REFORMS IN SCIENCE SHOULD BE CARRIED OUT WITH CAUTION
By Mher Ohanian
Yerkir/arm
September 09, 2005
Overcoming the extremely unfavorable situation in Armenia’s science
sector is something that could guarantee a competitive economy. Any
radical reforms in the sector that fail to take into account the
realities established during a long period would simply destroy the
scientific potential accumulated by generations of scientists.
Currently, there is a trend that the entire scientific system we have
inherited from the Soviet era does not correspond to national economy
interests and thus should be downsized.
There certainly is some truth in this but what matters more is that
the process should be carried out in open and transparent discussions
and the scientific community should be informed on the reforms being
implemented. Only then, situational solutions could be ruled out.
One of the key directions in the government’s science sector policy
is the optimization of how the allocated money is spent. Reforms in
the field of science require a “counting and registering” in that
area. Moreover, scientific products should also be ” counted and
registered.” In addition, an impartial test should be carried out to
find out their scientific “value.”
A chief issue in restructuring the science is the process of uniting
scientific substructures that had been operating separately.
In such a situation, the implementation of the principle of financing
the scientific themes is preferable at this period of time since
it allows — though temporarily — reproducing of the most vivid
scientific potential.
However, the implementation of the principle of financing scientific
themes has stirred the discontent of the science community because of
the arbitrary decisions taken in this sphere. The result is that many
institutes of the National Academy of Sciences face to be shut down.

URGENT ISSUES, URGENT DISCUSSION
Karo Armenian
Yerkir/arm
September 09, 2005
Presently, the possibilities for development of the independent
Armenian state are in close interrelation with the issues of the
entire Caucasus region and Armenians all over the world, and as such,
they are in focus of our intellectuals. The time is complicated,
the correlation of the forces acting in the region is ever-changing
and our state is facing challenges in all areas.
Between August 26 and 28, Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF)
Bureau held a a special seminar to discuss the strategic issues of
Armenia. A group of ARF members from around the globe took part in
the seminar.
The agenda of the seminar included issues like the interaction and
collision of chauvinistic interests in the region, exploitation of
the natural resources of the region and the present alternatives of
the South Caucasus countries in regional bargaining.
Discussions took place for all the above-mentioned issues. It should be
emphasized that the changing times require a scrupulous, comprehensive
and everlasting reevaluation. The formation of our national strategy
could be carried out only based on these standards.
The Armenian political thought should summarize the contradicting
factors of the current world order to understand what the reliable
factors for the Armenian statehood are.
In this respect, this and other audiences alike are to lead to
crystallization of new vital solutions.

BOOK REVIEW: A WELL-CHOSEN SAROYAN SAMPLER
by Jonathan Kirsch, Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to Book
Los Angeles Times
September 11, 2005 Sunday
Home Edition
BOOK REVIEW; Features Desk; Part R; Pg. 2
WEST WORDS;
Essential Saroyan A Selection of William Saroyan’s Best Writings
William Saroyan, edited by William E. Justice Heyday Books/Santa
Clara University: 208 pp., $11.95 paper
Review, is at work on a book about Revelation and its role in
American culture and politics.
SAROYAN is a brand name in American letters. Nowadays, however, the
famous surname appears mostly on the work of Aram Saroyan (“Artists
in Trouble”) and his daughter, Strawberry (“Girl Walks Into a Bar”).
The founder of the family dynasty, Aram’s father, William, is sadly
neglected. When his work is read at all, it is mostly compulsory in
a college survey course or a high school textbook. “For whatever
reasons,” observed Peter H. King in a 1997 column in The Times,
“Saroyan today is held under book-land quarantine.”
William E. Justice, who previously co-edited the lively anthology
“California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century,” sets out
to restore the paterfamilias to his rightful place in “Essential
Saroyan,” a discerning sampler of the writer’s most enchanting and
enduring fiction. “This book is a valentine,” Justice confesses. “But
lest you take its sentiment lightly, be warned: it hides a landmine.
It may leave you forever changed.”
Time magazine saluted Saroyan at the end of his life for the “ease and
charm” of his stories, but the apparent compliment carries a subtext —
his principal literary crime, according to his contemporary critics,
was a certain sentimentality and even soft-heartedness. But whether
these qualities ought to be regarded as a weakness or a strength
remains in the eye of the beholder.
“The sheer, unabashed o7adolescencef7 of the man, with all its
bravado, sentiment, and defiant idealism,” writes Justice, “came to
define Saroyan.”
Indeed, Saroyan was perfectly capable of the showy gesture, another
quirk that did not endear him to the cooler critics. “As a writer,”
Justice points out, “Saroyan was an athlete.” Perhaps the best example
is the challenge he set for himself in 1934 — Saroyan wrote one short
story daily for a month and submitted each to Story magazine, which
published them. A year later, his first and most famous collection,
“The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories,”
was a bestseller. Its title story opens “Essential Saroyan.”
“Horizontally wakeful amid universal widths,” he writes in its
beginning passage to describe the phantasmagorical moment when the
protagonist stirs from sleep, “practicing laughter and mirth, satire,
the end of all, Rome and yes of Babylon, clenched teeth, remembrance,
much warmth volcanic, the streets of Paris, the plains of Jericho,
much gliding as of reptile in abstraction, a gallery of watercolors,
the sea and the fish with eyes, symphony, a table in the corner
of the Eiffel Tower, jazz at the opera house, alarm clock and the
tap-dancing of doom, conversation with a tree, the river Nile, the
roar of Dostoevsky, and the dark sun.”
Even the reader has to take a breath.
Saroyan was born in Fresno in 1908 and spent five years in an Oakland
orphanage before his widowed mother took back her children. He chose
the Central Valley as the setting of some of his most accomplished
fiction, including his autobiographical novel “The Human Comedy.”
Thus, he places his characters in the same public library where the
largely self-taught author acquired his love of reading and writing.
“[E]veryone was hushed, because they were seeking wisdom,” he writes of
the reading room. “They were near books. They were trying to find out.”
Saroyan celebrated his Armenian heritage with unapologetic pride
of ancestry and a certain self-deprecating humor: “We barbarians
from Asia Minor are hairy people,” he writes in “Seventy Thousand
Assyrians.” “[W]hen we need a haircut, we o7need f7a haircut.” His
novel “My Name Is Aram” has been called “the Armenian ‘Huck Finn,’ ”
Justice writes in his introduction. At the end of his life, Saroyan’s
ashes were divided between Fresno and Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
Saroyan’s famously unhappy marriage to his much-courted first wife,
Carol — his rivals included Orson Welles, Clifford Odets and Marlon
Brando, and she later married actor Walter Matthau — is mentioned
only in Justice’s illuminating introduction. But Saroyan’s deep
embitterment over his service in World War II explains the fear and
anger that boils up in “The Adventures of Wesley Jackson,” a wholly
unsentimental antiwar novel that carries some of the same sting as
Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.”
“[T]he big-family spirit that comes over a whole country when there’s
a War makes me a little suspicious of the people who throw the party
because it seems to me they are always smiling and full of hope and
too quick to be heroic, whereas the fellows in uniform are confused
and miserable most of the time,” declares the protagonist. “o7I’mf7
scared because I’m in the Army, but what the hell’s scaring the people
who aren’t in the Army?”
Saroyan acquits himself of the charge of mawkishness in the final
selection, “A Writer’s Declaration, a blend of memoir and manifesto
that includes some of the most bracing wisdom one author has ever
shared with his fellow writers. It is worth the price of the volume.
“What advice have I for the potential writer?” he asks. “I have
none, for anybody is a potential writer, and the writer who is a
writer needs no advice and seeks none…. The writer is a spiritual
anarchist as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented
with everything and everybody…. When he’s dead he’ll probably be
as dead as others are dead, but while he is alive he is alive as no
one else is, not even another writer…. He is also mad, measurably
so, but saner than all others, with the best sanity, the only sanity
worth bothering about — the living, creative, vulnerable, valorous,
unintimidated, and arrogant sanity of a free man.”
Justice insists that Saroyan was “once the most famous writer on
earth” and argues that he belongs in the company of Kahlil Gibran,
Dylan Thomas, J.D. Salinger, C.S. Lewis, the Brontes, Dostoevsky, Jack
Kerouac and Sylvia Plath. Even if the praise is a bit overwrought, the
fact remains that Justice has picked well from Saroyan’s life work and
makes the case that the great man is sadly and unfairly neglected. *
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

BELARUSSIAN AIR FORCE TO BE ARMED WITH RUSSIAN S-300 MISSILE SYSTEMS
Xinhua General News Service
September 10, 2005 Saturday 1:30 PM EST
The defense ministries of Russia and Belarus signed a contract in
Minsk on Saturday, under which Belarus will receive Russia’s S-300
air defense missile systems, the Interfax news agency reported.
“The missile systems will be of the S-300PS modification,” and will
arm one air defense brigade, a source of Belarussian Defense Ministry
was quoted as saying.
Under the terms of the contract, the S-300 missile systems will be
on duty for common air-defense of Russia and Belarus, according to
the source.
The Russian-made S-300PS missile system is one of the most advanced
air-defense missile systems in Russia and also one of the most demanded
weapons in the world weapon market.
Russia before sold the missile systems to Belarus, Armenia, Ukraine,
Kazakhstan and other countries.
The dates for delivering the missile systems to Belarus have not been
discussed, the Belarussian source said.

OUR BODIES OURSELVES, OUR PURSES
By Diana Heil, Courtesy Photo
The Santa Fe New Mexican (New Mexico)
September 10, 2005 Saturday
Co-author’s visit to Santa Fe will raise money for several projects,
including health guide for Latinas
Judy Norsigian, co-founder of the Our Bodies Ourselves organization
in Boston, is coming to Santa Fe.
She will visit her sister Lisa, who also goes by her Tibetan Buddhist
nun name Rinchen Lhamo. And Norsigian will speak about women’s health
issues at a house party, which is open to a limited number of guests
from the public.
Norsigian, 57, is on a fundraising tour through the Southwest.
“We’ve been facing difficult times financially in the last few years,
and so we’ve instituted this house-party routine, which is a wonderful
way to talk about issues and get support and get people to understand
how the book is certainly a source of income but it is never more
than 10 to 15 percent of our total budget,” she said in a telephone
interview this week.
The nonprofit’s operating budget is about $500,000.
Through its books, workshops and activism efforts, the group provides
information about health, sexuality and reproduction from a feminist
and consumer perspective. Our Bodies, Ourselves, the book’s founding
text, is now in its eighth edition. Tibetan and South Korean versions
are in the works.
The Latina Health Initiative, a special outreach effort of the group,
produced Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas. But the Spanish-language
edition hasn’t been updated since 2000.
“We’re hoping to create a collaboration with some institutions because
we don’t have the funds to do it ourselves, and the publisher is
very small,” Norsigian said. “I would love to see that begin next
year. It’s badly needed.”
The initiative also is translating a booklet called “Journeys of
Parenthood,” written by the Maternity Center Association in New York
City. It will offer practical guidance to pregnant mothers while
staying sensitive to Latina cultural practices.
In 1971, when Norsigian first met the Boston Women’s Health Book
Collective at age 23, she didn’t know much about feminism, but she
was interested in nutrition. The college graduate had been living on
a commune in upstate New York for a year, where she learned how to
rebuild Volkswagen engines and grow organic food.
Meanwhile, the dozen women she met in the collective had challenged
the medical establishment by writing a 193-page booklet called Women
and Their Bodies. Soon after, Norsigian worked on the first chapter
on nutrition for Our Bodies, Ourselves, the book’s new title. It sold
250,000 copies.
“I became very interested in reproductive-health issues, midwifery,
childbearing … and trying to keep the effect of the profit motive
down to a dull roar in health and medical care,” Norsigian said.
In 1973, the year abortion became legal, Simon & Schuster published
the first commercial edition.
Norsigian came from an Armenian-American family. Her father ranted
against religion and psychiatry, and her mother was a lab technician.
Norsigian’s mother always wanted to be a doctor. But Norsigian’s
grandfather thought it was a waste for a woman to get an education;
her role was to be a mother.
So what did her mother think of Our Bodies, Ourselves?
“Though she never really read it that carefully, she was proud we
did it,” Norsigian said. “My mom was a feminist in her own way.”
Today, at age 83, Norsigian’s mom still teaches yoga classes in Boston.
GRAPHIC: 1. Judy Norsigian, second from left, along with the other
staff members who worked on Our Bodies, Ourselves. Norsigian will be
in Santa Fe on Wednesday.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

NEW POSSIBILITIES
Yerkir/arm
September 09, 2005
South Caucasus will find itself in focus of the international
community and media: parliamentary election will be held in Azerbaijan,
constitutional reforms referendum is to be conducted in Armenia. In
a way, we all will witness a unique competition between Armenian
and Azerbaijan.
The core of the competition will be the level of democracy of the
two countries and their will to build standards that are in line with
international standards.
No doubt, the competition between the countries of the region goes
on in several areas: economic, military, political, scientific and
cultural. But most important is the competition in the political
area. Political maturity is a powerful stimulus for economic growth
and a strong guarantee for national security.
By adopting a constitution based on European standards, this society
would gain an advantage in the regional competition because we would
have a new state with entirely new possibilities for our security
and national aspirations.

THORRINGTON GETTING A CHANCE TO PROVE HIMSELF
by Kent McDill, Daily Herald Sports Writer
Chicago Daily Herald
September 4, 2005 Sunday
John Thorrington consulted the road map in his mind as he discussed
the story of his personal heritage and world travels.
It’s a story that begins in South Africa, and he’s now reached a
point where he feels settled in Major League Soccer as a member of
the Chicago Fire.
Thorrington, 25, is available to start at midfield tonight when
the Fire plays the Los Angeles Galaxy at the Home Depot Center in
Carson, Calif. It is the second of five consecutive road MLS games
for the Fire, which does not play at home again until the first week
of October.
Thorrington has only recently been able to contribute after a spring
filled with injury problems. But Thorrington had the game- winner in
the Aug. 13 match against the Galaxy at Soldier Field.
For Thorrington, that felt like his first real contribution to the
team he joined in the spring.
“My whole goal now is to repay the faith Dave (coach Sarachan) and
the staff had in bringing me here,” Thorrington said. “It felt so
good to contribute and help the team get a win.”
Thorrington has played in only five games this season (three starts)
after battling a back problem and a hip-alignment issue through the
first four months of the season.
Thorrington is an American citizen, but he was born in South Africa
to an English father and an Armenian mother. His family moved to
California when he was 2, he applied for American citizenship in
1997 at the age of 18, and he was able to play for the U.S. Under-20
national team in 1999.
Thorrington eventually made an appearance for the U.S. national team
in a friendly match against Ecuador in June 2001.
Professionally, Thorrington began his career in England in 1997, when
he became the youngest American to sign with a team from the English
Premiership by joining Manchester United. He spent three years training
with Man U and then played with the reserve team before moving on.
A stop in Germany to play with Landon Donovan on the reserve team
of Bayer Leverkusen was followed by seasons with English second-
and third-division teams before coming “home” to the states for
this season.
Considering his background, Thorrington was prepared to compare MLS
play to the competition that exists in the EPL.
“It’s a different style of play,’ Thorrington said. “There is more
of a Latin influence here. We play an aggressive style.
“I don’t think European leagues should look down on MLS. We have
players competing in their leagues. The overall standard of play in
MLS has come on.”

FOR THE ERASED
by LD Beghtol
Village Voice (New York, NY)
September 6, 2005, Tuesday
Ages ago at college in her native California, singer, composer, and
cultural provocatrice Diamanda Galas abandoned the study of science
to pursue her true passion: experimental music. But biochemistry’s
loss is our gain; over the last two decades, her controversial works
have earned her a place high in the avant-garde music pantheon.
Fearlessly outspoken, frighteningly knowledgeable, and dangerously
openhearted, Galas dedicates her latest work, Defixiones: Orders
>From the Dead to the estimated 3 million to 4 million victims of the
Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek “ethnic cleansing” committed
by the Ottoman Turks between 1914 and 1923.
Since 1999, Defixiones has been performed to near unanimous acclaim at
prestigious venues the world over, from London’s Royal Festival Hall
to the Sydney Opera House, from the Athens National Opera to Mexico
City’s Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. Its New York premiere
(presented by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s “What Comes
After: Cities, Art + Recovery” international summit) is scheduled
for September 8 and 10 at Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts,
Pace University–appropriately enough, just across from City Hall,
mere blocks from ground zero.
The word defixiones refers to warnings engraved in lead placed onto
graves in Greece and Asia Minor, threatening desecraters with grievous
harm. Galas uses this term in a broader memorializing sense, urging
us to remember the forgotten dead, the “erased,” the massacred. Her
epic performance for solo voice, piano, and electronics speaks for
the poet-author in exile–both far from home and in his homeland–as
well as for “born outlaws,” as Galas calls homosexuals, echoing Genet.
Informed by excerpts from the Armenian Orthodox liturgy and the
traditional amanethes, or improvisatory lamentations sung at Greek
funerals, Galas 70-minute masterwork showcases both her astounding
vocal technique and her enormous capacity for rage, compassion,
defiance, and ferocious emotionalism. Though at times truly fearsome
in its raw, insistent pathos–familiar to those who know her crushing
Plague Mass (1990) or Schrei X (1996)–Defixiones’ real power lies
in those seductively lyrical, quiet passages that occur just before
Galas wail of existential anguish erupts in reverberant majesty.
Iraqi artist-scholar Selim Abdullah notes, “The sentiment, strength .
. and sensitivity contained in this Saturnian representation go.
back to the very aspects the Greeks gave to a whole Occidental
culture.” Awash in blood and tears, and haunted by images of
unspeakable (and until now, largely unspoken) butchery, Galas funeral
mass is cathartic, but neither glib nor sentimental. Any redemption
is hard-won.
I spoke with Miss Galas who has lived in the East Village for
the past 10 years, on two occasions in mid August. Over multiple
cappuccinos–caffeine being her current drug of choice–she dazzled
me with her famous intelligence and often barbed wit. Onstage she’s
a mythic figure come to life; in person she is perhaps even more
mesmerizing.
Few people in America, other than those of Greek, Armenian, or Assyrian
descent, seem to have heard of this horror. Why is it so unknown?
This country discusses one or two genocides and markets them in very
contrived ways. They don’t write about them truthfully, the way
[author and concentration camp survivor] Primo Levi did. Think of
Spielberg and the legions of mediocrity he has propagated.
And there’s the conflicting numbers, and . . .
What does it matter if it was 6 million or 2 million or 200? Genocide
is genocide. Every culture has its particular way of killing and
torturing its enemies. And the Turks are still trying to cover
it up by calling it deportation, but that’s just another word for
“death sentence.”
You’re perceived as the voice of the fallen and forgotten. Is that
something you’ve chosen?
No–I hated being the poster girl for the AIDS epidemic. It had to
be done, but I hated it. I never meant to be political– I’m an artist.
An artist can only speak for herself. But if you get particularly good
at something it has a sort of universality, and then it has a certain
audience, and you’re answerable for that. Like Adon [Syrian-born poet
Adon Ali Ahmed Said]–a great, great poet–who is seen as the voice
of a “leftist movement” of some sort, but he’s only writing about
what is truth to him.
How did you come to create Defixiones?
My father is an Anatolian Greek. All my life he’s talked about how the
finest Greek culture was from Anatolia–home to Assyrians, Armenians,
Greeks, and Jews, who for centuries traded languages, songs, ideas,
histories–and how many of these cultures are indistinguishable from
one another. So the notion of racial purity there is just absurd. He
also told me about the atrocities committed by the Turks against
Greeks from Asia Minor. But the direct catalyst was an interview I
saw with Dr. [Jack] Kevorkian, who said, “I’m Armenian, I know what
torture is all about. I know the difference between homicide and
helping people end a life of misery.” He was so articulate, and he
was discussing Greek Stoic philosophy and the Armenians in the same
breath, which I found very unusual at the time.
So in 1998 I said to myself: It’s time to do this work.
Later I read Peter Balakian’s book Black Dog of Fate, which talks
about what being an Armenian in America means–it means you’re
invisible. It’s the same with the Greeks. Most people think of Greek
culture as a dead culture: Socrates and Aristotle and the statues . .
And they think Assyrians are the same as Syrians..
Then, as a fellow at Princeton in 1999, I studied texts by Giorgos
Seferis and others in preparation for a performance at the Vooruit
Festival at the Castle of Ghent [in Belgium].
Defixiones was more a song cycle then, with [the underground Greek
protest music known as] rembetika and works by Paul Celan, Henri
Michaux, and Cesar Vallejo. I concentrated on exiled poets like
the Anatolian Greek refugees of the 1920s–my father’s people. The
premiere was on September 11, 1999, which marked the anniversary
of the reign of terror under Charles V, who persecuted homosexuals,
women thought to be witches, and other heretics.
Defixiones is somewhat a work in progress?
Yes. Currently I’m using texts by Giorgos Seferis, [who] is like my
bible–and Nikos Kazantzakis, who people will know from his novel The
Last Temptation of Christ. And Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose poem is
addressed to the people who survived. Everyone just hated him. And
Yannis Ritsos. And “The Dance” by Siamanto, with its description of
brides being burned alive. And the pro-genocide poem “Hate,” which
was published by [the Turkish newspaper] Huerriyet and broadcast by
the BBC in 1974, right before the invasion of Cyprus–about why the
Turks should decapitate the Greeks.
September is such a politically charged month . . .
Yes, starting with the destruction of Smyrna in September 1922. And
Black September 1955, when Turkish officials waged a disinformation
campaign stating that Greeks had bombed the consulate in Thessalon
resulted in the desecration of Greek churches and the mutilation and
murder of priests and other men. And the Black September of Ariel
Sharon’s going into Lebanon in ’82. He was doing a real con job. And
then the situation in America in 2001 . . .
Your aggressive style and disturbing subject matter automatically
put you outside the mainstream. Yet your music has a surprisingly
broad appeal.
Well, I’ve been creating sacred masses, which are not exactly a popular
art form in this country today. But they’re meant to be, literally,
for the people. The American idea of a populist art form is rap. Some
of it is good, but most is appalling in that it promotes stupidity and
the abuse of the same groups that monotheist totalitarian governments
persecute: women, homosexuals, and anyone who doesn’t speak precisely
your language.
You must get tons of hate mail.
Fundamentalists of all sorts despise me. I’m attacked by my own people
too–American Greek men who are homophobic and think everything I
say is heresy. I got shit recently from a Jewish promoter about doing
Defixiones in Mexico. She asked me if I really believed people would
be interested. And I thought: “Please don’t insult my intelligence–or
theirs. They’ll understand the concept of genocide as it has occurred
and continues to occur to so many people around the world . . . ”
I want to perform Defixiones in Istanbul and Smyrna. The psychic
manifestations of violence can be just as devastating as the
physical acts–especially when people refuse to recognize them. It’s
depersonalizing. I have a line in INSEKTA: “Believe me, believe me.”
Not being believed can kill.
Who are your fans?
People who find it necessary to think for themselves in order to
survive, because they’re damned by the fact they don’t agree with the
mediocrity that society shoves down their throats. They rise above
this by continuing to educate themselves. This is especially true
of homosexuals, who are born outside the law anyway. They’re still
figuratively and literally buried alive by the Egyptians and Turks.
Here in New York they’re visited upon by the Aesthetic Realism
Foundation and treated with electroshock. In Iran, they hang teenage
“infidels.” It’s unbelievable that ethnic groups still shut out those
who can be so disciplined and organized, and who can do great things.
[Gay men] either disappear completely or they address the situation.
They’ve had to–to save their own lives. They are great fighters. I
say these are the first soldiers you should enlist, not the last.
This is the man to whom you should say, “Will you be my brother? Will
you help me?”
Will the Turkish government ever admit these atrocities?
I think it will be forced to, through the ongoing work of their own
scholars, both old and young, and by artists and writers who want to
be part of the rest of the world, despite the horrific censorship that
the Turkish government exercises over them. My website is listed as a
hate site, which is completely ridiculous. I do not hate the Turkish
scholars who are trying to address true events in the world.
There are many Turks who want to see things change, but they’re not
given the opportunity to express themselves. When they do, they get
sent to prison or mental asylums. Midnight Express is absolutely
the truth.
But until the government officially apologizes, there is no reason
for it to be accepted by the European Union. You must admit what
you’ve done–it shows that your present actions will be mandated by
the apology for your past actions. But until this happens there can
be no trust at all.
For more information about the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian genocides,
Black September, and Galas’s work, see: diamandagalas.com “Voices
of Truth” series: hellenic-genocide.com/voices-of-truth”Before the
Silence” archival news reports series, run by Sofia Kontogeorge Kostos:

AZERBAIJAN’S DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION
By Hafiz Pashayev, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Washington Times
September 11, 2005 Sunday
In a recent visit to Azerbaijan as National Democratic Institute
chairman, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “Election
day is important, but the months leading up to the elections are
also crucial.”
She referred to the parliamentary elections to be held Nov. 6, when the
citizens of Azerbaijan go to the polls to elect their representatives
to Parliament, or Milli Mejlis.
The Bush administration views these elections as a litmus test of the
Azerbaijan government’s commitment to democracy. The U.S. Congress
has weighed in by passing a resolution calling on Azerbaijan “to hold
orderly, peaceful, and free and fair elections in November 2005 in
order to ensure the long-term growth and stability of the country.”
We are the first to recognize that independence, stability and
prosperity depend on successful democratic reform. President
Ilham Aliyev wants an orderly transition, as our last few years
of unprecedented economic growth would be jeopardized by political
instability. Toward this end and to conduct elections according to
international standards, the president issued an Executive Order
outlining steps to be taken:
(1) Allowing all political parties to organize rallies free from
violence and intimidation.
(2) Welcoming domestic and international election observers. (3)
Providing access to media, thus ensuring fair coverage.
(4) And ensuring central and regional authorities create the necessary
conditions for exit polls.
Among many provisions of the Order already carried out are those that
concern participation in the political arena by opposition parties.
There has been dialogue between ruling and opposition parties, all
opposition parties may freely conduct rallies and demonstrations and,
thus far, all opposition activists – including those who called for
overthrow of the government in October 2003 – have been allowed to
become candidates if they wish. During his visit to Azerbaijan at
the end of August, Sen. Richard Lugar, Indiana Republican, said:
“The opposition leaders underlined that the registration process of
the MP candidates went well, which is a step forward compared to
the previous elections.” President Aliyev went further by warning
all regional election officials not to interfere in the old Soviet
fashion, when ballot-stuffing was common.
President Aliyev’s insistence on free and fair elections in November
is based on the idea Azerbaijan’s secular government can co-exist
with its Muslim traditions.
Our vision is premised on the belief democratic pluralism will ensure
a peaceful outlet for dissent, eliminating the need for violent
alternatives. Citizens of all ethnicities and political persuasions
are free to advocate their positions peacefully.
Today, Azerbaijan is a vibrant, independent state. We have faced many
challenges in our young country’s life: preserving our independence
in a tough neighborhood; making the transition from a shattered to a
market economy; building government institutions and an independent
judiciary; finding a peaceful solution to our conflict with Armenia;
and developing and delivering our natural resources to world markets.
Throughout these difficult years, the United States has been a friend
and ally of Azerbaijan. Our strategic partnership has blossomed since
the attacks on America on September 11, 2001. Immediately after,
the late President Heydar Aliyev visited the U.S. Embassy in Baku not
only to express his condolences but to offer his full support. Today,
we stand side-by-side in the global war on terrorism. Our troops
proudly serve in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Azerbaijan’s location between Russia, Iran and Turkey, coupled with
our desire to integrate into the Euro-Atlantic community, requires
that we conduct a balanced foreign policy fostering development of
democratic institutions and a strong economy. Azerbaijan has come this
far without tangible foreign aid and expects to continue democratic
and economic development, primarily through its own resources.
According to a recent survey by the International Republican Institute
sponsored by USAID, an overwhelming majority of Azerbaijanis want
economic and social development to be their government’s priority
concerns.
This November, the people of Azerbaijan will elect a Parliament I
believe will accelerate our transition toward democratic pluralism to
match the country’s unprecedented economic growth. Mr. Lugar told the
press in Baku: “I sense in Azerbaijan a yearning for building strong
democratic institutions.”
Hafiz Pashayev is Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States.

EMBASSIES, FROM LANDMARK TO BULWARK
by Susan Spano, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
September 11, 2005 Sunday
Home Edition
HER WORLD;
To protect diplomats abroad, new building designs play up security
while downgrading architectural singularity.
AMERICAN travelers may not know it, but they own a magnificent 18th
century palace on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. After World War
II, the U.S. government bought the building at this enviable address,
and it now serves as the consular services division of the U.S.
Embassy, a proud postage stamp of America and symbol of our long,
complicated relationship with France.
The neoclassical Hotel de Talleyrand, as it is called, is one of the
grandest of about 270 U.S. embassies and consulates around the world
dedicated to promoting U.S. foreign policy and serving as the face
of America abroad.
Some are as distinguished as the Hotel de Talleyrand in historic
and architectural terms. But since the 1998 Al Qaeda bombing of U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001,
many more have been deemed a security risk and will soon be replaced
in an unprecedented wave of embassy building. The construction,
estimated to cost $17 billion, is aimed, above all, at safeguarding
the people who work in American diplomatic installations abroad.
More than 200 people died as a result of the embassy bombings in Kenya
and Tanzania, including 12 U.S. diplomats. The two attacks were hardly
isolated incidents; embassies have become prime terrorist targets.
“Every year on Foreign Service Day in May, more names are added to
the plaque at the U.S. State Department in Washington, commemorating
members of the foreign service who have died in the line of duty,” John
M. Evans, U.S. ambassador to Armenia, said in a telephone interview.
His mission has just moved into one of the new embassies mandated by
the 1999 Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act. The
State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, led by
retired Maj. Gen. Charles E. Williams, recently completed 15 new
embassy compounds in such countries as Turkey and Bulgaria; 39 others
are being designed or constructed around the world; and contracts will
soon be awarded for 13 more State Department facilities in foreign
lands, which include embassies, consulates, office buildings and
ambassadorial residences.
New or old, embassies generally are places of business, not museums
or cultural centers open to casual inspection. Besides serving as the
headquarters of U.S. diplomatic missions, they often house a variety
of federal agencies such as the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service.
Consular services, however — which can be at an embassy or in a
separate building — are available to American citizens in case of
such emergencies as a lost passport.
As a result, Americans abroad get to know U.S. embassies and consulates
only if they get into trouble, which is a pity. Some, like the Hotel
de Talleyrand, are exceptional enough to warrant a visit.
The State Department keeps a register of culturally significant
properties, including Winfield House, an ambassadorial residence near
London’s Regent’s Park, surrounded by a 12-acre garden. It was built
in 1936 by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, who sold it to the U.S.
government after World War II for $1.
A changing world
ALSO on the register are the Palazzo Margherita, a U.S. Embassy
office building on the Via Veneto in Rome, atop an archeological
trove of 2,000-year-old Roman Imperial frescoes; the French colonial
ambassador’s handsome residence in Hanoi; Schoenborn Palace in Prague,
Czech Republic, with a Baroque facade and interior features from the
Renaissance; and the American Legation at Tangier, Morocco, the first
U.S. government property acquired abroad, a gift from sultan Moulay
Suliman in 1821. Unlike other entries on the register, the Tangier
Legation is a museum that can be visited.
Other noteworthy properties are more recent. In “Building Diplomacy:
The Architecture of American Embassies,” author Elizabeth Gill
Lui identifies the 1950s as another time of accelerated embassy
construction. Many facilities from that era, like the Athens embassy,
designed by Walter Gropius, were built by modern architectural masters
as symbols of democratic openness. In the busy hearts of foreign
cities, they had plenty of windows and relatively easy access but
little concern for security. “The architecture of embassies reflects
our changing relationship with the outside world,” Lui said in a
recent telephone interview.
That relationship turned ugly with the 1965 bombing of the U.S.
Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam. “The political shock was that an absolutely
fundamental principle of international order — the mutually agreed
upon inviolability of diplomats and their missions operating in host
countries — was violated,” Charles Hill, a diplomat and fellow of
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said in an e-mail. Subsequent
attacks on American diplomatic facilities — in Tehran; Beirut;
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Nairobi, Kenya — ultimately resulted
in the current rush to build new, more secure embassies. Since 2001,
when Williams was put in charge of the program, the Overseas Buildings
Operations bureau has cut costs and construction time, chiefly because
of the introduction of a standard embassy design.
Sized, like the three bears — small, medium and large — the design
template de-emphasizes architectural singularity. Instead, security
is optimized, with such features as perimeter walls, guard booths,
bulletproof windows and doors, leeway separating the building from
the street, anti-ram barriers and sites at a distance from congested
city centers.
Though the State Department intends to customize its new
standard-design embassies to their settings — for instance, the
Armenian embassy is on a lake reflecting Mt. Ararat (actually in
neighboring Turkey) thought to be the biblical landing place of
Noah’s Ark — critics have called them bunkers, reflections of fear,
not the free and open values of American democracy.
At the very least, post-9/11 requirements for secure embassy buildings
make it harder for the State Department to maintain historic landmarks
like the Hotel de Talleyrand. The choice of new building sites outside
city centers signals the abandonment of storied embassy districts. And
it’s unknown whether access to consular services may become, in
certain cases, more difficult for American travelers in trouble.
“What the average American tourist needs to know,” said diplomat
Hill, “is that the American government is not responsible for these
difficulties. It is the rise of terrorist movements, which have set
themselves monstrously against the basic foundations of international
order, law and established diplomatic practice.”
The recent relocation of the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey,
from a landmark palazzo downtown to a new building 45 minutes outside
the city illustrates the increasingly conflicted claims on American
diplomatic missions abroad.
The former consulate, known as the Palazzo Corpi, in the busy Beyoglu
district, was completed around 1882. It was then purchased for use
as an embassy by Ambassador John G.A. Leishman, who assumed that
the government would ultimately reimburse him. But Congress was
in a stingy mood, so back in Washington, D.C., Leishman staked the
building in a poker game with a handful of influential lawmakers,
who promised to see that the ambassador was repaid for the property if
he won. The Palazzo Corpi has the distinction of being the only U.S.
Embassy acquired by the government at a card table.
But the building’s vulnerable architecture and location fated it for
replacement, and in 2003 the consulate moved to a new building so
impregnable that it has been likened to a maximum-security prison.
Just a few months later, a terrorist bomb hit the British consulate
and London-based HSBC bank, near the Palazzo Corpi in central Istanbul,
killing 32 people, including Britain’s consul general, Roger Short. One
of the suspected perpetrators arrested after the bombing reportedly
told investigators that his group would have targeted the American
consulate had it not moved to a more secure facility.
In these highly charged times, balancing security requirements with
access, cultural exchange and the promotion of American values so
vital to effective diplomacy is the great challenge of the State
Department’s embassy building program. “We can’t do our work in a
fortress,” said Ambassador Evans. “But in Yerevan [Armenia], we’ve
got the balance right.”
Mixing business, comfort
THE new American embassy in Yerevan, Armenia’s mountain-bordered
capital, is nothing like a bunker, said Evan. It’s a five-minute drive
from Yerevan’s central square, and the building, completed earlier
this year, is surrounded by lakefront and three perimeter walls,
providing protection to 70 Americans, as well as 328 Armenians who
work there. “But once you’re inside, it’s like a college campus, with
lawns and trees and more space for receiving guests,” said Evans. The
waiting area for visa applicants and U.S. citizens in need of consular
services is more comfortable, he said, and the embassy’s library is
open to the public.
Seemingly successful applications of the secure embassy design are
hopeful signs, even if their out-of-town locations speak volumes about
America’s response to the changing world. “When we build, they will
come,” Williams said by e-mail, referring to his belief that embassy
construction outside city centers would stimulate development.
At the very least, it’s a safe bet we won’t be buying new property
on the Place de la Concorde, which is why, here in Paris, I keep
walking by to admire the Hotel de Talleyrand. Keeping diplomats and
foreign service workers safe comes first, of course. I just hope
the illustrious old building will never be deemed too insecure to
serve as a part of the U.S. Embassy to France. Every time I pass it,
I feel proud to be an American.
*
Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read
at latimes.com/susanspano.