Canadian directors award nods announced, gala dinner to be held Oct. 1
By John Mckay
Canadian Press
Friday, August 05, 2005
TORONTO (CP) – Jerry Ciccoritti, one of Canada’s workhorse filmmakers,
has been nominated in both the feature film and TV movie categories
for the 2005 Directors Guild of Canada awards.
Ciccoritti, whose latest project, the Shania Twain biopic, will air
on CBC-TV in October, was nominated for one of his personal works,
the minimalist drama Blood, and for directing Sophia Loren in CTV’s
epic miniseries Lives of the Saints.
The Directors Guild awards will be handed out at a gala dinner Oct.
1, MCed by former SCTV comic Joe Flaherty.
Other film director nominees include Jim Donovan for Pure, Michael
McGowan for Saint Ralph and Lewin Webb for The Good Shepherd. Other
contenders in the TV movie/miniseries category are Charles Biname for
the CBC political thriller H20, Michael DeCarlo for an instalment of
the Murdoch Mysteries and Kari Skogland for the hockey tale Chicks
With Sticks. H20 got four other nominations: team achievement,
production design and picture and sound editing.
In series television, contenders include Ken Finkleman for an episode
of his Newsroom parody series on CBC, Don McBrearty for an episode
of the pay-cable bio-thriller ReGenesis, and Mina Shum and Stephen
Surjik for Da Vinci’s Inquest.
More than 100 jury members screened nearly 400 submissions and came
up with 79 nominations in 20 categories. And the nods were spread
widely across the industry with few entries getting more than a couple.
Guild president Alan Goluboff says this year’s nominations include
a wide range of veterans and new filmmakers across the country.
“Next year’s going to be slightly different because (Atom) Egoyan’s
going to have a film, (David) Cronenberg . . . I mean everybody under
the sun is going to have a film out next year,” says Goluboff who
adds that it was a particularly lean year for Canadian cinema.
“Canadian production is down,” he says, “in my view due to particular
government policies that have continued to make it very difficult
for filmmakers to work in this country.”
Goluboff concedes he has a political agenda in complaining that
government doesn’t feel concerned about a drop in Canadian production.
“We’re all losers because of that as Canadians,” he says. “But in
spite of that filmmakers, artists, will find ways to get their films
made and these awards in part reflect that.”
Blood, also nominated for picture editing, was an experimental film
by Ciccoritti featuring only two characters in a room and shot in
real time on digital video. It was screened at last year’s Toronto
International Film Festival. Lives of the Saints was an international
co-production featuring Loren and a cast of Italian-Canadians in an
epic family drama based on a series of novels by Canadian writer
Nino Ricci. It was also nominated in one of the Directors Guild
team achievement categories and for production design and best sound
editing.
Along with Lives of the Saints, Saint Ralph, the touching story of a
Canadian teen who enters the 1954 Boston Marathon as a tribute to his
ailing mother, was also nominated for outstanding team achievement,
production design and sound editing.
Don McKellar’s Childstar was a triple nominee, for team achievement,
and picture and sound editing. Istvan Szabo’s Being Julia received
nods for both picture and sound editing. The Robert Lantos-produced
feature netted star Annette Bening a best-actress Oscar nomination
this past year.
The Directors Guild of Canada awards this year will honour the
late Daniel Petrie Sr. (The Bay Boy, Fort Apache the Bronx) with a
lifetime achievement award, and former guild president Alan Erlich
with a distinguished service award.
On the web:
© The Canadian Press 2005
–Boundary_(ID_24+ujwkIyTQ8d+NZzTl+vg)–

Press Enterprise (Riverside, CA)
August 4, 2005, Thursday
CAL STATE SAN BERNARDINO: STUDENT HOPES STUDY WILL HELP DENTISTS;
QUEST TO DIG OUT ANSWERS;
She has spent the last year studying rare reptile’s teeth
by DARRELL R. SANTSCHI; THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE
Kahneria was a four-legged reptile that hung out around north-central
Texas, munching on green leaves and mollusks 50 million years before
the dinosaurs.
These days he lies around in a flat tub on a shelf in a biology
laboratory at Cal State San Bernardino, where a 39-year-old Loma
Linda mother of two glares at him through a microscope and picks at
his teeth.
Araxie Demirdji is his dentist.
A biology student at the university, Demirdji has spent the last year
studying one of only two kahneria skulls ever found.
Considering that the other one is more crumbled debris than intact
skull, Demirdji may be deeper into the head of kahneria than anyone
has ever been.
She will publish a report in scientific journals in the next two
years that will tell scientists what kahneria did with so many teeth
– at least 58 in its upper jaw alone with regular replacements –
and possibly insight into how teeth have evolved in humans and other
critters.
This could be useful, her teacher says, to veterinarians and dentists
wanting to know how jaws and teeth change.
All this from a woman who works as an office manager in an
orthodontist’s office and isn’t really interested in a career as a
paleontologist. Most paleontologists hunt for and study fossils for
the preparation of environmental-impact reports when somebody wants
to build something.
That’s how kahneria wound up in San Bernardino. The critter turned
up encrusted in rock when construction crews were building a road in
Texas. A professor from the Field Institute in Chicago took him there
and then shipped him on to Stuart Sumida, a biology professor at Cal
State San Bernardino. Sumida was looking for the right student to do
the reptile’s share of the work.
The student, a Lebanese-born Armenian immigrant who was drawing
pictures of dinosaurs as Sumida described them during one of his
classes, is Araxie Demirdji.
She came to the United States in 1988 with son, Sevan, 15, daughter,
Marianne, 14, and her husband, Samuel Demirdji, who came to study
organic chemistry at the University of Colorado.
In the mid-1990s, Samuel Demirdji was accepted at the Loma Linda
University School of Dentistry and Araxie Demirdji took a job as an
assistant at the dental school until he graduated in 2000.
Much of the family’s priorities were wrapped around her husband’s
education, Araxie Demirdji said. But once he went into private
practice, while teaching one day a week at the Loma Linda dental
school, she had an opportunity to go to school. She decided to study
biology.
“Since I was a child, my whole world was about insects and plants
and animals and nature,” she said. “I can’t let go.”
She enrolled at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa. Two semesters later
she transferred to San Bernardino Valley College, where she studied
organic chemistry for three quarters and then transferred to Cal State.
One of the first biology courses she took at Cal State was Sumida’s
class on dinosaurs.
“Every time he would show us a picture of a dinosaur or a reptile, I
would draw it as I took notes,” she said. “I could relate the drawing
to what he was talking about. I remember, one day I showed him.”
Sumida was impressed.
“She was sort of a quiet, unassuming person, but she was extremely
meticulous and extremely careful in the laboratory doing dissections,”
he said. “So, when she expressed interest in my research, I invited
her into the laboratory. I knew she had the patience and the mind-set
to do this kind of work. You have to be extremely patient.”
The office-size laboratory is a narrow, cramped room with heavy steel
cabinets to protect dinosaur bones. Microscopes, models and assembled
skeletons are spread around in what appears to the casual visitor
like random disorder.
Demirdji opens one of the cabinets, removes a tray, and finds an
unoccupied corner of a table to study bone fragments, and later the
skull, of the 250 million-year-old animal.
Because Demirdji works as an office manager and X-ray technician
at her husband’s office, Sumida said she was specially qualified to
separate the bones from the rock and study the animal’s teeth. She
took X-rays of the skull at her office and used dental tools for the
tedious close-in work.
She has been at it for a year now, cleaning the specimen in a process
that normally takes as long as two years.
“You’re picking rock off of bones,” Sumida said. “You can’t just
scrub it with water. You have to use dental tools. The experience
she has at her office meant she already understands dental structure.”
Demirdji said she has focused considerable attention on the six rows
of teeth, which have different functions much like in humans.
The critter replaced the teeth as needed. Replacements did not come
as fast as in a shark’s jaw, but unlike humans, kahneria could grow
more than one new set.
The creature lived on dry land, she figures, but likely had a water
hole or a lake nearby. It lived in a semitropical climate and needed
all those teeth because plants are tougher to chew and digest than
meat, she said.
Next up is completing a scientific paper, which Sumida says could
take an additional two years. Then Demirdji said she likely will
start studying a dinosaur. Or a reptile. Something with teeth.
She wants a degree but not a permanent paleontology job.
“I think it would not hurt to have a degree on the side,” she
said. “You do what you like, what you love to do. Then, at the same
time, you do something else.”
GRAPHIC: GREG VOJTKO/THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE / (1) “Since I was a child,
my whole world was about insects and plants and animals and nature,”
Araxie Demirdji says. “I can’t let go.” (2) Demirdji shows the teeth
of a 250 million-year-old reptilian skull that she’s studying at Cal
State San Bernardino. (3) Araxie Demirdji, who works at her husband’s
orthodontist office, has spent the last year studying one of only two
kahneria skulls ever found. (4) “I knew she had the patience and the
mind-set to do this kind of work. You have to be extremely patient.”
STUART SUMIDA, BIOLOGY PROFESSOR AT CAL STATE SAN BERNARDINO; PHOTOS

Phoenix New Times (Arizona)
August 4, 2005 Thursday
New School Hollywood
System of a Down’s Daron Malakian plays it cool in the big league
By Rob Trucks
Famed producer Rick Rubin, the man responsible for signing the now
uber-successful System of a Down, recently told the L.A. Times that
SOAD guitarist/songwriter/vocalist/mastermind Daron Malakian is
“a true artist.” Malakian, said Rubin, “doesn’t really live in the
world. He lives in a bubble and the bubble is filled with music. All
he does is listen to music and play music all day every day.”
“I don’t know about the true artist part,” Malakian tells New Times
from his Glendale, California, home, “but the way he explained the
way I live was pretty right on.”
But as it turns out, there’s at least one other thing that Malakian
likes to do.
“I’m a sports fan in general, you know,” he says. “I really love
sports. That probably doesn’t fit very well with the art part,
does it?”
Not that the 29-year-old guitarist is concerned with appearances.
“You’ve got a lot of people who are really into making people think
they’re an artist,” he says. “I think an artist should just do whatever
the hell they want and stop trying to be artists. That’s pretty much
how I live my life.”
In actuality, the members of Malakian’s band, a quartet of Los
Angeles-based Armenian-Americans and surely the only arena rockers
in history whose names all end in “an,” go out of their way to stand
apart. Mezmerize, their latest disc and just the first half of a
double album pairing released six months apart, furiously propels
a now signature mix of hardcore, metal, opera, and Armenian folk
riffs behind vigorous political invectives. And yet SOAD’s singular
amalgamation of sound has certainly found an audience. The group’s
first three albums have all gone platinum. 2001’s Toxicity has done so
three times. And Mezmerize is well on its way to its own certification.
“I’m proud that we’re a band that isn’t made by a machine,” Malakian
says, “and I know the machine has taken effect in some ways, but I
can’t say that the machine was there when we were building from the
ground up, you know? I’m really proud that System of a Down isn’t
like that and never was like that.”
To be sure, System’s ground-floor, lyrical politics are often painted
with an overreaching brush. Take the tag from SOAD’s current single
“B.Y.O.B.” — “Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always
send the poor?” — which both literally and figuratively raises
questions it can’t, or refuses to, answer. Still, it’s a discourse
that, in the past, has only been pursued by a legion of folkies and
the stray, politically aware punk rocker — certainly not by any
metal act that, against all odds, has managed to reach out and touch
the face of the mainstream.
So while Malakian and fellow SOAD writer/vocalist Serj Tankian
habitually editorialize on the cornerstones of societal ills —
violence on television, a Statue of Liberty weeping over America’s
polarization, and genocide (“P.L.U.C.K.,” a song from their debut
album, functions as a history lesson on the Turkish slaughter of
neighboring Armenians in the early 20th century) — Mezmerize also
brings to the table “Old School Hollywood,” a rare personal take on
the guitarist’s participation in the L.A. Dodgers’ annual celebrity
baseball game.
“My publicist said, ‘Hey, they play this game every year at Dodger
Stadium, and do you want to do it?’ And I was like, ‘Cool, man,’
because I was such a big fan. When I was a kid, like in elementary
school, I played basketball on the Forum floor. And I was like, ‘Wow,
I did that.’ It would be kick-ass to play baseball at Dodger Stadium.
“I ended up going there, and you’ve got all these actors who like
haven’t been in a show for 15 years or so. And they’re really taking
the game seriously. Like they’re wearing like fucking uniforms and
shit. And I felt very awkward, because my whole thing was not to go
there to win. I was there just so I could get a chance to play at
Dodger Stadium.”
“It kind of turned out,” Malakian says, “to be a really surreal,
weird experience. And a song came out of it.”
Two participants whose careers have seen better days, Tony Danza and
Frankie Avalon, make appearances in Malakian’s composition, as does
the manager of Malakian’s team, Jack Gilardi, agent and husband to
Annette Funicello. But don’t expect any dinner for five to be held
at the guitarist’s home.
“When they let me play,” he says, “they stuck me in the outfield for
like two minutes, and then they sat me back down. I was so benched
it wasn’t even funny.
“Here I am in the middle of all these huge like television sitcom
actors and fucking movie actors, most of them from like my childhood,
and just the whole experience, playing baseball with Frankie Avalon
on your team, is just, I mean, come on. You couldn’t dream that.”
Ah, but this is L.A. La-La Land. The place where rock ‘n’ roll dreams
can come true.
“I remember coming home,” Malakian says, “[and in] no more than like
half an hour, picking up the guitar, and that song just shot out
of me. It was a very spontaneous thing. A lot of the stuff that I’m
proud of usually comes out very natural that way. I don’t even feel
responsible for it sometimes.”
The night after he talks with New Times, Malakian will return to the
scene of the crime to take in a Dodgers game at Chavez Ravine. But
make no mistake, his heroes extend past the diamond. Take former
Laker Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (which may at least partially explain
why two consecutive songs on Mezmerize contain the phrase “10 feet
tall”). And Malakian’s musical paladin?
“Keith Moon is my biggest guitar hero,” he says. A surprising choice,
since the late Who drummer, you know, wasn’t a guitarist. “He played
so free and powerful,” Malakian says, “but also changed rock drumming
forever.”
Over the years, Moon’s balls-out, bull-in-the-china-shop persona
has drawn more than its fair share of rock ‘n’ roll followers who,
like Malakian, just want to make a difference.
“[I want ] to affect art,” he says. “To do something that kind of
contributes to art. Not just follow the trend or something like that.
Something that kind of helps. Something that helps it evolve, you
know? That’s still my dream today. I’ve never lost that.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

The New York Sun
August 4, 2005 Thursday
Reality Reinterpreted
By MEGHAN CLYNE
To anyone not under a blackout during this spring’s papal transition,
the commentariat’s frustration with John Paul II and Benedict XVI was
manifest and alarming. Denounced as hard-liners, the pontiffs were
branded out of touch on such matters as bioethics, sexual morality,
and religious tolerance. The Church was urged to get with the times
(or the Times). In order to accommodate “reality,” Catholics were
told they should, in effect, cease to be Catholics.
But what’s peddled as “reality” these days is bunk, according to
Vigen Guroian. A professor of theology and ethics at Loyola College
in Baltimore, Mr. Guroian urges a restoration of true humanity – one
defined not by polls and lab reports, but by “the moral imagination,”
Edmund Burke’s term for the source of all our civilizing traditions.
In “Rallying the Really Human Things” (ISI Books, 241 pages, $25),
Mr. Guroian traces the futility and bankruptcy of contemporary
culture to godlessness and anthropocentrism, which he pins on a
failure in education. Parents and teachers, he writes, “treat fact
as god, event as illusion, individual as datum, person as chimera,
norm as relative value, and human nature as social construct.”
The result? Timeless questions surrounding sexuality and love are
reduced to the effectiveness of condoms as measured by x, y, or z
study; a baby is worth his weight in stem cells; and a woman’s life
may be taken if enough doctors testify that she is in a “persistent
vegetative state.”
Human existence has become so desiccated partly because these parents
and educators have yielded their instructive responsibilities to
“The Great Stereopticon,” as Richard Weaver called the bombardment
of here-and-now information unleashed by the television age, all the
more potent more than 50 years later thanks to the Internet. Cable
news and blogs feed endless spin to hungry minds without planting
them in any sort of historical, cultural, intellectual, or moral
context. It is that context Mr. Guroian seeks to restore.
He does this primarily by bearing witness to what its absence has
wrought. Much – perhaps too much – is made of the “culture wars.” But
the struggle to keep alive the means of human exceptionalism –
principally, God – is rarely a well-publicized clash of swords. The
real assault on the moral imagination is more subtle, more sustained,
waged along unobserved fronts.
Mr. Guroian documents, for example, the vacuity of modern education.
Colleges graduate careerist men and women who are slaves to their
trades, unappreciative of life’s spiritual and intellectual riches.
The capacity for reflection, and an education in the full range of
human feeling, does not decorate these lives, which are dedicated to
bottom lines.
Mr. Guroian, as a college instructor, reserves special ire
for his fellow professors, who he believes are complicit in the
self-destructive behavior – from binge drinking to hookups – that
defines modern collegiate life, particularly for young women. The
sexual revolution tore away the social norms that once veiled female
virtue. As casual intercourse became itself the norm, women could
no longer protect themselves from male aggression by invoking moral
standards.
Instead, “reality” is now invoked against them. Those who remain
chaste are met with ridicule or scorn, told they will have to change
their ways if they ever hope to land a mate. The “reality” is that
the competition is more than willing to oblige. Yet even if giving
into one’s passions is now perfectly acceptable, it is not therefore
admirable. What sets man apart is his mastery over his passions, his
capacity to recognize and obey a higher authority than his pheromones.
Mr. Guroian is calling for a restored valuation of this
self-discipline, and a whole lot of other things that are difficult
– and that may seem artificial and antiquated now – in the name of
reweaving what Burke called “the decent drapery of life …
necessary to cover the defects of our own naked shivering nature.”
That call is not issued out of a Quixotic desire to mask ugly truths
with fictional niceties. Rather, it is the realization that man’s
transcendence of his biological condition through God is the Truth
of human existence.
How that reweaving should proceed, unfortunately, is less than
clear from this book. Mr. Guroian’s critique is a little too
far-reaching: His collection of essays is ambitious, ranging
in subject matter from dogma to gay marriage to President Bush’s
rhetoric to Armenian nationalism. A tighter focus might have led to
more specific prescriptions. The West is rotting from the inside;
Christian orthodoxy is essential to saving it. Beyond that, however,
few specifics are given.
That this book is published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute
signals its target audience: young people, particularly college
students, who are likely to be of a sympathetic, conservative
mind-set. If Mr. Guroian does not explain how young people are to
convert others to their point of view, it may be because they will
never be able to. Rather, these young readers will, someday, have
children of their own, onto whom they can pass an appreciation of
“the really human things.” In this respect, Mr. Guroian’s chapter
on Chrysostom and cultivating the Christian family may be the most
useful of his book. It directs readers toward the means by which they
are best able to restore humanity to public life: the faithful family.

Raffles is a lucky dip
By Nur Dianah Suhaimi
Gold Coast Bulletin (Australia)
August 6, 2005 Saturday
The famous Raffles of Singapore may be losing some of its facade of
wonder writes Nur Dianah Suhaimi
AUTHOR Somerset Maugham penned novels under the frangipani trees at
Raffles Hotel in the 1920s. Ernest Hemingway sipped Singapore Slings
at the Long Bar and, in 1967, the hotel was the backdrop for the
movie Pretty Polly.
But if it once was an artists’ haunt, the present-day Raffles Hotel,
made a national monument in 1987, is a far cry from its former self.
“The hotel is nothing more than a kitschy icon of Singapore’s colonial
past,” said Cyril Wong, a Singaporean poet. “It’s romantic surroundings
are no longer relevant to today’s writers who wish to be inspired by
contemporary issues.”
Some think the 118-year-old hotel, a recent acquisition by US-based
Colony Capital, is just another self-important colonial structure of
the past.
“It started as a colonial enterprise and is now another foreign
enterprise,” said Economist Group researcher Yasmine Yahya.
“There has never been anything particularly Singaporean about the
Raffles Hotel identity. Now it has been sold to Westerners, I guess
the Raffles story has come full circle.”
The hotel, formerly an Arab mer-chant’s bungalow, was opened by
Armenian hoteliers in 1887.
In 1933, after the death of its last Armenian owner, Raffles Hotel
was made a public company called Raffles Hotel Ltd.
But many of today’s writers and artists would rather draw inspiration
from buildings being torn down than from the old colonial landmark
it-self, said poet Wong, 28.
“If there’s a writer who gets his inspiration from Raffles Hotel today,
I’d tell him ‘Go to Little India — talk about the real thing’.”
Little India is one of Singapore’s ethnic enclaves which has managed
to resist much of the urbanisation that has overtaken the area
around Raffles.
Tony Watts, editor of a magazine for expatriates, believes the hotel’s
former reputation as a writers’ haunt may have been a bit overblown.
“It was probably not the hotel which inspired writers at the time
but the tropical, undeveloped sur-roundings of Southeast Asia,”
said Watts, an expatriate of eight years.
“Back then, Raffles Hotel might just be another one of those exciting
places to be in this exotic region.”
Introduced to many through the movie Pretty Polly , the ambience of
the hotel was elevated beyond its reality. The film starred Hayley
Mills and Trevor Howard in a Noel Coward romantic comedy about a
young woman who spends a few months as a travelling companion with
her wealthy aunt.
The hotel today is largely fre-quented by wealthy tourists who don’t
mind splurging on hospitality and food.
Despite its central location, few locals frequent the hotel.
“It’s not for teenagers like me,” said Gan Ruben, an 18-year-old who
works at the Raffles Cafe. “Prices here are too expensive.”

Azerbaijan relaunches opposition crackdown with coup charges
by: Simon Ostrovsky
Agence France Presse — English
August 7, 2005 Sunday 4:53 AM GMT
BAKU Aug 7 — The arrest of an opposition leader in former Soviet
Azerbaijan over an alleged coup plot hatched by Armenian secret police
and a US democracy group reactivates an opposition crackdown in the
oil rich republic ahead of parliamentary elections.
Prosecutors on Thursday announced the arrest of Ruslan Bashirli,
the leader of the Yeni Fikir youth group modeled on movements that
helped topple regimes in Ukraine and Georgia recently, on charges of
attempting “to take power by force.”
His detention came just two months after the Azerbaijani authorities
had lifted a ban on public demonstrations that had been in place since
the contested 2003 presidential elections which ended in rioting and
hundreds of arrests.
The two days of rioting that enveloped the capital Baku in 2003 put
Azerbaijan in the international headlines. Since then, the authorities
have clamped down on dissent, loosening the unspoken ban on rallies
only in June after heavy Western diplomatic pressure.
Prosecutors accuse Bashirli of accepting money from Armenian operatives
posing as democracy activists from Georgia and Armenia in order to
finance a revolt planned by the US-based National Democratic Institute
(NDI).
While in Georgia in July, Bashirli told the Armenians he represented
forces “acting on the instructions of the National Democratic Institute
of the USA,” according to a prosecutors’ statement.
He said he had received “specific instructions from representatives
of this organization to prepare a revolution in Azerbaijan,” the
statement said.
Azerbaijan fought and lost a bitter war with Armenia over the
mountainous region of Nagorno Karabakh in the early 1990s and the
two former Soviet republics have yet to sign a formal peace deal.
Both Yeni Fikir and NDI denied they were plotting to oust the regime
of president Ilham Aliyev, with the US group’s Azerbaijan director
Christy Quirk saying the allegations “just aren’t true.”
Bashirli’s deputy Said Nuriyev told AFP the youth leader made the
comments about NDI “because he was drunk and bragging.”
Armenia too rejected on Friday accusations that its secret police
were involved in an alleged plot to overthrow the government in Baku.
The charges Bashirli faces echo similar allegations applied to
politicians who fell out of favor during the decade long rule of the
Aliyev clan, and currently live in exile or languish in prisons.
Since his arrest was announced national television networks have
repeatedly aired footage of Bashirli meeting with the alleged Armenian
agents.
One of the channels, Lider, has interspersed footage from the meeting
— where Bahirli could be seen discussing democracy in Azerbaijan
and drinking with three men — with pictures of Azerbaijanis killed
or mutilated during the Karabakh war.
Azerbaijan’s opposition has slammed the arrest as a smear campaign
orchestrated by the National Security Ministry ahead of parliamentary
elections in November.
Ali Kerimli, the leader of Azerbaijan’s National Front Party with
which Yeni Fikir shares an office, said Bashirli was set up “because
the authorities understand that they don’t stand a chance against
the opposition in a fair fight.”
At the same time the National Front Party has distanced itself from
Yeni Fikir, calling Bashirli’s statements “regrettable.”
Lider aired footage of refugees from the Karabakh war as they
demonstrated in front the Party’s headquarters showering the building’s
facade with eggs on Saturday.
Some observers have predicted the case would expose strains within the
opposition, which formed a loose coalition ahead of the parliamentary
vote earlier this year.
But parties that form the Azadliq opposition block have vowed to
stick with the National Front despite the campaign they claim has
been launched against it.
“Our relationship with the National Front will categorically be
unchanged,” said Sardar Jalaloglu, who leads the Democratic Party
of Azerbaijan. “This set-up was staged by the Ministry of National
Security.”

Suisse – Turquie: le genocide pas aborde au Conseil des Etats
Edicom, Suisse
6 août 2005
BERNE – Contrairement au National, le Conseil des Etats ne se penchera
pas sur le genocide armenien. D’autres pays n’ont pas a montrer du
doigt la Turquie 90 ans après les faits, a justifie le president de
la commission de politique exterieure des Etats.
La commission a decide de ne pas porter l’affaire du genocide de 1915
devant le plenum de la Chambre des cantons, a indique Peter Briner
(PRD/SH). Comme le Conseil federal, la commission estime que l’affaire
n’est pas du ressort du parlement.
Il appartiendrait plutôt aux parties concernees, soit la Turquie et
l’Armenie, de s’en saisir. Une commission mixte d’historiens devrait
“se pencher sur les evenements horribles” comme la Suisse a reflechi
sur son histoire durant la 2e Guerre mondiale.
La Suisse ne doit pas se montrer faible devant la Turquie, a par
ailleurs declare M. Briner en revenant sur l’annulation de l’invitation
du conseiller federal Joseph Deiss dans plusieurs interviews parues
samedi dans la presse alemanique. Elle ne doit pas pour autant
repliquer de la meme facon.
“Il est important de ne pas courber l’echine”, a precise le president
de la commission de politique exterieure. Selon lui, “c’est bien qu’il
y ait eu ici de vives reactions”. Que la Turquie justifie l’annulation
de la visite de Monsieur Deiss par des raisons d’agenda ne correspond
sûrement pas a la verite.
C’est une formule diplomatique typique lorsqu’on ne trouve pas de
meilleure explication, a ajoute M. Briner. “On ne peut s’empecher
de penser que le gouvernement turc essaie de calmer la population en
brassant de l’air.”
Les medias turcs ont manifestement “mobilise l’opinion contre la
Suisse”. L’affaire est liee a la procedure que la justice suisse
a declenchee contre le chef du Parti des travailleurs turcs (PKK)
et contre un historien pour avoir nie le genocide armenien en 1915.
–Boundary_(ID_o9IidhYKpiYqrsjsoIq4vQ)–

Joseph Deiss indésirable en Turquie
Edicom, Suisse
5 août 2005
Ankara invoque des raisons de calendrier pour annuler la visite du
ministre de l’économie – Enquêtes suisses pour négation du génocide
arménien en cause Berne (AP) Le conseiller fédéral Joseph Deiss n’ira
pas en Turquie en septembre prochain. Ankara a annulé la visite prévue,
officiellement pour des raisons de «calendrier». La vraie raison
résiderait toutefois dans les enquêtes ouvertes en Suisse à l’encontre
d’un politicien turc pour négation du génocide arménien. La question
arménienne empoisonne depuis longtemps les relations helvético-turques.
L’ambassade de Suisse à Ankara a reçu le 2 août dernier une note du
ministère turc des affaires étrangères, l’informant que la visite
de Joseph Deiss prévue le 2 septembre prochain était annulée, a
déclaré vendredi le porte-parole du DFI Christoph Hans, confirmant
une information parue dans «Le Temps» et le «Tages-Anzeiger». Motif
invoqué, l’agenda du ministre turc de l’économie Kürsad Tüzmen ne
lui permet pas de rencontrer son homologue suisse à la date convenue.
Si la Turquie devait en réalité avoir annulé la visite à cause des
enquêtes pour négationnisme ouvertes contre le politicien turc Dogu
Perinçek, ce serait regrettable, car la Suisse observe la stricte
séparation des pouvoirs, a souligné le porte-parole du DFI Christoph
Hans. Le DFI espère maintenant que la rencontre prévue entre Joseph
Deiss et son homologue turc puisse être reportée à une date ultérieure.
Dogu Perinçek fait l’objet de deux enquêtes pénales dans les cantons de
Vaud et de Zurich, pour avoir nié publiquement le génocide arménien de
1915, notamment il y a deux semaines à l’occasion de la commémoration
du Traité de Lausanne qui a délimité les frontières de la Turquie
moderne en 1923. Le chef du Parti des travailleurs a été entendu par
le juge d’instruction de Winterthour, un interrogatoire qui fâche
Ankara. Un autre Turc, l’historien Yusuf Halacoglu, est aussi sous
le coup d’une enquête pour négationnisme.
La question du génocide arménien a déjà provoqué de vives tensions
entre Ankara et Berne. Il y a deux ans, la Turquie a annulé une visite
de la ministre des affaires étrangères Micheline Calmy-Rey, après
le vote par le Grabnd Conseil vaudois d’une résolution reconnaissant
le massacre des Arméniens par les Turcs. La cheffe de la diplomatie
helvétique avait dû attendre un an et demi pour se rendre à Ankara.
Le Conseil fédéral doit reconnaître le génocide L’annulation de la
visite de Joseph Deiss fâche les parlementaires, qui ne croient pas
à un pur problème de calendrier. Ankara a voulu faire pression sur
le Conseil fédéral, qui a toujours ménagé la chèvre et le chou entre
les intérêts économiques du pays en Turquie et la question arménienne,
a déclaré à la Radio romande le conseiller national Dominique de Buman
(PDC/FR), président du groupe parlementaire Suisse-Arménie. A ses yeux,
le gouvernement doit au contraire reconnaître le génocide arménien,
comme l’a fait le Conseil national en décembre 2003.
La revendication est partagée par le président de la Commission de
politique extérieure du Conseil national, Erwin Jutztet (PS/FR). A
ses yeux, la susceptibilité de la Turquie sur la question arménienne
et son refus de reconnaître cet épisode de son histoire témoigne par
ailleurs d’une attitude immature vis-à-vis de la démocratie.
–Boundary_(ID_vhsNOCcOxkSoVHiuCXQtMg)–

Neue Zürcher Zeitung
8 August 2005
Völkermord an Armeniern kein Thema im Ständerat
Aussenpolitiker zum Streit mit der Türkei
Bern, 7. Aug. (sda) Der Völkermord an den Armeniern soll im
Ständerat – anders als im Nationalrat, der ihn anerkannt hat –
nicht thematisiert werden. Es sei nicht Sache anderer Länder,
90 Jahre später mit dem Finger auf die Türkei zu zeigen, sagt der
Präsident der Aussenpolitischen Kommission (APK) der kleinen Kammer,
Peter Briner (Schaffhausen, fdp.). Die Kommission sei im Gespräch
zum Schluss gekommen, über den Genozid von 1915 nicht im Plenum zu
befinden. Mit dem Bundesrat teile sie die Meinung, das sei nicht die
Aufgabe des Parlaments. Vielmehr hätten sich die betroffenen Staaten
mit dieser Frage auseinanderzusetzen, also die Türkei und Armenien.
APK-Mitglied Françoise Saudan (Genf, fdp.) stellte gegenüber dem
Westschweizer Radio fest, sie würde sich «unbehaglich fühlen», wenn
man «als Richter der ganzen Welt» aufträte.
Zur Ausladung von Bundesrat Joseph Deiss durch die Türkei sagte
Briner in einem Interview für mehrere Tageszeitungen vom Samstag,
die Schweiz dürfe sich gegenüber der Türkei nicht schwach zeigen. Sie
dürfe deren Verhalten aber auch nicht mit gleicher Münze erwidern.
–Boundary_(ID_6q8LKKh2Akw/WtwZ2Kh94Q)–

Le genocide armenien est une “affaire turque”
swissinfo 6 août 2005 17:58
Contrairement a la Chambre du peuple, la Chambre haute du parlement
suisse ne se prononcera pas sur le genocide armenien par la Turquie.
Peter Briner, president de la commission de politique exterieure du
Senat, estime que des pays tiers n’ont pas a montrer du doigt la
Turquie, 90 ans après les faits.
La commission des affaires etrangères a decide de ne pas porter
l’affaire du genocide de 1915 devant le plenum de la Chambre des
cantons, a indique samedi Peter Briner (Parti radical, droite).
Comme le gouvernement, la commission estime que l’affaire n’est pas
du ressort du parlement.
Il appartiendrait plutôt aux parties concernees, soit la Turquie et
l’Armenie, de s’en saisir. Une commission mixte d’historiens devrait
“se pencher sur les evenements horribles” comme la Suisse a reflechi
sur son histoire durant la 2e Guerre mondiale.
Membre de la commission, Francoise Saudan rencherit. Samedi sur les
ondes de la Radio Suisse romande, la radicale genevoise s’est dite
“mal a l’aise quand nous nous posons en justicier du monde entier”.
Ne pas plier face aux pressions
La Suisse ne doit pas se montrer faible face a la Turquie, meme si
elle ne doit pas pour autant repliquer de la meme facon, a par
ailleurs declare M. Briner.
Le senateur est revenu samedi sur l’annulation par Ankara de la
visite que le president de la Confederation Joseph Deiss devait
effectuer en Turquie en septembre.
Une affaire qui a fait couler beaucoup d’encre ces jours-ci en
Suisse, et qui constitue un nouvel episode d’un bras de fer qui ne
date pas d’aujourd’hui entre la Turquie et la Suisse.
En 2003, rappelons que la visite diplomatique de Micheline Calmy-Rey,
ministre des Affaires etrangères, avait ete reportee de 18 mois.
Motif, le parlement vaudois avait vote un postulat reconnaissant le
genocide armenien.
“Il est important de ne pas courber l’echine”, a precise le president
de la commission de politique exterieure. Selon lui, “c’est bien
qu’il y ait eu ici de vives reactions”. Que la Turquie justifie
l’annulation de la visite de Monsieur Deiss par des raisons d’agenda
ne correspond sûrement pas a la verite.
C’est une formule diplomatique typique lorsqu’on ne trouve pas de
meilleure explication, a ajoute M. Briner. “On ne peut s’empecher de
penser que le gouvernement turc essaie de calmer la population en
brassant de l’air.”
Mobilisation anti-Suisse
Les medias turcs ont manifestement “mobilise l’opinion contre la
Suisse”. L’affaire est liee a la procedure que la justice suisse a
declenchee contre le chef du Parti des travailleurs turcs (PKK) et
contre un historien pour avoir nie le genocide armenien en 1915.
Selon M. Briner, la Turquie sait pourtant très bien que, si elle veut
adherer a l’Union europeenne, elle ne pourra faire l’economie de se
pencher sur la question armenienne.
“Or, la question est delicate en politique exterieure”, a releve le
conseiller aux Etats.
Francoise Saudan n’est, quant a elle, pas aussi categorique. Elle
estime que meme l’UE, dans ses discussions avec la Turquie, a des
exigences concernant les relations avec Chypre, mais ne revient pas
sur le genocide armenien.
–Boundary_(ID_IcNHbH5YUslWJvZRMCvKcQ)–