EMBARRASSED MARKARIAN PROMISES ‘STRICTER’ GUN CONTROL
By Astghik Bedevian
Armenialiberty.org, Armenia
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Oct 6 2005
Prime Minister Andranik Markarian pledged late Wednesday to be more
careful in presenting government officials and friends with firearms
and effectively admitted that one of those “gifts” was used in a
recent high-profile murder.
He said he asked the Armenian police to screen prospective recipients
of such presents “more strictly.”
Markarian has faced embarrassing questions about his weapons-giving
practices since an extraordinary crime committed in a small town near
Yerevan on September 27. The mayor of Nor Hajn, Armen Keshishian,
reportedly shot dead a local businessman in broad light after a
bitter argument over what police describe as “illegal construction”
financed by the latter.
The dead man supported Keshishian’s challenger in the local election
scheduled for this Sunday. The mayor, who was close to Markarian’s
Republican Party (HHK), is currently under arrest pending trial.
Armenian media have reported that the pistols used in this and
several other crimes had been given to their perpetrators by the
Armenian premier.
Markarian did not deny those reports. “We will try to make things
stricter from now on,” he told reporters. “The police have already
been given a corresponding instruction.”
Markarian at the same time insisted that the existing legal procedures
allowing him to award handguns to citizens are not flawed.
“In this country only I present weapons,” he said. “But I don’t give
anyone such presents until the police check the origin of a weapon,
the identity and credibility of its recipient.”
According to some press reports, there are more than 500 such
recipients. President Robert Kocharian is said to have ordered
law-enforcement agencies to double-check their identity and criminal
records following the Nor Hajn crime.
Under Armenian law, citizens can not possess any firearms without
police permission which is supposed to be given only in exceptional
circumstances. The controversial prime-ministerial “gifts” appear to
have been one of the easiest ways of obtaining such permissions.

SOMETHING DIFFERENT AT THE KEY: MARS VOLTA, SYSTEM OF A DOWN
By Travis Hay
Seattle Post Intelligencer , WA
Oct 6 2005
Special To The Post-Intelligencer
It was a bill that could only be described as Armenian-metal and
prog-rock heaven Wednesday night at KeyArena with two of rock’s most
volatile and exciting acts, The Mars Volta and System of a Down,
playing powerful and entertaining sets.
MUSIC REVIEW System of a Down and The Mars Volta WHERE: KeyArena WHEN:
Wednesday night
Armenian quartet System of a Down — vocalist Serj Tankian, guitarist
Daron Malakian, drummer John Dolmayan and bassist Shavo Odadjian —
headlined with two hours of aggressive, intelligent and intense metal,
most of which came from its latest record “Mesmerize.”
Opening with “Soldier Side” and following with the politically
chastising “B.Y.O.B.,” the band kicked it into fifth gear from the
start and didn’t stop until its set was finished.
Odadjian’s braided beard spun through the air as he thrashed his
head from side-to-side and waved his arms in the air as if he were
conducting the mosh pit from the stage during “Psycho.” Tankian made
devilish clown faces while singing and his playfully demonic vocals
were spot on the entire night, especially during the band’s hits
“Chop Suey!,” “Toxicicty” and “Aerials.” As much fun as those two
were to watch, it was Malakian who was the most enjoyable to pay
attention to. His animated gestures, short stature and greasy hair
made him look like a heavy metal Squiggy.
Eight-piece experimental-progressive metal group The Mars Volta played
an awe-inspiring five-song set that lasted an hour. The closest thing
to a modern-day Pink Floyd, the group’s Latin-tinged music is tough
to describe. However, with an extreme assortment of instruments and
a charismatic singer whose vocals come in the form of a forceful
falsetto, the band is perhaps the most promising act in rock.
What holds back The Mars Volta are its quasi-conceptual records,
bilingual lyrics and loosely structured songs, many without hooks;
they’re a band you either get or don’t. Besides the standard drums,
bass and guitar, the instrumentation included maracas, cow bell,
saxophones, keyboards and a flute. Not since Jethro Tull’s heyday
has a flute rocked so hard onstage.
Singer Cedric Bixler let his body move wherever the music took
him, showcasing perhaps the best dance moves in rock while his
partner-in-crime, guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, led seamless
transitions between songs. The set was part jazz, part progressive
rock and part indescribable and it nearly stole the show.

ARMENIAN FOREIGN MINISTER SAYS NATO CAN BE IMPORTANT TO PEACE IN SOUTH CAUCASUS REGION
The Associated Press
10/06/05 11:33 EDT
YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) – NATO can be a key player in helping stabilize
the troubled southern Caucasus region that includes Armenia, the
country’s foreign minister said Thursday.
Speaking at a joint seminar of the parliament and representatives of
the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, Vardan Oksanyan said “NATO can play
a large role in establishing peace in the south Caucasus and bring
countries of the region into peaceful dialogue.”
The region is troubled by tension between Azerbaijan and Armenia
over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, and neighboring Georgia
is trying to bring two separatist regions back under the central
government’s control.
Armenia is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization,
which includes Russia and four other ex-Soviet states. Russia has
troops based in Armenia, but Oksanyan said “at the same time we are
working closely with NATO.”

THE NUMBERS GAME: DEATH, MEDIA, AND PUBLIC EMOTION
Jean Seaton
Open Democracy, UK
Oct 6 2005
When media report wars or disasters, why are death tolls announced
before bodies are counted? And what does this do to our democracy?
Jean Seaton dissects the numbers game.
As hurricanes Katrina and Rita retreat and some ordering of the
after-effects takes place, the magnitude of what has happened is
still unfolding. The role of the reporting of the tragedies is also
being scrutinised.
There are the blistering issues of inequality, and the ways in
which our modern – indisputably man-encouraged catastrophes – have
indisputably man-made effects. Hurricanes, just like famines, produce
precise maps of disadvantage, which shockingly make public all kinds
of usually hidden discrimination.
There is the role of the media in Katrina first in telling us that
the hurricane “was not as bad as expected” when the water was surging
into New Orleans, and then at least why some outlets told us that
while white people “foraged”, black people “looted”.
There is also the more subtle problem of audiences’ sometimes casual
disinterest in any group that looks like a victim. Surely, one reason
people used their mobiles so effectively to take images in the July
2005 bombings in London was that to report on an event (which is what
everyone now knows how to do) meant that by they regained some control
over them: they stopped being merely victims. There is a chilling
audience response to simultaneously feel close to disasters because
now they can be seen – yet because they are watched on a screen to feel
distanced, because they are part of the ongoing litany of disasters.
Reported but uncounted
However, lying around the soggy remains of the cities that have been
devastated are the wrecks of discarded statistics. Were there 20,000
people in the New Orleans Superbowl or 5,000? How many people were
shot: four or 120? How many died in the hospitals – despite heroic
medical efforts – simply because there was no power and no water: 300
or 600? Did most people escape or not? How long is a traffic jam with
500,000 people in it? Can you really evacuate 2 million people? Why at
first was it reported that 10,000 people had died when the final death
toll seems to have been around 800? If most people escaped was it a
success rather than a failure? And, more provocatively, was the death
count the only – or indeed the most important – thing in the story?
So far, at least, the mortality figures have all been steadily
coming down from huge estimates and will now slowly creep up – but
not by large numbers. Unlike the Asian tsunami the death toll will
not become unimaginably high. But how do we get our minds around the
order of magnitude the disaster represents? Is it less of a story if
fewer people died?
There are many reasons for the numbers changing – not least that
nobody had the slightest idea of how to begin to estimate the impact
of the catastrophe, they had only their eyes, not, as it turns
out, necessarily reliable. It was chaos, and critically for modern
eyes it looked on television screens like foreign, other, biblical
Armageddon. Actually what looking at it reminded me of was one of
JG Ballard’s early science fiction worlds in which some quality of
civilised life is withdrawn, no power and too much water, and the
veneer of propriety is stripped away from everybody. A very large
disaster must, the scenes implied, have killed a very large number
of people.
But it is also part of such disasters as the New Orleans flood that
the impact was both unparalleled and patchy. If you were at the
heart of the storm everything went, but ten miles away things were
untouched. By a fluke of wind or place, a house or an office might
survive. Your house might fall down but you might have survived,
as many did. Many more escaped than seems likely. Sorting out real
numbers is hard to do in such circumstances.
Another source of wrong numbers were the disaster plans that did
exist. Journalists, hunting for “facts” recycled the numbers
of casualties that plans had estimated might result from such
a catastrophe, and used them as if they were descriptions of the
event that had just occurred – rather than bureaucratic responses to
imagined future ones. As it turned out 20,000 body-bags did not mean
20,000 dead.
Then there is the problem of the relationship between physical
destruction, buildings, houses, streets, things – all of the weighty
material of American civilisation dissipated, gone (not unlike 9/11).
If so much stuff had been destroyed then surely, it seemed, so
must have very many people? Needless to say, it was very difficult
to get reliable information and people intent on saving others may
understandably not make counting a priority. There are lots of good
reasons why counting was insecure. Nevertheless, my brother, one of
the British diplomats much maligned in the country’s tabloid press,
sent a team from Chicago in search of British citizens to care for
and had a remarkably accurate estimate of the casualty figures by
the third day – just as the media figures started to escalate. Why
didn’t the media ask people who knew?
Katrina may well go on claiming lives in unexpected ways, and these
will neither be reported nor counted. A law student friend of my
son had been working in New Orleans on Clive Stafford Smith’s legal
programme to investigate possible cases of wrongful conviction and
thus save prisoners from execution. Having managed to commandeer a
car she was penned in a thirteen-hour traffic jam leaving the city
as the wind blew up, while the police threatened with guns anyone
trying to use the other side of the motorway.
Although she managed to escape from the city, what did not escape was
the painstakingly collected trial evidence and witness interviews,
the years of patient work put in against a hostile judicial system
to free many who had been inadequately represented and whose lives
depended on files and computer records now lost for ever in the
flood. So there are victims still to come.
Think of a number, then use it
Nevertheless, the main reason for the volatility of the original
casualty count had at least something to do with audiences and
journalism as well as practical reality. Mortality figures establish
the claims of an event on our attention. A journalist who missed much
of the story because she was in a remote part of Afghanistan when it
happened observed that it was very odd being so out of touch. But,
she added: “It was the 10,000 figure that had us all jumping about
paying attention when someone got a text message – before that we had
thought, oh yes all of New Orleans flooded, not so important.” The
body-count changed what it meant. So numbers have to be big enough
to catch the eye.
Indeed, not is quite all that it seems on the numbers front.
Mortality and casualty figures have their own life and it is quite
often rather independent from that of the events they describe. Thus
“10,000” dead has a long history. It means something like “an awful
lot”. The original campaigning press reporting of the “the Bulgarian
atrocities” in 1876 had three numbers that reoccur: 30,000 dead, our
good friend 10,000 dead and a local massacre with some more precise
and smaller number, “123” or “over 40 women and children”.
Interestingly, 10,000 in the late 19th century meant that the
inhabitants of a town had been killed; it is – one might say – an
urban sort of number. These figures re-emerged in subsequent late
19th- and early 20th-century Balkan conflicts. It would have been
difficult to get accurate figures so the first modern campaigning
foreign reporters did what they could, and pitched in numbers that
would impress the readers back home – “10,000” dead has popped up in
urban conflicts and disasters ever since.
Another mythic number was the “700,000” Jews it was claimed had been
murdered by the Nazis in 1933. Actually, the figure seems at first
to have been derived from an estimate of the numbers of Armenians
massacred during the first world war. It was a figure that resonated,
and it was repeated in all of the major anti-fascist rallies in
Britain during the 1930s: Hugh Dalton, the Labour politician and
prominent anti-appeaser used it, the Archbishop of Canterbury used it,
the Jewish Chronicle used it, the Chief Rabbi used it, it appears in
Fabian pamphlets and Board of Deputies of British Jews’ reports.
It seemed an appallingly large number, and was used in speeches,
reported in newspapers and then, authenticated by the Times and the
Telegraph, recycled by politicians and campaigners. It was still being
used in 1942. In 1933 it was an overestimate and of course by 1942 it
was a tragically misleading underestimate, but it was a number people
repeated to each other – in circumstances when precise counting was
in any case impossible. The number, in a way, did its work, something
very large and evil was happening, but later it obscured reality and
was rendered meaningless by repetition.
The need for context
The temptation to journalists to jump on large numbers is
understandable – after all they want us to attend, and they want to
get their story a place in the news. Indeed, in any real and large
event there is so much panic and disorder, who is to know how many
have died with any accuracy?
Then there are all the familiar issues about the emotional geography
of casualties. We bother more about people we feel close to, and a few
casualties in one place get more attention than many casualties in a
place (even if it is just down the road in fact) that we do not feel
linked to. There is a media equation that produces – out of distance,
number and news value – a place for any set of numbers in the story
hierarchy.
This is one reason why stories need “faces”, identifiable individuals
whose predicament mediates the experience more tellingly to
audiences. This mechanism concentrates on the human similarity of
another victim and may help us understand the plight of the many
suffering or in danger. Sometimes, of course, this has distorting
side-effects. Our preference for saving known victims rather than
the “statistical” victims of large numbers of casualties can lead to
some strange outcomes. We will the means to save one sick child (or in
Britain on occasions the one trapped dog), at the expense of delivering
the most sensible relief to many. Nevertheless, the mechanism is a
way of helping us understand the experience behind numbers.
Another aspect of media numbers is that they play into what audiences
can imagine. And this may be another problem. There is a wonderful,
empowering moment in children’s lives when they first count to 1,000.
It takes a rather satisfyingly long time, and in my experience is
usually accomplished in the back of a car on a lengthy journey to a
holiday. But it gives the 7-year-old a feeling for the dimensions of
the number. I wonder what feeling for big numbers we usually have?
Antony Gormley, the British sculptor, has a marvellous work The Field,
which includes models, made by community groups of small, clay,
humanoid figures which he then crowds into a space: there are 4,000
of them. It looks both incalculable and human. It makes one take on
the individuality of each figure and the size of the community. It
is a lesson in size. So what we need is some imaginative thinking
about how to explain the numbers of casualties to us, some way of
representing the human dimensions of tragedies in ways we can work
with. Then, perhaps, the figures would be less mythic and more real,
and the soggy numbers floating around New Orleans could settle down
and do their work more accurately.
But what we needed perhaps during hurricane Katrina at least as much
as a reliable estimate of the dimensions of the disaster in human
fatalities, was more explanation of what it meant. What is the role
of New Orleans in America? It is not just a pretty place but a vital
industrial port. Where have all the people gone and how are they
coping? Could we deal with millions of displaced people? It is not
merely a “natural” disaster but a huge social, cultural and economic
one. In order to comprehend what it means we need to know a good deal
more than the fleeting, attention-grabbing horror of the numbers game.
Jean Seaton is professor of media studies at Westminster University.
She is co-author (with James Curran) of Power Without Responsibility:
The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (5th edition, 1997) and official
historian of the BBC. Her most recent book is Carnage and the Media:
The Making and Breaking of News about Violence (Penguin 2005)

NAASR PRESENTS TALK ABOUT ARMENIAN PHOTO COLLECTION
Belmont Citizen-Herald, MA
Oct 6 2005
The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research will present
“Armenian Photographs in the Getty Museum Collection,” an illustrated
lecture by Van Aroian, on Thursday, Oct. 13 at 8 p.m. at the NAASR
Center, 395 Concord Ave., Belmont.
The Getty Museum in Los Angeles houses the Getty Research Library,
which contains a collection of Ottoman photographs. This collection
is an invaluable resource for Ottoman scholars, ethnographers,
historians of Ottoman photography, and students of Armenian Ottoman
life. Furthermore, this collection provides a valuable resource for
an investigator interested in developing the significant contribution
of Armenian photographers to the early development of photography
throughout the Ottoman Empire.
The program will provide a visual presentation and sampling of the
Ottoman photo collection at the Getty Research Institute, with a focus
on its Armenian flavor and contributions. These photos will provide
us the opportunity to walk down memory lane and share together some
social and historic commentary.
Van Aroian spent some six weeks in 1999-2001 looking through the
Getty’s Ottoman photograph collection. He earned a bachelor’s degree
at Boston University and a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies
at Harvard University. He was a fellow in Urban Geography at Clark
University and an Urban Planner and Deputy Director of the Worcester
Redevelopment Authority. He later joined his brother in-law, Kevork,
and wife Mary Balekdjian Aroian in importing and retailing Oriental
carpets.
Admission is free (donations accepted). A reception will follow
the program. For more information call 617-489-1610, or e-mail
[email protected].

VICE PRESIDENT SHEKHAWAT MEETS ARMENIAN PRESIDENT
Rediff, India
Oct 6 2005
Vice President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat on Thursday had a meeting with
Armenian President Robert Kocharian soon after arriving in Yerevan
on a two-day visit, which is expected to give a major impetus to
relations between the two countries.
The Vice President flew to Yerevan from Minsk on the third leg of his
three-nation tour that earlier took him to Romania and Belarus. He
was received warmly by Vahan Hovhannisyan, Deputy Chairperson of
the National Assembly of Armenia, and Michael Carvardanyan of the
Armenia-India Parliamentary group.
Soon after his arrival, the Vice President had a meeting with
Kocharian. This is the first ever Indian Vice Presidential visit
to this Commonwealth of Independent States country, which is the
smallest of the nations that came into existence after the break-up
of the Soviet Union in 1991.
During his visit, the Vice President will be addressing the national
assembly of Armenia. On Friday, he will be conferred honorary degree
by Yerevian State Medical University where some 400 Indian students
are studying.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

GEN. OZKOK MEETS AZERBAIJANI DEFENSE MINISTER ABIYEV
Turkish Press
Oct 6 2005
BAKU – “Turkey has always supported Azerbaijan since it acquired
its independence,” said Defense Minister Safar Abiyev of Azerbaijan
on Thursday.
Turkish General Staff Chief Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, who is currently in
Baku on an official visit, met Abiyev.
Speaking at the meeting, Abiyev said, “there has been close cooperation
between Turkish and Azerbaijani armed forces. Azerbaijan needs a
powerful army in order to further strengthen its independence. We
rely on Turkey’s support to establish a sound army, develop defense
industry, and improve our relations with NATO.”
Abiyev said that Azerbaijani armed forces gained experience by
participating in joint military exercises aiming to protect the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural
gas pipeline.
“Despite all efforts, security problem has still been continuing in
the region. Armenia has occupied nearly 20 percent of Azerbaijani
territories. More than 1 million Azerbaijani people have been living
under extremely difficult conditions in refugee camps,” he said.
Abiyev added that terrorist groups and drug traffickers had been
using the occupied regions as their base due to lack of control.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

CRITICALLY INJURED: EGOYAN ADMITS HE’S HURT BY RECENT REVIEWS OF WHERE THE TRUTH LIES
By Sarah Rowland
Montreal Mirror, Canada
Oct 6 2005
There are those who view Atom Egoyan as the golden boy of Canadian
cinema. After all, he’s been the darling of the Toronto Film Festival
for more than 10 years now, raking in award after award, only to donate
a big chunk of his cash prizes to under-funded Cancon filmmakers,
like Mina Shum.
But then there are those who see him as a pretentious art-pig whose
greatest talent is manipulating art councils for grant money. It’s
safe to say that Rick Groen falls under the latter category. Last
September, Groen wrote a catty review in The Globe and Mail that not
only slagged Egoyan’s latest film, Where the Truth Lies, but almost
every movie the man’s ever made.
“It was unbelievably painful- more so than those sort of things
should be,” says Egoyan, who, for what it’s worth, is one of the
nicest directors one could ever hope to interview. “When you get a
criticism of an individual film, you completely understand that some
people might not like that particular work. And you’re also able to
take solace in the body of work that you’ve done.” Not so here. The
article went on to compare and contrast Egoyan and David Cronenberg,
with the Crash director coming out on top.
“I think this false kind of competitiveness that’s been set up between
David and I is just ridiculous,” says Egoyan. “I adore David.
He’s my mentor. So it just seems odd that our two careers are lined
up. I mean, when David read it, he called me to say that he was
appalled.” According to Egoyan, this kind of destructive criticism
is very indicative of anglo culture.
“The evening that it came out, I was at a Unifrance function and
the ambassador was talking about how the new generation of French
filmmakers would make the old generation proud and I almost felt like
weeping because that doesn’t happen in English Canada,” he says.
“It’s like, ‘Let’s demolish whatever we build up just so we can build
it up again.'”
The Duke, the Empress and the Almighty
In the spirit of building up, Where the Truth Lies has gotten a raw
deal in more ways than one. Along with mixed reviews (as many have
already read by now), Egoyan’s murder mystery has also been unjustly
slapped with an NC-17 rating for a harmless threesome scene in a
hotel room. This is unfortunate for several reasons; most notably
in that all the controversy has overshadowed the actual movie, which
is an intriguing whodunit starring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a
Martin and Lewisesque comedy team. The duo split up at the peak of
their career after the body of beautiful young chambermaid (Rachel
Blanchard) shows up in their hotel room.
One of the film’s major themes is how we treat celebs like superior
beings. In his everyday Toronto existence-where the only attention he
gets is turning the occasional head-it’s hard for Egoyan to relate to
this kind of worship. But when he goes home to his motherland Armenia,
it’s quite a different story.
“We are like gods there,” he says, referring to himself and his wife.
“People stop in the middle of the street and look at you and
start crying. And in that particular culture, there are no physical
boundaries, so strangers are constantly touching, hugging and kissing
you. I didn’t like that. I think having people treating you as this
super human all the time would be an impossible way to live.”
Thanks to this taste of fanatical behaviour, Egoyan says he can better
understand Bacon and Firth’s characters, who spend a great deal of
off-time hiding out in their fivestar den of excess.
“I certainly see how a celebrity would need to have this one particular
space or zone where they feel they can escape from it all.” He can
also relate to being one of the people who dote on these privileged
individuals.
“I was a houseboy at the Empress Hotel when I was growing up in
Victoria. And it amazed me how much access I would have to strangers’
rooms. Just by delivering sheets or cleaning up a tray I could suddenly
walk into someone else’s life. I’ll never forget walking into John
Wayne’s room. It was just this weird thing for a 16-year-old to
suddenly have access to the great man,” he says before adding,
“And no, I didn’t have a threesome with John Wayne.”
Where the Truth Lies opens Friday, Oct. 7

LATVIAN PRESIDENT VAIRA VIKE-FREIBERGA VISITS ARMENIA
ITAR-TASS, Russia
TASS
Oct 6 2005
YEREVAN, October 6 (Itar-Tass) – Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga
will discuss the prospects of further developing economic cooperation
between the two countries during her official visit to Armenia,
which begins on Thursday.
Itar-Tass was told at the Presidential Press Service here that the
visit was chiefly intended to give fresh impetus to the development
of inter-state relationships, to promote cooperation and to determine
the priorities of economic interaction. The presidents of the two
countries will discuss also problems of EU-Armenia cooperation and
of regional integration.
They are planning to sign a joint declaration and some
intergovernmental agreements on the stimulation and mutual protection
of investments, on cooperation in the customs sphere, and also
in culture.
“Armenia highly appreciates the present level of its relations
with Latvia and is determined to make its bilateral relations with
that country even stronger than now, to promote cooperation in the
economic domain,” officials of the Armenian President’s Office noted
on Thursday. “Active cooperation with Latvia is very desirable for
Armenia, for using Riga’s experience in the effort to effectively
surmount the difficulties of the transition period,” officials of
the Presidential Office stated.
Military cooperation between Armenia and Latvia is also developing
quite effectively, an official of the presidential administration
noted. Armenia is planning to completely reorganise its armed forces
and, therefore, it is important to analyse the Latvian experience
in the reform of the armed forces, as well as in peacekeeping and in
civil defence.
It is believed in Yerevan that in spite of the existing positive
tendencies, economic cooperation between Armenia and Latvia is still
unsatisfactory. For instance, trade turnover between the two countries
added up to slightly more than two million U.S. dollars last year and
to 1.5 millions in the first six months of the current year. Armenian
exports are expected to grow notably this year.
The sides will also touch on the possibility of their cooperation
both within the European structures and in other international
organisations, officials of the Armenian presidential administration
pointed out.

NATO MAY PLAY LARGE ROLE IN SOUTHERN CAUCASUS – MINISTER
ITAR-TASS, Russia
TASS
Oct 6 2005
DUSHANBE, October 6 (Itar-Tass) – Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan
Oskanyan said NATO may play a large role in establishing peace in
southern Caucasus and induce countries in the regions to a peaceful
dialogue.”
Oskanyan said so at a seminar on security in southern Caucasus,
organized by the Armenian parliament and NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly.
“It matches Armenia’s efforts and wishes;” this task can be viewed
within the context of the program of individual partnership between
Armenia and NATO, the foreign minister said.
The implementation of the individual partnership program will help
Armenia to attain three goads: to institutionalize the dialogue with
NATO on border security and the fight against terrorism and illegal
weapons-trafficking.
It will also facilitate the country’s army reform, whose objectives
envision civil control over the armed forces, and ensure Armenia’s
participation in NATO-led peacekeeping operations.
“We can achieve all this with NATO’s assistance,” the minister said.
Armenia is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
/CSTO/, it has Russian military bases in its territory, but at the
same time, the republic closely works with NATO, in accordance with
Yerevan’s principle of “complementary foreign policy.”