder
if it was meant as a parody of some of the routines the boys used in
their heyday.
Egoyan tells this story from several points of view and in different
timeframes, a commentary on the unreliability of the narrator,
perhaps, but a son-of-a-gun for the viewer trying to keep things
straight or, more importantly, believable.
Within a glittery production design, much of Where The Truth Lies
seems stagy and fake, and you suspect that not all is a purposeful
metaphor for the mists of the past.
The sex scenes, including the famous menage-a-trois among Lanny,
Vince and a hotel chambermaid (Rachel Blanchard) — the scene that
earned Egoyan the harmful NC-17 rating in the United States — are
oddly unerotic.
The shock of seeing stars the magnitude of Bacon and Firth engaging
in a naked frolic is only part of the reason. There’s also a cool,
distancing effect in Egoyan’s direction that makes the episodes seem
almost laughable.
Within this fractured mystery are several enjoyable episodes,
including a scene in which Karen meets Lanny and his butler (David
Hayman) on a 1970s airplane whose first-class section is as
wonderfully retro as an arborite kitchenette, and scenes from the
telethon in which Bacon and Firth persuade us that, all expectations
to the contrary, they could have been a successful act.
Bacon is especially good as the hip, womanizing Lanny, who is smarter
than he seems and Firth has a light touch that darkens later as the
reporter edges closer to the truth.
By then, though, Where The Truth Lies has collapsed into a pile of
good intentions and narrative obsessions. This was to be Egoyan’s
breakthrough into the mainstream, but it is too complex, too thought
out and neither the truth nor the lies seems to have any reality.
GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: Courtesy, Alliance Atlantis; Kevin Bacon, left, Rachel
Blanchard and Colin Firth in Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s Where
the Truth Lies.

Associated Press Worldstream
Oct 7 2005
Armenian-Turkish journalist convicted, sentenced for remarks
insulting Turks

An Istanbul court on Friday convicted an Armenian-Turkish journalist
of making remarks insulting to Turks in an article he wrote last
year, the journalist said.
Hrant Dink, a Turkish citizen and editor of the bilingual
Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos, was convicted under a clause in the
Turkish penal code that makes it a crime to insult the Turkish
national character.
Dink said he was given a six-month suspended sentence, which means he
will not serve prison time unless he repeats the offense.
In a series of articles written in 2004, Dink urged Armenians in the
diaspora to get rid of the “poisoning effect” of their history in
Turkey and focus on the welfare of Armenia, said Karin Karakasli, an
editor at the newspaper. She said the court took the article out of
context, saying it meant that Turkish blood is poison.
The European Union has asked Turkey to change its law making it a
crime to insult the national identity or risk endangering its EU bid.
Turkey officially opened EU membership negotiations early Tuesday,
but its bid is opposed by a majority of Europeans.

Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
October 7, 2005, Friday
CAUCASUS TRANSIT
SOURCE: Voyenno-Promyshlenny Kurier, No 37, October 5 – 10, 2005, p.
3
by Sergei Minasjan, Director of the Research Center of the Caucasus
Regional Security and Integration of the Russian-Armenian (Slav)
State University
WITHDRAWAL OF RUSSIAN MILITARY BASES FROM GEORGIA MAY POSE THREATS TO
NATIONAL SECURITY OF ARMENIA
Withdrawal of Russian military bases from Georgia (as far as Moscow
and Tbilisi are concerned, its schedule checks with the May 30
accord) may pose unexpected threats to the future of the
Russian-Armenian military cooperation and even national security of
Armenia.
Russia claims to have kept its commitments (2005) concerning transfer
of objects to Georgia and withdrawal of its bases from Batumi and
Akhalkalaki. Objects of the Russian Army Group in the Caucasus were
turned over to the Georgians in accordance with the existing
regulations to preclude complaints concerning their condition.
A delegation of the Russian Foreign Ministry under Ambassador Igor
Savolsky visited Tbilisi to discuss the process of withdrawal of the
Russian military bases. Negotiations over a legally binding document
on the withdrawal took place.
According to Savolsky, two-day consultations in Tbilisi were supposed
to dwell on the problems of Russian military transit to Armenia via
Georgia. It seems to be a major obstacle. Tbilisi does not want
Russian convoys to be escorted by Russian servicemen wielding arms.
It insists on having the Russian servicemen unarmed, their own
security seen to by the armed Georgians. In this manner, what Georgia
essentially aspires to is control over Russian troops’ military
communications in the region.
It is clear already that Georgia’s obstinacy on the matter will make
problems for the 102nd Russian Military Base in Armenia. Once the
bases are out of Georgia, it will remain the only Russian combat
ready military object in the southern part of the Caucasus with a
clear status (discounting the Gabala radar in Azerbaijan that
monitors missile launchers from the Indian Ocean, but that is a
different matter). If therefore maintenance of the Russian military
base in Armenia becomes dependant on Georgia with its clear
pro-Washington and pro-Brussels attitude, it will raise questions of
expediency of Russia’s military presence in the region. Professor
Anatoly Tsyganok, a prominent military analyst, claims that
withdrawal of military bases from Georgia compromises the
Russian-Armenian military cooperation because it will disrupt the
single antiaircraft defense system in the south (a lot of its command
posts have been in Georgia ever since the Soviet era). It will
grossly affect air control in the southern part of the Caucasus and
efficiency of the Armenian antiaircraft defense linked to the Russian
antiaircraft defense system.
There is more to it. Georgian military expert Irakly Aladashvili
points out that withdrawal of the Russian bases will make bringing
supplies to the base in Armenia much more problematic and – even
worse – jeopardize military transit into this country, an active
member of the CIS Collective Security Treaty Organization. In a
crisis (say, another round of hostilities with Azerbaijan), Armenia’s
allies from the CIS Collective Security Treaty Organization will find
sending its weapons and military hardware extremely difficult.
Aladashvili is concerned that Georgia “will try to prevent additional
shipments of Russian arms across its territory” to “retain
neutrality”. It is clear, however, that Georgia will not be regarded
as an objectively neutral country because it will help isolate
Armenia from the rest of the world. (Armenia lacks access to the sea,
it has been blocked by Turkey and Azerbaijan for over a decade
already.)
There is another important aspect of the withdrawal that may pose a
threat to national security of Armenia. Georgian experts maintain
that even with the bases pulled out, Russia and its “sympathizers” in
the former Georgian autonomies and areas populated with ethnic
minorities will go on posing a threat to Georgia. Alexander Rusetsky,
a prominent expert of the SCIRS (Georgian Center of Security
Analysis), maintains in one of his articles that “Russia’s clout with
the southern part of the Caucasus is dwindling but its presence
(military presence included) in Georgia is inevitable in the
foreseeable future. An end may be put to it only through a massacre
and complete extermination or expulsion of pro-Russian politicians
and citizenry. First and foremost from the territory of Abkhazia, the
former South Ossetian Autonomous Region, and Samtskhe-Djavakheti. We
cannot expect the process to be as subtle as it was in Adjaria in May
2004.” It follows that once the Russian military bases are out of
Georgia, the Georgian authorities may bring up the matter of
termination of Russian peacekeepers’ mission in South Ossetia and
Abkhazia and mount a campaign to “neutralize” Armenian “politicians
and citizenry” in Djavakheti…
Gela Bezhuashvili, Secretary of the National Security Council,
clarified his position on the first point in an interview with Novye
Izvestia on September 5. “Our dissatisfaction with how Russian
peacekeepers perform in Abkhazia and South Ossetia are
well-grounded,” he said. “Peacekeeping mandate of these operations is
obsolete. Unless radical measures are taken to ameliorate the
situation, we will insist on amendment of the mandate and structure
of peacekeeping contingents.” No more need be said. Tbilisi only has
to bide its time and wait for the bases to be out of Georgia.
As for the situation in Samtskhe-Djavakheti, not everything with it
is that clear. There is no saying to what extent official Tbilisi
shares the expert’s views. It is clear in any case that as soon as
the 62nd Russian Military Base in Akhalkalaki is history, the
Georgian authorities may forget their loudly proclaimed determination
to handle the political and socioeconomic problems the Armenian
population of the region is facing. Should Tbilisi try a military
solution, including actions against Armenian political groups and
movements, it will become another threat to national security of
Armenia. Official Yerevan will not remain indifferent to the lot of
the Armenian population of Djavakheti.
Translated by A. Ignatkin