Former ruling party hits at Armenia gas deal with Russia as “disgraceful”
Arminfo
8 Apr 06
Yerevan, 7 April: A former ruling party of Armenia, the Armenian
Pan-National Movement [APNM], is against the “disgraceful” deal the
Armenian authorities have struck with Russia’s Gazprom company, and
views the move as dangerous for the country’s national security.
Under the pretext of lowering gas tariffs, the current authorities in
reality are making yet another attempt to retain their grip on power
and hold a “self-election”, the party told Arminfo.
The APNM believes that there is no political, economic, or social
justification for the sale of the fifth bloc of the Razdan power
station in return for the “dubious” lowering of gas tariffs for
consumers.
Handing over control over the energy grid to another country is
nothing but the loss of the most important basis of independence,
particularly given the fact that this deal brought Russia’s share in
the structure of Armenia’s energy sector close to 100 per cent, the
party said in a statement.
As was the case with the property-for-debt deal, the property of the
Armenian state was sold at a lower price, whereas the fifth bloc of
the power station in two or three years could have fully covered the
price for which it was sold.
The party believes that all government arguments that the deal is
aimed at resolving social problems of people are “dishonest lies”.
Moreover, all of the 248.8m dollars will be channelled to a special
Defence Ministry account, which is not transparent at all.
Therefore, on the one hand, the disgraceful deal is aimed at softening
the consequences of the price rise ahead of the parliamentary and
presidential elections. On the other, the incumbent authorities will
be able to use the funds to stay in office, the statement read.

MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARMENIA
—————————————— —-
PRESS AND INFORMATION DEPARTMENT
375010 Telephone: +37410. 544041 ext 202
Fax: +37410. 562543
Email: [email protected]
PRESS RELEASE
08-04-2006
Minister of Foreign Affairs Vartan Oskanian concluded a one-day working
visit to the Syrian capital.
In Damascus, on April 8, Minister Oskanian met with Syrian Foreign Minister
Walid al-Moualem. During that meeting, the two spoke at length about
bilateral as well as regional matters. They specifically focused on
cooperation in international forums, educational and economic exchange, as
well as institutional cooperation. They also spoke at length about the
Nagorno Karabakh negotiation process, Armenia-Turkey relations, as well as
the situation in Iraq and other matters in both regions.
Earlier in the day, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also received the
Armenian delegation. Minister Oskanian informed him about political and
economic developments within Armenia and in the region. President Assad
expressed his appreciation at the traditionally warm relations between
Armenians and Syrians and said that should serve as a foundation for
deepening ties, especially in the economic sphere.
The Minister’s Damascus visit concluded with a reception at the embassy,
attended by representatives of community organizations and religious
leaders.
On Sunday, the Minister will be in Aleppo at the 100th anniversary
celebration of the Armenian General Benevolent Union and the 75th
anniversary celebration of the Armenian Youth Association.

Armenian president supports sale of fifth block of Razdan power plant
Arminfo
8 Apr 06

Yerevan, 8 April: The sale of the fifth block of the Razdan power
station will have a positive impact on Armenia’s economy and will
stimulate the Armenian export, Armenian President Robert Kocharyan
told journalists during a visit to Kotayk Region today.
He said that thanks to the deal Armenia will be provided with Russian
gas at a guaranteed low price for three years. “We have managed to
agree on importing gas at a low price for three years, which will
undoubtedly stimulate the Armenian export,” the president said.
Commenting on the opposition’s complaints about the deal, the Armenian
president said that there are politicians in Armenia who are always
discontented with something.
[Passage omitted: Details of the deal]

MP says gas deal with Russia’s Gazprom in line with Armenia’s national
interests
Noyan Tapan news agency
7 Apr 06
Yerevan, 7 April: The sale of the fifth power unit of the Razdan power
station to Russia with the aim to soften the consequences of raising
the gas price proceeded from Armenia’s national interests, Mger
Shakhgeldyan, the chairman of defence, national security and internal
affairs commission of parliament and deputy chairman of the Orinats
Yerkir [Law-Governed Country] Party told journalists today.
He said that state control over the energy sphere is certainly
preferable. “However, it is about national interests. We think that
national interests should be on the first place,” he said.
Shakhgeldyan pointed that it is important to diversify energy sources
to ensure energy security which is a crucial component of the
country’s security. He also noted the importance of the construction
of the Iran-Armenia gas pipeline.
[Passage omitted: Shakhgeldyan said that hike in the gas price will
not affect most of the population]
Asked by our correspondent whether there is a guarantee that the fifth
power unit will be put in operation, taking into account the
inactivity of the enterprises handed over to Russia within the
framework of the property-for-debt programme five years ago,
Shakhgeldyan said: “As legislative state, we have raised and will
continue raising this issue.”
He said that the Armenian MPs have always told their Russian
counterpart that these enterprises should be put unto operation,
because there are certain expectation that this will happen. “In this
case, we will do our best in order for the investments to be made,”
Shakhgeldyan said.

More than 1 million Italians abroad cast ballots in parliamentary election

AP Worldstream; Apr 08, 2006
MARTA FALCONI
More than 1 million Italians living abroad voted in the country’s
parliamentary election, according to a final tally, and their ballots
could be decisive in a close race.
This election marked the first time expatriates were allowed to vote
in a general election without having to travel back to Italy Around
1.1 million Italians abroad, or 42 percent of those eligible, sent in
their ballots by mail in early voting, the Foreign Ministry said.
Official results won’t be released until after the Sunday-Monday
domestic voting to choose between blocs led by Premier Silvio
Berlusconi and his center-left challenger, former European Commission
President Romano Prodi.
About 2.6 million citizens abroad were eligible to vote to elect 18
lawmakers who, for the first time, will be responsible for
representing their interests in the national legislature. Those
lawmakers will fill 12 new seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower
house of parliament, and six in the Senate.
Around 47 million citizens who live in Italy will vote this weekend.
Latin American consulates reported the highest average ballot return
rate, with about 52 percent of Italians voting, the ministry said. The
highest return was in Uruguay, where 63 percent of Italians
voted. Campaigning politicians paid special attention to Latin America
_ Argentina in particular because it is home to hundreds of thousands
of expatriates. Fifty-six percent of Italians living there voted.
Europe had an average return rate of about 38 percent, with Armenia
topping the list with 95 percent, the ministry reported. About 37
percent of Italians living in North America voted, with the highest
returns in Barbados at 81 percent. Africa, Asia and Oceania reported
an average of 44 percent, with 100 percent _ or 32 people _ voting in
Kuwait, the ministry said.
Until now, Italians wishing to vote in their country’s general
elections had to fly back to Italy. A 2001 law, one of the first
pieces of legislation from Berlusconi’s five-year conservative
government, gave citizens who live abroad the right to vote by mail.
The expatriate representatives will have full voting rights in Italy’s
parliament, giving Italians abroad the chance to influence decisions
not just on issues concerning them directly, but also on those
affecting domestic policies in Italy.
In addition to giving overseas voters the right to cast ballots, the
law also created four huge electoral districts to represent Italians
who live overseas in Parliament, which is composed of a 315-seat
Senate and 630-seat Chamber of Deputies.
In recent weeks, politicians of all stripes have been crisscrossing
the globe trying to woo voters.

Russia’s Baltic Fleet hosts CIS air defence exercise
RTR Russia TV, Moscow
8 Apr
[Presenter] Joint exercises of the air defence forces of CIS countries
have taken place at a naval base of the Baltic Fleet. Crews of Russian
warships demonstrated their hardware to guests, while commanders
practised joint actions in the even of a threat.
Marina Naumova reports from Kaliningrad Region.
[Naumova] The air defence commanders of the armed forces of Armenia,
Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and other CIS countries decided not to drive into
the main naval base of the Baltic Fleet but to walk into it. Despite
the protocol, the generals set off on foot for ships on combat
duty. Representatives of those countries which do not have their own
navies showed particular interest towards destroyers.
[Unidentified officer] Ships carry out combat duty in turn to ensure
air defence of the Baltic base, well, their own area of stationing, in
the stipulated readiness to open fire.
[Naumova] According to experts, the Baltic Fleet is the ideal base for
training assemblies of members of the council of the joint air defence
system of CIS countries. Strike aviation, land- and ship-based systems
of tracking and destroying air targets are concentrated here. Each of
the warships is part of the air defence system. All fighting hardware
has been set up on board the flagship to show how it works. Missiles
are being delivered to launchers.
A series of training episodes to repel an enemy in the air using the
air defence forces of the ship were demonstrated on board the
destroyer. The main part of these forces is the Uragan air defence
missile system.
The range at which such a missile can hit air targets attains 25
km. The warhead’s homing system is itself capable of correcting the
course. In just a few seconds, the notional target is destroyed.
[Vladimir Bashtayenko, first deputy chief of staff of the air force
and air defence force of Belarus] We were more interested in the air
defence component. Everything has been coordinated. The senior
assistant for air defence clearly set tasks to find and destroy air
targets.
[Naumova] Designer Yakov Bezel has already visited ships of the Baltic
Fleet. He has been designing automatic systems of tracking and
destroying air targets for 45 years.
[Yakov Bezel, designer-general of the automatic control system of the
Russian air defence forces and air force] Our system, air defence
systems – they are the most modern in the world. No-one else has them,
whether they lay claims to that or not.
[Correspondent] At the air defence command post, the guests were shown
how the coordination of all navy forces is being ensured. Airspace is
being controlled from here not only over Kaliningrad Region, but over
the whole of the western direction.
[Murezin Otashev, head of the command post of the air force and air
defence force of the Baltic Fleet] Crews are very well trained,
because they constantly accompany their air targets and those of
bordering countries. The number of flights is very high. Therefore,
the level of professional skills of the crews is high.
[Correspondent] Next time, the air defence commanders of the armed
forces of CIS countries will meet at the Ashuluk military range in
Astrakhan Region.
It is planned to hold there full-scale exercises of air defence forces
in the conditions of increased difficulty with launches of target
missiles at extremely low altitudes.
[070629-070904 Video shows a ship in a port, officers walking, officer
briefing other officers, two radars, guns and other hardware of a
ship, missile being fired from a ship, Bashtayenko speaking, officers
visiting a ship, Bezel speaking, officers working on computers,
electronic equipment, Otashev speaking, ground-based air defence
systems.] 06

The Weekly Standard
04/17/2006, Volume 011, Issue 29

rticles/000/000/012/079baety.asp?pg=1

The Price of Denial
Why Turkey needs to come to terms with history.
by Ellen Bork
The Armenian Genocide
PBS, April 17
IN ISTANBUL LAST OCTOBER, an acquaintance invited me to lunch with
three participants in a conference of historians, journalists, and
civil society activists that had recently been held at Bilgi
University. Its subject was the fate of Armenians in Turkey during
the early part of the 20th century.
Although it received far less attention abroad than the prosecution
of novelist Orhan Pamuk for speaking publicly about the deaths of
over one million Armenians and tens of thousands of Kurds, the
conference was just as significant, demonstrating Turkish civil
society’s growing self-confidence in questioning the official line on
the Armenian genocide–and the ruling AKP party’s messy flexibility
in allowing such questioning to take place. Postponed, then blocked
in court after the justice minister called it a “stab in the Turkish
nation’s back,” the conference finally took place with the public
support of the prime minister.
According to my lunch companions, the conference participants agreed,
as one put it, that these massacres were “deliberately done by a
small group within the ruling party.” In other words, without using
the word “genocide,” the specific elements of its definition are
increasingly being accepted by Turkish society.
Describing the fate of the Armenians in Turkey as genocide is much
less charged in the United States. “Turkish deniers are becoming the
equivalent–socially, culturally–of Holocaust deniers,” says author
Samantha Power in The Armenian Genocide, a documentary by Andrew
Goldberg and Two Cats Productions, to be broadcast Monday, April 17,
on PBS. The one-hour program provides a compact, evocative, and
visually rich treatment of the massacres by the Ottoman sultan’s
Hamidiye regiments in the late 19th century, and the 1915
deportations and massacres of approximately one million Armenians,
including intellectuals from Constantinople, as Istanbul was then
called. It also includes the campaign of assassination against
Turkish diplomats by Armenian terrorists in the 1970s and ’80s.
Even here, however, the matter remains fraught. When PBS decided to
follow the documentary with a 25-minute debate among academics and
authors, there were objections that this would suggest the genocide
itself was in question. Some individual PBS stations, including the
Washington and New York stations, have decided not to air the panel
discussion.
The reason controversy persists has little to do with scholarship and
everything to do with the role the United States plays as a
battleground for efforts to achieve official recognition of the
genocide. While the Armenian-American community ensures that the
issue is brought up annually before Congress, Turkey, a NATO ally
with a high diplomatic profile in Washington, wages a campaign that
can be presumptuous. Speaking to the Congressional Study Group on
Turkey last month, the Turkish ambassador admonished American
congressmen to do their patriotic duty by voting down resolutions
recognizing the genocide.
Paradoxically, the importance of the Holocaust to Americans ensures
both sensitivity to the Armenian tragedy and a reluctance to accord
it the significance of genocide. There is also a disinclination to
criticize Turkey, a valuable Muslim ally of Israel. These
considerations inform the views of Turkey’s allies in the foreign
policy establishment, of which conservatives constitute a significant
part. Within the conservative camp, criticism of Turkey recently has
been concerned mainly with an Islamic tilt under the ruling AKP, and
growing anti-Americanism across the Turkish political spectrum. And,
of course, Turkey’s refusal to provide support for the Iraq war.
Little concern has been expressed about persisting limits on speech,
which are frequently connected (in the Pamuk case and many others) to
criticisms of Turkey’s treatment of minorities, and its relationship
to a Turkish national identity forged during a period of instability
and imperial collapse.
As The Armenian Genocide demonstrates, it is precisely this
historical background upon which a specious, yet persistent,
objection to recognition of the genocide is based. In its most
respectable form it is the contention that the deportations,
massacres, and starvation of Armenians took place in a particular
“context”–that is, amid (or in response to) rebellion and treachery
from Turkey’s Armenian population, in league with Russia.
“So, if the Armenians killed and were killed,” Yusuf Halacoglu, head
of the Turkish Historical Society, says in the film, “the fact is
there were two sides involved in a civil war.” The argument boils
down to a claim that the events were not genocide but a response to
provocation in which the victims, including unarmed women, children,
and the elderly, brought on their fate.
It is a variation on the argument, made by some in the 1990s, that
there was no obligation to stop the killing of Muslims by Serbs in
Bosnia since the people of the region had been “killing each other
for centuries.” Both justifications are red herrings, which can be
effective when made with confidence by articulate proponents.
In the documentary, Turkish historians reject this claim, providing
historical context that enhances rather than undermines an
understanding of the fate of the Armenians as genocide. The loss of
Balkan territory, the flow of refugees from these Christian quarters
of the empire telling of persecution–all combined, says Taner Akcam,
to make “fear of collapse . . . [the] basic factor of the emergence
of Turkish nationalism.”
The effects of this fear have been profound, and the documentary’s
most compelling moments come when the Turkish historians describe
their experience with their society’s most stubborn taboo. Halil
Berktay received death threats for being a “Turkish historian inside
Turkey that has spoken up.” He argues that the new Turkish republic,
launched in 1923, dissociated itself from the past by adopting
attributes of Western society, including secularism, and found itself
embraced and courted by Western powers.
“All kinds of reasons like this made it undesirable for the young
republic to maintain an honest memory of what had been done in 1915,”
says Berktay, and “as a result, you have an enormously constructed,
fabricated, manipulated, national memory.”
After decades of denial and silence, it took an act of courage for
these historians to question the official version. Fatma Müge Göcek
expresses the confusion she felt upon realizing “you could actually
live in a society, get the best education that society has to offer,
which I did, and not know about it or have any books or anything
available to read about it.”
This situation is changing, as this documentary and events like the
Bilgi conference make clear. While my acquaintances in Istanbul have
complicated feelings about international pressure on Turkey to
confront its past, America has been involved from the outset.
Reporters and diplomats relayed news of the atrocities, and charity
appeals raised enormous sums, all of which is documented in the film.
For some Turks, it was in the United States that they found the
freedom, the libraries, and the contacts with Armenian Americans that
enabled them to delve into the past and develop independent
judgments. Of course, the U.S. government is still the prime target
of Turkish efforts to prevent official recognition of the genocide.
It will be up to the Turks to come to a complete understanding of
their past, and consolidate their democratic institutions and civil
liberties. In the meantime, less deference to the Turkish official
position would put America on the side not only of justice for
genocide victims, but also of Turks, like the historians in this
film, who refuse to accept limits on their speech and scholarship.
Ellen Bork is deputy director at the Project for the New American
Century.

© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights
Reserved.

Malaysia Sun, Malaysia
April 8 2006
Race troubles British political party
Big News Network
Saturday 8th April, 2006 (UPI)
The British National Party faces a revolt over selecting the grandson
of an asylum-seeker to stand for a Bradford ward in next month’s
local elections.
BNP hard-liners are refusing to accept the candidacy of Sharif Abdel
Gawad on racial grounds, even though officials said he is a totally
assimilated Greek-Armenian whose grandfather was a Christian, the
Guardian newspaper reported Saturday.
Scores of party contributors have denounced Mr. Gawad’s selection on
online notice boards. They contend the BNP should remain an all-white
party and the decision to appoint Gawad was made over the heads of
rank and file members.
A BNP spokesman said those members who refused to accept Gawad have
no place in the party.
In 2004 party leader Nick Griffin tired to force through a rules
change allowing non-white people to join the BNP. After widespread
opposition from members, leaders were forced to abandon the effort.

Radio Free Europe, Czech Rep
April 8 2006
Azerbaijan Says U.S. Proposals On Karabakh ‘Very Interesting’

April 8, 2006 — Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov
today said the United States made him “very interesting” proposals on
how to solve his country’s territorial dispute with Armenia.
Speaking after talks with U.S. officials in Washington, Mammadyarov
said Baku would make its response public when U.S. envoy Steven Mann
visits the Azerbaijani capital on April 18.
Before meeting with Mammadyarov on April 7, U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice reportedly talked with the Armenian and Azerbaijani
presidents over the phone.
Yerevan and Baku have been formally at war since 1988, when the
predominantly ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh seceded
from Soviet Azerbaijan.
The United States, Russia, and France co-chair the Minsk Group of
nations mandated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Bahrain News Agency, Bahrain
April 8 2006
Syria, Armenia hold talks
date: 08 04, 2006
Damascus, April 8 (BNA) An official talks was held on Saturday
between Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al Mualem and the visiting
Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian.
The talks between both sides focused on bilateral developing ties,
regional issues of common interest and the situation in the region.
The Armenian Minister said in a statement following the talks that
his talks with Syrian President Bashar Al- Assad relations between
Syria and Armenia and the latest developments in the region.