ARMENIAN AMBASSADOR TO URUGUAY: FACT OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DOES NOT NEED PROOF
PanArmenian News Network
Aug 4 2005
04.08.2005 03:33
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Foreign Relations Commission of the Uruguayan
Parliament has again organized hearings of the issue of the Armenian
Genocide. This time Armenian Ambassador to Uruguay Ara Ayvazyan was
the main person reporting. In the course of the discussion he stated
that «the fact of the Armenian Genocide does not need proof and the
proposal is very dangerous and may turn a trap to Uruguay, which
is known as the first country that has recognized and condemned the
Armenian Genocide.» The Ambassador suggested that Uruguay join the call
of different countries to Turkey to open the Armenian-Turkish border
and establish diplomatic relations with Armenia. After the discussions
MP Lilian Keshishian noted that the proposal of Armenia produced a
good impression. «There is an arrangement available beforehand on
the content of the statement,» she stated. During the debate the
Uruguayan Parliament unanimously reaffirmed that the massacre of
Armenians is a genocide. Deputy Uruguayan FM Belela Erera confirmed
it at the meeting with the Armenian Ambassador. In the course of the
discussion of the Armenian Genocide issue initiated at the instance of
Turkish Ambassador Shorkru Tufan in the Uruguayan Parliament, Turkish
PM Erdogan’s proposal to form an international commission was spoken
about. Turkey has asked Uruguay to take part in the commission work
and promote «determination of the genocide actuality.» Ara Ayvazyan
said he was concerned over the developments and made a proposal on a
meeting with commission members. As the issue referred to Aremnia,
the Ambassador proposed not making any public statements without
acquaintance with Armenia’s point of view. It should be reminded
that Armenian President R. Kocharian officially turned down Turkish
PM’s proposal on the forming of a joint commission, suggesting to
establish bilateral relations instead, reported RFE/RL.
–Boundary_(ID_44xDmLBFZgL+f4kbEZ/JAA)–

LA City Beat, CA
Aug 4 2005
Walk on the Wild Side
Bootlegs reveal a lot about your neighborhood … and you
~ By DONNELL ALEXANDER ~
Illustration by Sean Tejaratchi
I am not nearly as cool as people tend to think I am. For instance,
I roll worse blunts than that chick with the stupid-long Korean nails.
I don’t know where the after-party is later on tonight (so stop asking,
motherfucker). And, as of this writing, I have not been involved in
a threesome.
Which is why I engage bootleg discs. I need to get out more, but
there’s so much to see and so little time. Like a Grateful Dead taper
from back in the day, I watch my DVDs – and listen to the odd CD –
for that ambient information encasing the putative object of art.
Up on Flickr.com there’s a “Crappy Bootleg DVD Covers” photo show.
It’s meant to make fun, but I find the material awesome. Independent
of the gross factual inaccuracies – Spike Lee directed The Passion?
“Jackson Pollack is the greatest living fainter?” And this on the Harry
Potter box? – there’s genius in the anime cover art interpretation for
the film A.I. Plus, that contrived sidelong nude is the Carrie-Anne
Moss scene that might have saved The Matrix Reloaded.
It’s inadvertent genius of this sort that makes me follow bootlegs,
especially in tangible Los Angeles. Like the speakeasies that are
popping up more around the cool parts of town – and that I’m only
cool enough to occasionally hit – bootlegs speak to a life that’s
beyond regulation and ineffably real.
I actually spent money on my first and last bootlegs in Brooklyn,
during the summer of 2001. The CDs? Missy Elliott’s joint, house-music
collection NYC Underground, Vol. 3, and a release that presently eludes
me. My son, then four, and I were outside a kids’ bowling party in
Sunset Park, waiting on a car. I knew it was morally sketchy, so that’s
why I made the move: For the thrill. I might not ever do it again.
And the product was fine; at the very least I cemented an affinity
for house music. Most value was peripheral – the art of the deal and
the presentation of the discs. (I love the look of faded cover art in
a digital age.) Purchasing bootlegs feels less risky than purchasing
drugs or other stolen goods. The objects themselves are transgressive,
but, let’s face it, no one feels at risk for purchasing them. It’s
strictly self-policing that keeps me out of the game.
Nowadays I watch and I listen, but don’t buy. The Gangs of New York
DVD that recently graced my pad has not been consumed. I fetishize
it anyway.
Were it not for this DVD, I might not recognize Thai writing. (Thai
subtitles and Dolby audio are primary to the disc; English, Malaysian,
and “Chinese” are other subtitle options.) If not for this disc, I’d
have continued to think all those businesses in the west portal of my
East Hollywood neighborhood were Armenian. One might call this copy
of Gangs of New York perfect were it not for its promise of “Bouns”
where one might expect bonus material. (If “Bouns” is Thai for nothing,
well, the section has bouns up the ass.)
About a year ago, Baby Mama Deux hit me off with Bad Santa, Peter
Pan, Big Fish, 28 Grams, and a title that presently eludes me. One
of Deux’s 10-year-old students sold her the DVDs for $20 while she
shopped in the Garment District, a fact that created some conflicted
feelings about contributing to an illegal activity. But at least,
she reasoned, the problem child was showing some initiative, and it
wasn’t crack that he proffered.
One can get anything in the Garment District.
Bad Santa was really excellent, a horrible copy but somehow true
to the grimy narrative and in a way preferable to Badder Santa, a
DVD release which in my opinion dragged. But Peter Pan was such an
impressionistic smear of imagery that my then-seven-year-old could
not watch it; his entire appreciation of the myth was tainted. And
as a result I developed a policy against watching any knockoff copy
from which I have any expectation of artistic excellence.
One exception: I did watch Spider-Man 2 in bootleg form while staying
at a Sacramento pad in the summer of ’04. Again and again I tried to
walk past the big screen. But the bootleg was so pristine, its audio
so absolutely clear, I just had to stay and watch the film that was
that week’s biggest hit. Spider-Man 2’s Italian titles gave away the
secret to its fine pedigree. “Made in America” has iffy connotations,
even in the realm of knockoff DVDs.
But Fahrenheit 9/11? Absolutely no watchy. The DVD’s muffled sound
and silhouettes getting popcorn were repellent. Kill Bill Vol. 2?
Still haven’t seen it. I did take in Hollywood sequels and early
Roc-A-Fella releases and decided that Soul Plane is the ultimate
bootleg film: a guilty pleasure atop a guilty pleasure.
One might find fault with my policy. Isn’t it clear, one might ask,
that I’m depriving the slumping biz of much needed income by watching
secondhand bootlegs rather than subscribing to Netflix? Well, the
biz ain’t trying half as hard as I am to control quality, with its
sequels and TV-show remakes and lowbrow spring fare. Therefore, my
standards are a lot more about my tastes than concern for the film
industry. One who doesn’t accept this can kiss my natural black ass.
Of greater importance in my moral universe is remaining part of the
citizenry’s off-the-books library, its unofficial pass-around that
allows anyone to see the town. Or the nation. Or the world.
It’s a beautiful thing, the notion of immigrants from Thailand using
bootlegs to learn an honest American history. The crime is one with
a built-in bouns.
Shit, I used to be a real wild kid. On certain weeknights when I
lived in NYC, I’d party until the Manhattan clubs and bars closed,
then shuffle into my sports-mag gig at 4 a.m. I’d write until near
9, when the ad staff began leaking in. In the bathroom, I’d roll
up a bag of funk – delivered to me in that very same john, natch –
then start making my way up the island. Up through Times Square, past
the delis on the Upper West Side, I did the watcher part of writing,
my gig – in my mind – to the core. Then the A-train dragged me back
to downtown Brooklyn, for coffee and a couple of cannoli and a smoke
in the alley and a matinee at the neighborhood arthouse.
A half-decade later, and things just aren’t the same. There are now
many children to provide for, not to mention a role model to be. So,
when my older son and I scooter past the East Hollywood bootleg man
with his wares laid out on a blanket, we look at the titles and I
tell the boy how the product came to be. I tell him not just about
the Italian Spider-Man, but also the muddled Fahrenheit 9/11. And,
sure, he wonders why we can’t buy Willy Wonka and Episode III. I
explain the desire away, and we don’t buy. I’m older now. I got
responsibilities yo.

Monument honors those lost
By John Ciampa/ Staff Writer
Chelmsford Independent, MA
Aug 4 2005
At the Sts. Vartanantz Armenian Church on Old Westford Road stand
three granite tablets differing in height, meaning and coloration.
The triptych lies stark and still, as if the people that it
represents are actually a million distant echoes cast within the
stoney silence of memory – voices of the past that long for us to
heed their stories of pathos and loss.
This striking memorial, erected to commemorate the 90th
anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, does not just ask for attention
– it demands it.
The monument’s layout is distinctive and rich with symbolism in
order to accurately reflect what happened during the genocide.
Columns of granite rise up from a round pedestal that is
encircled by rows of brick. The bricks form a cross that stretches
from the monument toward the church. Between the arms of the cross
rests a series of benches – erected for relatives who survived,
perished and one marked as “unknown,” signifying those unaccounted
for.
“That bench is very important for me,” says former Chelmsford
High principal George Simonian, a member of Sts. Vartanantz and a
direct descendent of survivors of the genocide.
“So many Armenians were simply taken away and there is no record
of them. I had relatives that were brought out to sea, thrown
overboard and that was it. Others were just taken from their homes,
never to be heard from or seen again,” he said.
Simonian says that everything about the monument is deliberate
and carefully designed. When facing the church in front of the
monument, the three stones symbolize a family – a man, woman and
child – entering the church.
In the late-afternoon sun the monolithic shadows are long and
dark, emphasizing their presence.
A pair of granite spires – cast in the likeness of the church’s
gold dome – guide visitors toward the monument along a path that
extends to the church’s front vestibule. Between the spires, the
horizon drapes a canvas behind the stones that stretch into the
foothills of southern New Hampshire, where merging shades of blue
from the mountains and sky provide a hallowed backdrop.
“We were lucky enough to get have a generous benefactor in William
Hausrath,” says Simonian. He wasn’t Armenian, but his wife Agnes
Manoogian was. He made the donation on her behalf.”
According to Simonian, Hausrath presented the church with the
funds in April 2004.
Simonian motions with his hands across the church’s property as
he recalls the careful positioning of the monument.
“We debated the location,” he explains. “When we noticed the
view from the front of the church overlooking this area, it became
clear that this would be the spot.”
Also seen from the church are a series intricate carvings that
adorn each stone.
According to Sts. Vartanantz parishioner, Jim Magarian, there
are called Khathckars, which hearken back to the stone crosses that
have historically been placed in Armenian monasteries.
“We spared no expense,” says Simonian. “The stones are made of
Barre Gray granite from Vermont, which is the best there is. Local
builders came in and did a tremendous job. We worked with Luz Granite
from Lowell, and Mark Donovan from Westford, a former student of
mine, did the brickwork.”
Dedicated to the men, women and children who lost their lives
during the genocide, each tablet eulogizes the groups who perished.
Their inscriptions read in unison: May God Enlighten Their Souls.
The Armenian Genocide signifies the widespread strife that swept
across the eastern regions of the Ottoman Empire, primarily from
1915-1922, in which Armenia sustained massive losses in both
territory and population.
One of the oldest civilizations in the world, the former
Armenian nation stretched over much of the ancient Middle East.
Today, Armenia occupies only a small area about the size of Maryland,
just north of Iran.
Armenians place blame on the Young Turks – a leading faction
that rose to power within the Ottoman ranks during this period, but
Simonian says that the seeds to the Genocide were sown well before
that.
“Going back to the late-19th century, the Ottomans were growing
increasingly weary of us. We were an ambitious and upwardly mobile
people – and the only Christians in the region.”
Throughout the 20th century, scholars and historians have
discussed the Armenian Genocide in an attempt to place it within its
proper historical context. Much of Armenia’s former lands lie in
present-day Turkey.
Turkish authorities continue to deny the genocide, instead
labeling it as consequence of war (genocide by definition, must
constitute a planned means of mass extermination). Exacerbating the
issue is the fact that it occurred during the outbreak of World War
I, with much of the world distracted by the chaos that was engulfing
Europe at the time.
“It’s not even about the land,” insists Simonian. “We’re simply
looking for some kind of admission. The Germany of today has nothing
to do with the Nazis, yet that doesn’t keep them from acknowledging
the Holocaust.”
“The Turkish government has consistently made attempts to deny
any self-incriminating evidence on the subject,” says Magarian.
“There’s ample evidence showing how they’ve suppressed dialogue and
information within their own country.”
Those who call it a genocide attest that the process by which
Armenians were killed was clinical and calculated, and not the result
of a protracted conflict.
They claim that it began with the murder of Armenian men who
were serving in the Turkish infantry, followed by the rounding up
hundreds of Armenian elites in the Turkish capital of Constantinople
on April 24, 1915, where they were executed.
“They were scholars, businessmen and politicians, essentially
our leaders,” said Simonian.
Then, after having annihilated much of the Armenian male
population, Turkish forces drove the remaining Armenian women and
children in “death marches” into the depths of what is now Syria,
where they were left to perish in the desert heat.
Henry I. Morgenthau was the American Ambassador to
Constantinople from 1913 to 1916. His memoir, “Ambassador
Morgenthau’s Story,” details much of what he witnessed in Armenia.
Published in 1918, it remains one of the most widely cited American
accounts of what took place.
“Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human mind can
devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and injustice the
most debased imagination can conceive, became the daily misfortunes
of this devoted people,” wrote Morgenthau.
Despite Morganthau’s words, the U.S. stands among the nations
that have yet to acknowledge the Genocide, and both the Clinton and
Bush administrations have abstained from referring to it as such,
though President Reagan did use the term at one point during his
tenure.
“The U.S. position is based on a policy of political interest,”
claims Magarian. “Armenia is a small nation that holds little
strategic importance for the U.S., yet Turkey continues to be a key
Middle Eastern ally that we want to appease.”
The list of nations that have officially acknowledged it
continues to grow, however, and includes France, Italy, Russia,
Canada and even the Vatican, among others.
Regardless of where today’s regimes stand, most nations share
the consensus that Armenia suffered immeasurable losses.
“Most estimates place total casualties around 1.5 million,” says
Magarian.
That figure constitutes roughly 60 percent of Armenians who were
living at the time – a proportion equaling that of the Holocaust.
Adolf Hitler would come to invoke the plight of the Armenians some 20
years later when giving orders to round up Jews.
“Many more were deported or abandoned. My father was one of the
children who managed to escape,” adds Magarian.
Many others who also escaped now call the U.S. home, and the
Boston area holds one of the most vibrant Armenian communities in the
country. The Armenian Library and Museum of America is located in
Watertown. Inside, visitors can find a wealth of information on
Armenian history including archived recordings from survivors of the
Genocide.
Like the monument that now stands here in town, it is a testament to
a people who have persevered.

Saint Stepanos Skeletons Could Belong to John, the Baptist
Iranian Cultural Heritage News Agency (IRNA), Iran
Aug 4 2005
Iran’s Armenian Archbishop believes that the newly discovered
skeletons in Saint Stepanos Church could belong to John, the Baptist.
Tehran, 4 August 2005 (CHN) – Following the recent discovery of
skeletons in Saint Stepanos Church, in a letter to CHN, Iran’s
Armenian Archbishop talked of the possibility of their belonging to
John the Baptist.
A few months ago, a team of Iran’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism
Organization (ICHTO) who were studying documents from Iranian churches
for international registration, came to discover some skeletons in
Saint Stepanos Church, located in the northeastern province of East
Azarbaijan.
Saint Stepanos Church is Iran’s second most important church after
Qareh Kelisa (the Black Church) in West Azarbaijan.
With regard to this discovery, Sabveh Serkisian, Iran’s Armenians’
archbishop and head of the Prelacy of Tehran and North of Iran,
wrote a letter which reads as follows:
“With regard to the box found in Saint Stepanos Church of remains of
Apostles, it is said that the box consists of remains of John, the
Baptist. According to Armenian historian, Aracle Davar Yareshti, when
the Taslis-e Moghaddas (Trinity) Church of Old Jolfa was destroyed,
a box of sacred remains and a scroll were found at the location of the
main church altar and handed after a while to Shamon, bishop of Saint
Stepanos Church in Darsham region. The scroll was then transferred
to the afore-mentioned church in 972.
“Most probably the discovered remains are of great historical value.
According to the church tradition, we know that when Gregor was
selected as the bishop of Gheisarieh (Constantinople), on his way back,
Bishop Ghiondios gave him parts of the remains of John the Baptist to
show his affection and respect. Parts of the remains were transferred
to the town of Mush and put in the main church of John, the Baptist.
“The transfer of these remains to another location has been the
result of killings and destructions in the region. Priests and true
Christians changed the location of the skeletons to preserve the
skeletons, and as a French traveler recalls he saw the box when he
was passing Saint Stepanos Church in 16th-early 17th century where
he was told that the box belonged to one of the 12 Apostles of Christ.”
The bones discovered by Iranian experts in Saint Stepanos Chruch
were collected in attendance of a representative from the Prelacy of
Armenian Church and transferred to East Azarbaijan Prelacy until the
completion of the restoration project of the church.
Existence of the bones of Apostles and Christian Saints, namely Saint
Stepanos (saint Etienne), Saint Minos and Daniel, has been pointed
out in different sources including “six journeys of Jean-Baptiste
Tavernier” (1676), some photo-albums in Golestan Palace, and also
the photo archives of Adl clan, which were taken by Ali Khan Vali,
the ruler of northern Azerbaijan in Qajar era.
The discovery of these bones in Saint Stepanos Church highlights the
importance of the church and is hoped to facilitate its registration
on UNESCO World Heritage List as desired by Iranian officials.
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Pravda, Russia
Aug 4 2005
The Museum of Snoring: snorers are worse than criminals
08/04/2005 09:54
Composer Johannes Brahms could outdo the whole orchestra with his
snoring
It is an open secret that snoring is extremely annoying at night, but
it can also make some individuals lose their temper in the daytime.
The museum exposition in Alfeld, a small town in Lower Saxony, is
wholly devoted to the phenomenon of snoring and methods of fighting
with those who snore their heads off.
Poet Marina Novikova wrote a witty “Ode to Snoring”, where this
disorder was presented as a guarantee of immeasurable love: a woman
is ready to forgive her lover for snoring if only he will sleep
beside her.
About 20 percent of all adults snore on a frequent basis. The snoring
ones include women as well men (the latter especially). The British
Snoring and Sleep Apnoea Association conducted a survey which showed
that the majority of snorers (and those who sleep beside them) are
dreaming of getting rid of this problem. The most common after-effect
of snoring is connected with insufficient sleep and waking up tired
(81 percent). In many cases snoring causes headache, which can spoil
sex life and even lead to divorce. Women, whose partners snore in
their sleep, also complain that they do not get satisfaction from sex.
About 400 more or less effective snore remedies are displayed in
Alfeld, which is situated not far from Hildesheim (Lower Saxony).
Physician and researcher Joseph Alexander Wirth collected them on his
own initiative. Not only did he collect them but also exposed them to
the public in the local “Museum of Snoring” (“Schnarchmuseum Alfeld”).
One of the army jokes says: “How do you get rid of snoring? – “You
should sleep in a gas mask!”
In the museum there is an “anti-snoring mask” which is a hundred years
old and represents leather straps that were wrapped around the chin
so that the mouth would remain close.
“These are the real torture tools, – Mr. Wirth grins. – During the
Independence War in the US a cannonball was sewn down to the inner
side of the snoring soldiers’ uniforms so that they would not turn
over onto their backs and disturb fellow soldiers. A similar method
is applied even nowadays, although instead of heavy cannonball thick
foam plastic pillow is used or tennis-balls are sewn down to the back.”
Here one can see the so-called “ear suppository” which is paled into
the snorer’s ear so he would not turn over on his side. Another
object represents hollow tubule filled with essential oils, which
during the lighting-up get into respiratory tract prevent snoring.
Its inventor left on e question unanswered: how do you sleep with this
thing? Another case displays prosthetic devices for oral cavity,
which help to pull the upper jaw to the front by force. “Pins”
for nose, which stretch nostrils to the point when a sleeper gets
more oxygen. The devices, which are fastened on hands or legs and
start vibrating in the time of snoring. Or the cruelest of all –
electroshock.
Many of the odd items in the cabinet of curiosities were gifted to
55-year-old Wirth by his patients. “I kept them in the basement, but
then I thought why not to make a museum out of this?” the collector
of rarities tells.
He collected the rest of curiosities through the Internet and
finally opened “The Museum of Snoring” in 2000. Mr. Wirth was greatly
assisted by the local Schlafapnoe society. About thousand of people
visit a small house in the residential area of Alfeld every year.
The doctor thinks that “people must come to the museum smiling and
leave it having learnt something”.
The snorers may be comforted by the fact that many famous people
suffered from the same trouble: British PM Winston Churchill, for
instance. The lover of Armenian cognac “warbled” so much at night
that lady Churchill escaped from the bedroom in panic. After decades
of happy marriage she slept in the bedroom with special acoustic
insulation. They say that composer Johannes Brahms could outdo the
whole orchestra with his snoring. Some say that physicist Albert
Einstein and even the mighty Greek god of wine, Dionysus, were among
those who loved to snore.
There is a whole collection of stories and caricatures devoted to this
topic in the museum. In addition to books and pictures one can see
a variety of dolls and fabric animals, which can snore when squeezed.
Igor Bukker

Mammadyarov, Rice discuss key issues
Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
Aug 4 2005
Baku, August 3, AssA-Irada — Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov has
expressed his content with the results of the meeting he held with
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington on Tuesday.
Mammadyarov, who arrived in Washington for a three-day visit on Monday,
has told journalists that during the meeting views were exchanged on
the role of the United States, as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group,
in the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Upper
Garabagh, the current situation in the Caucasus, energy projects
in the Caspian basin, as well as on preparations for Azerbaijan’s
parliamentary elections due in November and US-Azerbaijan ties.
“Rice pledged that the United States will strengthen its efforts to
settle the Upper Garabagh conflict,” he said.
Touching upon the discussions on the upcoming elections, the minister
said that the United States wants to see the advancement of democracy
in Azerbaijan.
“As for bilateral economic relations, we held discussions on
the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas
pipelines as well as e the Gars-Akhalkalaki-Baku railway project
which is highly assessed by the United States.” During the visit,
Mammadyarov will hold meetings in the Pentagon and National Security
Council and attend a roundtable, together with representatives of the
National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute and
International Foundation for Election Systems. The Minister is also
expected to brief members of the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce
on the economic reforms underway in Azerbaijan and speak at the
influential US Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.*

Northern Cyprus gives warm welcome to Azeris
AzerNews, Azerbaijan
Aug 4 2005
80 Azerbaijani businessmen and journalists arrived in the
non-recognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) last
Wednesday on a first direct flight from a foreign country to the
Turkish-populated part of the ethnically divided island over the
last 31 years. Citizens of Northern Cyprus welcomed the Azeri
representatives with tears in their eyes,
AzerNEWS correspondent reported from the TRNC capital Lefkosha.
Chairman of the Union of Azerbaijani and Turkish Businessmen Ahmet
Erentok heading the delegation told journalists upon arrival that the
landing of an Azerbaijani airplane at the Ercan Airport of Cyprus is
of great importance.
Economic relations between Azerbaijan and TRNC and investment
opportunities in the country, which faces international isolation, were
discussed during the three-day visit. The two countries’ businessmen
signed two agreements on cooperation in conclusion of a business
forum on Friday, covering trade and banking. The participants also
discussed ways of collaborating in the area of tourism, construction
and agriculture.
‘One nation-three states’ UATB chairman Erentok said that Azerbaijan
and Turkey have been referred to as ‘one nation-two states’ so
far. “But from now on, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Northern Cyprus should
be called ‘one nation-three states’, he said during the businessmen’s
meeting with the national leader, ex-president of Northern Cyprus
Rauf Denktas on Friday.
Denktas called the opening of the Baku-Lefkosha flight as a significant
event for Northern Cyprus, saying that Azerbaijan should be considered
a model for other countries.
“Like the Garabagh region of Azerbaijan, the Northern Cyprus is
still under occupation. The Greek community of Southern Cyprus is
not willing to unite with the Turkish community of Cyprus within a
federation and is trying to keep the entire Cyprus under its control.
But they won’t succeed in this. TRNC exists and will continue to
exist.”
Erentok underlined that UATB will further work to develop relations
between Azerbaijan and Northern Cyprus.
In conclusion of the meeting, Denktas was elected honorary member
of UATB.
Denktas and his son Serdar Denktas, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign
Minister, will visit Baku on August 15.
Serdar Denktas told the AzerNEWS correspondent in Lefkosha that the
goal of the three-day visit is to extend gratitude to President Ilham
Aliyev for the recent opening of a direct flight from Azerbaijan to
the TRNC.
Flights ‘will end blockade’ The opening of flights from Azerbaijan
to the Northern Cyprus is the start of extricating the republic from
blockade, TRNC President Mehmet Ali Talat told ANS TV channel.
Talat said the flights between the two countries mean the ‘end of
a blockade’. He recalled that only Turkish aircraft have landed at
the Ercan Airport located in the northern part of Cyprus so far,
expressing confidence that the flights from Azerbaijan to his country
will provide suitable conditions for other countries to carry out
flights to Northern Cyprus as well.
Deputy Prime Minister Serdar Denktas, in an interview with local
Trend news agency, regarded Azerbaijan’s decision to open flights
as ‘courageous’. “Some countries wanted to take this step before,
but subsequently backed away from it on fears of pressures from the
international community and Greek Cyprus”, he said.
Diplomatic tensions Greek Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos has
condemned the Azerbaijani businessmen’s visit. “Opening flights to
Northern Cyprus is unacceptable”, Turkish NTV channel quoted him
as saying.
Papadopoulos said he has forwarded a letter expressing his objection
to President Ilham Aliyev. “The leadership of Greek Cyprus has decided
to take active steps to prevent such flights. We have filed a complaint
to the International Civil Aviation Organization”, the document says.
Papadopoulos said he is disappointed with the fact that Azerbaijan
became the first country to forge ties with Northern Cyprus and vowed
to do his utmost to prevent other countries from establishing relations
with TRNC.
Azerbaijan has advised not to seek any political motives behind the
establishment of business ties with TRNC. The visit was organized
not by the government but by private companies, said Foreign Ministry
official Tahir Taghizada. “The opening of a flight to Northern Cyprus
should not be politicized or seen as a change in official Baku’s
foreign policy”, he said.
Informal reports say that Greece has threatened to open a flight to
Upper Garabagh in response to Azerbaijan’s decision to start direct
flights from Baku to Lefkosha.
A presidential administration official has said that Azerbaijan’s
plans to forge ties with TRNC should not perturb anyone. The country
will continue working in this direction. “These steps are aimed at
preventing isolation of Cyprus Turks from the international community”,
said head of the President’s Office international relations department
Novruz Mammadov.
President Ilham Aliyev said in a recent meeting with Turkish Minister
for Defense Vecdi Gonul in Baku that Azerbaijan will take ‘important
steps’ to help Northern Cyprus come out of isolation.
The statement follows the President’s earlier promise to support
Northern Cyprus and ensure investments in the republic.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan said during his visit
to Russia that Baku’s recent steps ‘de facto imply recognition of
the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’. “I hope that Azerbaijan’s
policy in this area will continue”, he said.

AN INCOVENIENT PATRIOT
By David Rose
Vanity Fair
September 2005 Issue
Love of country led Sibel Edmonds to become a translator for the
F.B.I. following 9/11. But everything changed when she accused
a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish
nationals. Fired after sounding the alarm, she’s now fighting for
the ideals that made her an American, and threatening some very
powerful people.
In Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, December 2, 2001 was fine but
cool, the start of the slide into winter after a spell of unseasonable
warmth. At 10 o’clock that morning, Sibel and Matthew Edmonds were
still in their pajamas, sipping coffee in the kitchen of their
waterfront town house in Alexandria, Virginia, and looking forward
to a well-deserved lazy Sunday.
Since mid-September, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, Sibel had
been exploiting her fluency in Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani as
a translator at the F.B.I. It was arduous, demanding work, and
Edmonds-who had two bachelor’s degrees, was about to begin studying
for her master’s, and had plans for a doctorate-could have been
considered overqualified. But as a naturalized Turkish-American,
she saw the job as her patriotic duty.
The Edmondses’ thoughts were turning to brunch when Matthew answered
the telephone. The caller was a woman he barely knew-Melek Can
Dickerson, who worked with Sibel at the F.B.I. “I’m in the area
with my husband and I’d love you to meet him,” Dickerson said. “Is
it O.K. if we come by?” Taken by surprise, Sibel and Matthew hurried
to shower and dress. Their guests arrived 30 minutes later. Matthew,
a big man with a fuzz of gray beard, who at 60 was nearly twice the
age of his petite, vivacious wife, showed them into the kitchen. They
sat at a round, faux-marble table while Sibel brewed tea.
Melek’s husband, Douglas, a U.S. Air Force major who had spent several
years as a military attache in the Turkish capital of Ankara, did
most of the talking, Matthew recalls. “He was pretty outspoken, pretty
outgoing about meeting his wife in Turkey, and about his job. He was
in weapons procurement.” Like Matthew, he was older than his wife,
who had been born about a year before Sibel.
According to Sibel, Douglas asked if she and Matthew were involved
with the local Turkish community, and whether they were members of
two of its organized groups-the American-Turkish Council (A.T.C.) and
the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (A.T.A.A.). “He said
the A.T.C. was a good organization to belong to,” Matthew says. “It
could help to ensure that we could retire early and live well, which
was just what he and his wife planned to do. I said I was aware of
the organization, but I thought you had to be in a relevant business
in order to join.
“Then he pointed at Sibel and said, ‘All you have to do is tell
them who you work for and what you do and you will get in very
quickly.'” Matthew could see that his wife was far from comfortable:
“She tried to change the conversation to the weather and such-like.”
But the Dickersons, says Matthew, steered it back to what they
called their “network of high-level friends.” Some, they said,
worked at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. “They said they even
went shopping weekly for [one of them] at a Mediterranean market,”
Matthew says. “They used to take him special Turkish bread.”
Before long, the Dickersons left. At the time, Matthew says, he found
it “a strange conversation for the first time you meet a couple. Why
would someone I’d never met say such things?”
Only Sibel knew just how strange. A large part of her work at the
F.B.I. involved listening to the wiretapped conversations of people
who were the targets of counter-intelligence investigations. As she
would later tell investigators from the Justice Department’s Office
of the Inspector General (O.I.G.) and the U.S. Congress, some of
those targets were Turkish officials the Dickersons had described
as high-level friends. In Sibel’s view, the Dickersons had asked
the Edmondses to befriend F.B.I. suspects. (In August 2002, Melek
Can Dickerson called Sibel’s allegations “preposterous, ludicrous
and slanderous.”)
Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy
targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C., one of
the organizations that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke
to staff members at the A.T.C., one of the organizations that the
Dickersons allegedly wanted her and her husband to join. Sibel later
told the O.I.G. she assumed that the A.T.C.’s board-which is chaired
by Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national-security
advisor-knew nothing of the use to which it was being put. But the
wiretaps suggested to her that the Washington office of the A.T.C. was
being used as a front for criminal activity.
Sibel and Matthew stood at the window of their oak-paneled hallway
and watched the Dickersons leave. Sibel’s Sunday has been ruined.
Immediately and in the weeks that followed, Sibel Edmonds tried
to persuade her bosses to investigate the Dickersons. There was
more to her suspicions than their peculiar Sunday visit. According
to the documents filed by Edmonds’s lawyers, Sibel believed Melek
Can Dickerson had leaked information to one or more targets of an
F.B.I. investigation, and had tried to prevent Edmonds from listening
to wiretaps of F.B.I. targets herself. But instead of carrying out a
thorough investigation of her allegations, at the end of March 2002
the F.B.I. fired Edmonds.
Edmonds is not the first avowed national security whistle-blower to
suffer retaliation at the hands of a government bureaucracy that feels
threatened or embarrassed. But being fired is one thing. Edmonds has
also been prevented from proceeding with her court challenge or even
speaking with complete freedom about the case.
On top of the usual prohibition against disclosing classified
information, the Bush administration has smothered her case beneath
the all-encompassing blanket of the “state-secrets privilege”-a
Draconian and rarely used legal weapon that allows the government,
merely by asserting a risk to national security, to prevent the
lawsuits Edmonds has filed contesting her treatment from being heard
in court at all. According to the Department of Justice, to allow
Edmonds her day in court, even at a closed hearing attended only by
personnel with full security clearance, “could reasonably be expected
to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security
of the United States.”
Using the state-secrets privilege in this fashion is unusual, says
Edmonds’s attorney Ann Beeson, of the American Civil Liberties
Union. “It also begs the question: Just what in the world is the
government trying to hide?”
It may be more than another embarrassing security scandal. One
counter-intelligence official familiar with Edmonds’s case has told
Vanity Fair that the F.B.I. opened an investigation into covert
activities by Turkish nationals in the late 1990’s. That inquiry
found evidence, mainly via wiretaps, of attempts to corrupt senior
American politicians in at least two major cities-Washington and
Chicago. Toward the end of 2001, Edmonds was asked to translate some
of the thousands of calls that had been recorded by this operation,
some dating back to 1997.
Edmonds has given confidential testimony inside a secure Sensitive
Compartmented Information facility on several occasions: to
congressional staffers, to investigators from the O.I.G., and to the
staff from the 9/11 commission. Sources familiar with this testimony
say that, in addition to her allegations about the Dickersons, she
reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert
relationship with a very senior politician indeed-Dennis Hastert,
Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since
1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands
of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors
and information. “The Dickersons,” says one official familiar with
the case, “are only the tip of the iceberg.”
It’s safe to say that Edmonds inherited her fearless obstinacy from
her father, Rasim Deniz, who died in 2000. Born in the Tabriz region
of northwestern Iran, many of whose natives speak Farsi (Persian),
Turkish, and Azerbaijani, he was one of the Middle East’s leading
reconstructive surgeons, but his forthright liberal and secular
opinions brought him into a series of conflicts with the local
regimes. One of Sibel’s earliest memories is of a search of her
family’s house in Tehran by members of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret
police, who were looking for left-wing books. Later, in 1981, came a
terrifying evening after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist revolution,
when Sibel was 11. She was waiting in the car while her father went
into a restaurant for takeout. By the time Deniz returned, his vehicle
had been boxed in by government S.U.V.’s and Sibel was surrounded by
black-clad revolutionary guards, who announced they were taking her
to jail because her headscarf was insufficiently modest.
“My father showed his ID and asked them, ‘Do you know who I am?,'”
Sibel says. “He had been doing pro bono work in the slums of south
Tehran for years, and now it was the height of the Iran-Iraq war. He
told them, ‘I have treated so many of your brothers. If you take
my daughter, next time I have one in my operating room who needs an
amputation at the wrist, I will cut his arm off at the shoulder.’ They
let me go.”
It was time to get out. As soon as he could, Deniz abandoned his
property and his post as head of the burn center at one of Tehran’s
most prestigious hospitals, and the family fled to Turkey.
When Sibel was 17, she wrote a paper for a high-school competition. Her
chosen subject was Turkey’s censorship laws, and why it was wrong to
ban books and jail dissident writers. Her principal was outraged, she
says, and asked her father to get her to write something else. Denis
refused, but the incident caused a family crisis. “My uncle was mayor
of Istanbul, and suddenly my essay was being discussed in an emergency
meeting of the whole Deniz tribe. My dad was the only one who supported
what I’d done. That was the last straw for me. I decided to take a
break and go to the United States. I came here and fell in love with
a lot of things-freedom. Now I wonder: was it just an illusion?”
Sibel enrolled at a college in Maryland, where she studied English
and hotel management; later, she received bachelor’s degrees at George
Washington University in criminal justice and psychology, and worked
with juvenile offenders. In 1992, at age 22, she had married Matthew
Edmonds, a divorced retail-technology consultant who had lived in
Virginia all his life.
For a long time, they lived an idyllic, carefree life. They bought
their house in Alexandria, and Sibel transformed it into an airy
spacious haven, with marble floors, a library, and breathtaking views
across the Potomac River to Washington. Matthew had always wanted to
visit Russia, and at Sibel’s suggestion they spent three months in
St. Petersburg, working with a children’s hospital charity run by the
cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Sibel’s family visited America often,
and she and Matthew spent their summers at a cottage they had bought
in Bodrum, Turkey, on the Aegean coast.
“People said we wouldn’t last two years,” Sibel says, “And here we
still are, nearly 13 years on. A lot of people who go through the
kind of experiences I’ve had find they put a huge strain on their
marriage. Matthew is my rock. I couldn’t have done it without him.”
In 1978, when Sibel was eight and the Islamists’ violent prelude to
the Iranian revolution was just beginning, a bomb went off in a movie
theater next to her elementary school. “I can remember sitting in the
car, seeing the rescuers pulling charred bodies and stumps out of the
fire. Then, on September 11, to see this thing happening here, across
the ocean-it brought it all back. They put out a call for translators,
and I thought, Maybe I can stop this from happening again.”
The translation department Edmonds joined was housed in a huge,
L-shaped room in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office. Some 200
to 300 translators sat in this vast, open space, listening with
headphones to digitally recorded wiretaps. The job carried heavy
responsibilities. “You are the front line,” Edmonds says. “You are
the filter fro every piece of intelligence which comes in foreign
languages. It’s down to you to decide what’s important-‘pertinent,’
as the F.B.I. calls it, and what’s not. You decide what requires
verbatim translation, what can be summarized, and what should be marked
‘not pertinent’ and left alone. By the time this material reaches
the agents and analysts, you’ve already decided what they’re going
to get.” To get this right requires a broad background of cultural
and political knowledge: “If you’re simply a linguist, you won’t be
able to discern these differences.”
She was surprised to discover that until her arrival the F.B.I. had
employed no Turkish-language specialists at all. In early October she
was joined by a second Turkish translator, who had been hired despite
his having failed language-proficiency tests. Several weeks later,
a third Turkish speaker joined the department: Melek Can Dickerson. In
her application for the job, she wrote that she had not previously
worked in America. In fact, however, she had spent two years as an
intern at an organization that figured in many of the wiretaps-the
American-Turkish Council.
Much later, after Edmonds was fired, the F.B.I. gave briefings
to the House and Senate. One source who was present says bureau
officials admitted that Dickerson had concealed her history with the
A.T.C., not only in writing but also when interviewed as part of her
background security check. In addition, the officials conceded that
Dickerson began a friendship at the A.T.C. with one of the F.B.I.’s
targets. “They confirmed that when she was supposed to be listening
to his calls,” says one congressional source. “To me, that was like
asking a friend of a mobster to listen to him ordering hits. She might
have an allegiance problem. But they seemed not to get it…They
blew off their friendship as ‘just a social thing.’ They told us
‘They had been colleagues at work, after all.'”
Shortly after the house visit from the Dickersons, Sibel conveyed her
version of the event to her supervisor, Mike Feghali-first orally and
then in writing. The “supervisory language specialist” responsible for
linguists working in several Middle Eastern languages, Feghali is a
Lebanese-American who had previously been an F.B.I. Arabic translator
for many years. Edmonds says he told her not to worry.
To monitor every call on every line at a large institution such as
the Turkish Embassy in Washington would not be feasible. Inevitably,
the F.B.I. listens more carefully to phones used by its targets, such
as the Dickersons’ purported friend. In the past, the assignment of
lines to each translator has always been random: Edmonds might have
found herself listening to a potentially significant conversation
by a counter-intelligence target one minute and an innocuous
discussion about some diplomatic party the next. Now, however,
according to Edmonds, Dickerson suggested changing this system,
so that each Turkish speaker would be permanently responsible for
certain lines. She produced a list of names and numbers, together
with her proposals for dividing them up. As Edmonds would later tell
her F.B.I. bosses and congressional investigators, Dickerson had
assigned the American-Turkish Council and three other “high-value”
diplomatic targets, including her friend, to herself.
Edmonds found this arrangement very questionable. But she says that
Dickerson spent a large part of that afternoon talking with Feghali
inside his office. The next day he announced in an e-mail that he
had decided to assign the Turkish wiretaps on exactly the basis
recommended by Dickerson.
Like all his translators, Edmonds was effectively working
with two, parallel lines of management: Feghali and the senior
translation-department bosses above him, on one hand, and, on the
other, the investigators and agents who actually used the material she
translated. Early in the new year, 2002, Edmonds says, she discovered
that Dennis Saccher, the F.B.I.’s special agent in charge of Turkish
counter-intelligence, had developed his own, quite separate concerns
about Dickerson.
On the morning of January 14, Sibel says, Saccher asked Edmonds to
come into his cramped cubicle on the fifth floor. On his desk were
printouts from the F.B.I. language-department database. They showed
that on numerous occasions Dickerson had marked calls involving her
friend and other counter-intelligence targets as “not pertinent,”
or had submitted only brief summaries stating that they contained
nothing of interest. Some of these calls had a duration of more than
15 minutes. Saccher asked Edmonds why she was no longer working
on these targets’ conversations. She explained the new division
of labor, and went on to tell him about the Dickersons’ visit the
previous month. Saccher was appalled, Edmonds says, telling her,
“It sounds like espionage to me.”
Saccher asked Edmonds and a colleague, Kevin Taskasen, to go back into
the F.B.I.’s digital wiretap archive and listen to some of the calls
that Dickerson had marked “not pertinent,” and to re-translate as many
as they could. Saccher suggested that they all meet with Feghali in a
conference room on Friday, February 1. First, however, Edmonds and
Taskasen should go to Saccher’s office for a short pre-meeting-to
review their findings and to discuss how to handle Feghali.
Edmonds had time to listen to numerous calls before the Friday meeting,
and some of them sounded important. According to her later secure
testimony, in one conversation, recorded shortly after Dickerson
reserved the targets’ calls for herself, a Turkish official spoke
directly to a U.S. State Department staffer. They suggested that the
State Department staffer would send a representative at an appointed
time to the American-Turkish Council office, at 1111 14th St. NW,
where he would be given $7,000 in cash. “She told us she’d heard
mention of exchanges of information, dead drops-that kind of thing,”
a congressional source says. “It was mostly money in exchange for
secrets.” (A spokesperson for the A.T.C. denies that the organization
has ever been involved in espionage or illegal payments. And a
spokesperson for the Assembly of Turkish American Associations said
that to suggest the group was involved with espionage or illegal
payments is “ridiculous.”)
Another call allegedly discussed a payment to a Pentagon official,
who seemed to be involved in weapons-procurement negotiations. Yet
another implied that Turkish groups had been installing doctoral
students at U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information
about black market nuclear weapons. In fact, much of what Edmonds
reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal
activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the
profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military
technologies to the highest bidder.
Before entering the F.B.I. building for their Friday meeting with
Saccher, Edmonds and Taskasen stood for a while on the sidewalk,
smoking cigarettes. “Afterwards, we went directly to Saccher’s
office,” Edmonds says. “We talked for a little while, and he said
he’d see us downstairs for the meeting with Feghali a few minutes
later, at nine A.M.” They were barely out of the elevator when
Feghali intercepted them. He didn’t know they had just come from
Saccher’s office.
“Come on, we’re going to start the meeting,” he said. “By the way,
Dennis Saccher can’t be there, He’s been sent out somewhere in the
field.” Later, Edmonds says, she called Saccher on the internal
phone. “Why the hell did you cancel?” she asked. Bewildered, he
told her that immediately after she and Taskasen had left his office
Feghali phoned him, saying that the conference room was already in use,
and that the meeting would have to be postponed.
Edmonds says Saccher also told her that he had been ordered not
to touch the case by his own superiors, who called it a “can of
worms.” Despite his role as special agent in charge of Turkish
counter-intelligence, he had even been forbidden to obtain copies of
her translations. Saccher had two small children and a settled life
in Washington. If he dared to complain, Edmonds says, he risked being
assigned “to some fucked-up office in the land of tornadoes.”
Instead, Edmonds was ushered into the windowless office of
Feghali’s colleague, translation-department supervisor Stephanie
Bryan. Investigating possible espionage was not a task for which
Bryan had been trained or equipped.
Bryan heard Edmonds out and told her to set down her allegations
in a confidential memo. Edmonds says that Bryan approved of her
writing it at home. Edmonds gave the document to Bryan on Monday,
February 11. Early the following afternoon, the supervisor summoned
Edmonds. Waiting in a nearby office were two other people, Feghali
and Melek Can Dickerson. In front of them were Edmonds’s translations
of the wiretaps and her memo.
“Stephanie said that she’d taken my memo to the supervisory special
agent, Tom Frields,” Edmonds says. “He apparently wouldn’t even
look at it until Mike Feghali and Dickerson and seen it and been
given a chance to comment. Stephanie said that, working for the
government, there were certain things you didn’t do, and criticizing
your colleagues’ work was one of them. She told me, ‘Do you realize
what this means? If you were right, the people who did the background
checks would have to be investigated. The whole translation department
could be shaken up!’ Meanwhile, I was going to be investigated for
a possible security breach-for putting classified information on my
home computer. I was told to go the security department at three P.M.”
Before Edmonds left, Dickerson had time to sidle over to her
desk. According to Edmonds, she made what sounded like a threat:
“Why are you doing this, Sibel? Why don’t you just drop it? You know
there could be serious consequences. Why put your family in Turkey
in danger over this?”
Edmonds says the F.B.I.’s response to her was beginning to shift from
indifference to outright retaliation. On February 13, the day after
her interview with the bureau security office, three agents came
to her home and seized the computer she shared with her husband. “I
hadn’t had time to back up the data, and I told them that most of my
business was on that computer, Matthew Edmonds says.
“An agent called the next morning,” Matthew says. “He told me,
‘Everything on your computer is destroyed, and we didn’t back
it up.’ They were playing games. When I got the computer back,
they had wiped out everything. Four days later, I got a CD-ROM with
it all backed up.” A lifelong conservative Republican, Matthew was
being shocked into changing his worldview. I was so naïve. I mean,
what do you do if you think your colleague might be a spy? You go to
the F.B.I.! I thought if Sibel’s supervisor wasn’t fixing this problem
she should go to his superior, and so on up the chain. Someone would
eventually fix it. I was never a cynical person. I am now.”
While the agents were examining the Edmondses’ computer, Mike Feghali
was writing a memo for his own managers, stating “there was no basis”
for Sibel’s allegations. A day earlier, an F.B.I. security officer
had interviewed Dickerson. A report issued by the O.I.G. in January
2005 states, “The Security Officer did not challenge the co-worker
[Dickerson] with respect to any information the co-worker provided,
although that information was not consistent with F.B.I. records. In
addition…he did not review other crucial F.B.I. records, which would
have supported some of Edmonds’ allegations.” Instead, he treated
her claims as “performance issues,” and “seemed not to appreciate or
investigate the allegation that a co-worker may have been committing
espionage.
According to a congressional source, the fact that Edmonds was a
mere contract linguist, rather than an agent, made her claims less
palatable. “They seemed to be saying, ‘We don’t need someone like this
making trouble,'” the source says. “Yet, to her credit, she really did
go up through the chain of command: to her boss, his boss, and so on.”
Edmonds reached the top of the language-section management on
February 22, when she met with supervisory special agent Tom Frields,
a gray-haired veteran who was approaching the end of a long bureau
career. At first it seemed he was trying to set her mind at rest:
“He told me, I just want to assure you that everything is fine, and as
far as you’re concerned, your work on this matter is done,'” Edmonds
says. “I told him, ‘No, it’s not fine. My family is worried about
possible threats to their safety in Turkey.’ His face went through
a transformation. He warned me that these issues were classified at
the highest level and must not be disclosed to anyone. He started to
interrogate me: Who had I told? He said if it was anyone unauthorized
he could have me arrested.”
Edmonds’s meeting with Frields on the 22nd was probably her last
chance to save her job. The inspector general’s 2005 report disclosed,
“Immediately after the meeting, [Frields] began to explore whether the
F.B.I. had the option to cease using Edmonds as a contract linguist.”
Four days later the bureau’s contracting unit told him, “If it was
determined that [she] was unsuitable, the F.B.I. would have sufficient
reason to terminate her contract.” Stymied by Frields, Edmonds tried to
go still higher, and on March 7 she was granted an audience with James
Caruso, the F.B.I.’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism
and counter-intelligence. Edmonds says he listened politely for more
than an hour but took no notes and asked no questions. Afterward,
Matthew picked her up and they drove to the Capital Grille for an
early lunch. It was only 11:30 and the restaurant was still empty,
but as the Edmondses began to study their menus, they saw two men in
suits pull up outside in an F.B.I.-issue S.U.V. They came inside and
sat down at the next table.
“They just sat and stared at Sibel,” Matthew says. “They took out
their cell phones, opened them, and put them on the table. They didn’t
eat or drink-just sat, staring at Sibel, the whole time we were there.”
Modified cell phones, Sibel knew, are commonly used by bureau agents
as a means of making covert recordings.
That afternoon, Sibel wrote to two official bodies with powers to
investigate the F.B.I.-the Justice Department’s internal affairs
division, known as the Office of Professional Responsibility, and
its independent watchdog, the O.IG. She went on to send faxes to
the Senate Intelligence Committee and Senators Charles Grassley,
Republican from Iowa, and Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, both
of whom sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to say that she had
found evidence of possible national-security breaches.
On March 8, Sibel appeared at a dingy little office in Washington’s
China Town, where she was polygraphed. According to the 2005
inspector general’s report, the purpose of this examination was
to discover whether she had made unauthorized disclosures of
classified information. “She was not deceptive in her answers,”
the O.I.G. reported.
Dickerson was polygraphed two weeks later, on March 21, and she too
was deemed to have passed. But, according to an official cited in
the report, the questions she was asked were vague and unspecific.
“The polygraph unit chief admitted that questions directly on point
could have been asked but were not.” Nevertheless, then and for a long
time afterward, “the FBI continued to rely on the [Dickerson] polygraph
as support for its position that Edmonds’ allegations were unfounded.”
Dickerson’s polygraph test, however unsatisfactory, seems to have
sealed Edmonds’ fate at the FBI. The following afternoon, she was
asked to wait in Stephanie Bryan’s office. “Feghali saw me sitting
there and leaned across the doorway,” Edmonds says. “He tapped his
watch and said, ‘In less than an hour you will be fired, you whore.'” A
few minutes later, she was summoned to a meeting with Frields. They
were joined by Bryan and George Stukenbroeker, the chief of personal
security and the man in charge of investigating her case. Edmonds
had violated every security rule in the book, Stukenbroeker said.
A hulking security guard arrived to help escort her from the
building. Edmonds asked if she could return to her desk to retrieve
some photos, including shots of her late father of which she had
no copies. Bryan refused, saying, “You’ll never set foot in the
FBI again.”
Bryan promised to forward them, says Edmonds, who never got the
photos back. Edmonds looked at Frields. “You are only making your
wrongdoing worse, and my case stronger. I will see you very soon,”
she told him. According to Edmonds, Frields replied, “Soon maybe,
but it will be in jail. I’ll see you in jail.” (When interviewed by
the O.I.G., Frields and another witness denied making this comment.)
Matthew was waiting outside. “I’m not a crybaby,” Sibel says. “But as
I got into my husband’s car that afternoon, I was in floods, shaking.
As soon as she returned home from the February meeting where Dickerson
allegedly cautioned her not to endanger her family in Turkey, Sibel
called her mother and sister in Istanbul, even though it was the middle
of the night there. Sibel is the oldest of three sisters. The youngest
was studying in America and living with the Edmondses in Alexandria,
but the middle sister – whose name Edmonds wishes to protect – was
enjoying a successful career at an international travel company based
in Istanbul. The 29-year-old was also engaged to be married. Within
days of receiving Sibel’s call, she flew with her mother to Washington.
Early in April, Sibel and Matthew were having lunch in their favorite
Thai restaurant in Old Town Alexandria – a precious chance, with their
house now fully occupied with Sibel’s family, to share a private moment
together. “My phone rang,” Sibel says. “It was my middle sister. She
said something really bad had happened and I must come back at once.”
The sister’s Istanbul neighbor had just phoned, saying that
two policemen had knocked on her door, asking for the sister’s
whereabouts. They would not disclose the reason, saying only that
it was an “intelligence matter.” They also left a document. Sent by
Tevfik Asici of the Atakoy Branch Police Station and dated April 11,
it was addressed to Sibel’s sister and read, “For an important issue
your deposition/interrogation is required. If you do not report to
the station within 5 days, between 09:00 and 17:00, as is required
by Turkish law CMK.132, you will be taken/arrested by force.”
In July 2002, with a written recommendation from Senator Grassley,
Sibel’s sister requested political asylum in the United States. Her
application statement cited the threat allegedly made by Dickerson,
adding that Sibel would be considered “a spy and a traitor to Turkey
under Turkish law, and the Turkish police will use me to get at
her. Turkish police are known for using cruelty and torture during
interrogation; subjects are kept without advice to family members
and often disappear with no trace.” Estranged from Sibel, the sister
remains in America, unable to go home.
Edmonds did what numerous avowed whistleblowers had done before:
she appealed to congress, and she got a lawyer – David Colapinto of
the Washington firm of Kohn, Kohn and Calapinto, which advertises
itself on its Web site as specializing in cases of this kind. He filed
suit under the Freedom of Information Act for full disclosure of what
happened inside the bureau, and submitted a claim for damages for the
violation of Edmonds’s constitutional rights. By August he was ready to
depose Douglas Can Dickerson. But before their scheduled deposition,
the couple abruptly left the country. Douglas had been assigned to
an air-force job in Belgium. Virgil Magee, a U.S. Air Force spokesman
in Belgium, confirms that Dickerson remains on active duty in Europe,
but refuses to say exactly where.
That fall, Attorney General John Ashcroft tried to wipe out Edmonds’s
legal action by invoking the state secrets privilege. This recourse,
derived form English common law, has never been the subject of
any congressional vote or statute. Normally, says Ann Beeson of
the A.C.L.U., it is used be the government when it wants to resist
the legal “discovery” in court of a specific piece of evidence that
it fears might harm national security if publicized. But in Edmonds
case Ashcroft argued that the very subject of her lawsuit was a state
secret. To air her claims in front of federal judges would jeopardize
national security.
This, Beeson says, had distinct advantages for the F.B.I. and the
Department of Justice: it meant they did not have to contest the
merits of her claims. Moreover, the substance of the arguments they
used to justify this level of secrecy was and is secret itself. The
full version of Ashcroft’s declaration invoking the privilege,
filed on October 18, 2002, was classified, and in the public case for
blocking Edmonds’s action rested on the mere assertion that it would
be damaging to proceed. Later, in 2004, the law firm of Motley Rice
sought to depose her for a pending case on behalf of the families of
9/11 victims. Immediately, Ashcroft asserted the privilege again.
Motley Rice submitted a list of questions it wanted to ask Edmonds,
almost all of which were prohibited. Among them: “When and where
were you born?,” “What languages do you speak?,” and “Where did you
go to school?”
Edmonds still wanted to fight, and to challenge Ashcroft in court. But
over the next few months, the relationship with her lawyers began to
suffer. “Let’s face it, taking on the D.O.J. is no joke, especially
in Washington,” Edmonds says.
It was the absolute low point. I tried to find another firm,” she says,
“but as soon as I mentioned the state-secrets privilege, it was like,
‘Turn around, go back, and by the way the clock is running at $450
an hour.’ I must have been turned away by 20 firms.”
The Dickersons, the Justice Department, and the F.B.I. and its
relevant personnel declined to comment for this article. In August
2002, Melek Can Dickerson told the Chicago Tribune, “both the
F.B.I. and the Department of Justice have conducted separate
investigations of [Edmonds’s] claims…. They fired her and,
interestingly, they continued my contract.”
In September 2002, Colonel James Worth of the Office of the Air Force
Inspector General said that, in response to a letter from Edmonds,
there had been a “complete and thorough review of Major [Douglas]
Dickerson’s relationship with the American-Turkish Council” that found
“no evidence of any deviation from the scope of his duties.” Edmonds
says she was not interviewed by those conducting the review.
Edmonds’ treatment by the F.B.I. seems to fit two baleful patterns:
the first is the bureau’s refusal to address potentially disastrous
internal-security flaws; the second is a general tendency among
national-security agencies to retaliate against whistle-blowers.
Amid the lush greenery of his parents’ garden in Plattsmouth,
Nebraska; former F.B.I. senior intelligence-operations specialist
John Cole describes how these institutional inclinations combined to
destroy his career. Now 44, Cole joined the F.B.I. in 1985. By the
late 1990’s, he was running undercover operations in the Washington
area, focusing on counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence. Later,
while playing a key role in the 9/11 investigation, he became the
F.B.I.’s national counter-intelligence program manager for India,
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Early in the fall of 2001, Cole was asked to assess whether a woman
who had applied to work as a translator of Urdu, Pakistan’s national
language, might pose a risk to security. “The personnel security
officer said she thought there was something that didn’t seem right,”
Cole says. “I went through the file, and it stuck out a mile: she
was the daughter of a retired Pakistani general who had been their
military attache in Washington.” He adds that, to his knowledge,
“Every single military attache they’ve ever assigned has been a known
intelligence officer.”
After September 11, this association looked especially risky. The
Pakistani intelligence service had trained and supported the Taliban
in Afghanistan, and still contained elements who were far from happy
with President Pervez Musharraf’s pro-American policies. Cole gave
his findings to the security officer. “Well done,” she said. “You’ve
found it.”
A week later, she called Cole again, to say that the woman had started
work that morning with a top-secret security clearance. F.B.I. director
Robert Mueller had promised Congress that the bureau would hire lots
of new Middle Eastern linguists, and normal procedures had been
short-circuited as a result. As of July 2005, the woman was still
a bureau translator. Sibel Edmonds said she remembers her well – as
the leader of a group that pressed for separate restrooms for Muslims.
Cole says the incident was only one of several that caused him to doubt
the quality and security of the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts, and,
like Edmonds, he says he tried to fix the problems he saw by going
up the chain of command. Getting rid of an agent of his stature
was a lot more difficult than firing a contract linguist. Cole
says the retaliation began when, after years of glowing reports,
his annual appraisal found his work in one area to be “minimally
acceptable.” Next, he was placed under investigation by the Office
of Professional Responsibility, first on a charge that he lied
on a routine background check, and then, after he had disclosed
classified information without authorization. Finally, he was demoted
to menial roles: “They literally had me doing the Xeroxing” Bitterly
disillusioned, he says, he resigned in March 2004.
“According to the terms of our employment, whistle-blowing is an
obligation,” Cole says, “We sign a piece of paper every year saying
we will report any mismanagement or evidence of a possible crime. But
the management’s schtick is that if you draw attention to the bureau’s
shortcomings you’re disgracing it.
Cole is one of about 50 current and former members of the FBI,
C.I.A., National Security Agency, and other bodies who have made
contact recently with Sibel Edmonds. Another is Mike German, one
of the bravest and most successful counterterrorism agents in the
bureau’s history, who penetrated a neo-Nazi gang in Los Angeles and
a militia group in Seattle and brought them to justice.
German made his bed of nails in 2002 when he was asked to get involved
in an investigation into a suspected cell of Islamist terrorists. “I
came down and reviewed the case, and it was a complete mess,” he
says. “There were violations of FBI policy and violations of the
law. As someone who had been through successful terrorism prosecutions,
I knew you couldn’t afford to make mistakes.”
Like Cole, German says he thought himself obliged to report what was
going wrong, not to penalize other agents but in the hope of putting
it right. “I though the bureau would do the right thing: that the
case would get back on track, and we’d get the opportunity to take
action against the bad guys involved.” Instead, he says, he faced
the familiar litany of escalating retaliation – including an internal
investigation of his own work on the terrorist cell case. “Bear in
mind that only a handful of people have ever infiltrated terrorist
groups,” German says. “You’d think that after 9/11 they might have
been interested in that. But word came back to me that I’d never get a
counterterrorism case again.” He resigned from the bureau in June 2004.
As I talked to whistle-blowers, I had the impression that those treated
the worst were among the brightest and best. There could be no clearer
example than Russ Tice, and 18-year intelligence veteran who has
worked for the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) and
American’s eavesdroppers, the National Security Agency. “I dealt with
super-sensitive stuff,” he says. “I obviously can’t talk about it,
but I had operational roles in both Afghanistan and Iraq.”
It was at D.I.A. in the spring of 2001 that he wrote a report setting
down his suspicions about a junior collage, a Chinese-American
who Tice says was living a lavish lifestyle beyond her apparent
means. Although she was supposed to be working on a doctorate,
he noticed her repeatedly in the office, late at night, reading
classified material on an agency computer. “It’s not like I obsessed
over the issue,” Tice says. “I did my job, and then 9/11 happened,
and I was a very busy boy.”
He moved to the N.S.A. toward the end of 2002. The trigger for
his downfall the following April was the arrest of Katrina Leung;
the F.B.I. informant accused of spying for China while having an
affair with a bureau agent. It prompted Tice to send a classified
e-mail to the D.I.A. security section, commenting that the Leung case
showed that the F.B.I. was “incompetent.” The implication was that
the D.I.A. could prove it’s competence by fully investigating the
junior colleague.
Tice, a big, powerful man with a forthright manner, has to pause
to control his emotions when he describes what happened as a
consequence. “I was sent for an emergency psychiatric evaluation. I
took all the computer tests and passed them with flying colors. But
then the shrink says he believes I’m unbalanced. Later he said I’m
suffering from “paranoid ideation.” He was examined by an independent
psychiatrist, who “found no evidence of mental disorder.” But he had
already been denied access to secure places at N.S.A. As a result,
this highly commended technical-espionage expert was put to work
in the N.S.A.’s motor pool, “wiping snow off cars, vacuuming them,
and driving people around. People looked at me like I had bubonic
plague.” (The D.I.A. did not respond to a request for comment, and
an agency spokesperson said the agency does not discuss personnel
matters.)
After about eight months of this purgatory, apparently an attempt to
persuade him to resign, he was placed on “administrative leave.” Like
other whistle-blowers, he tried to redress his treatment. In August
2004, Tice wrote letters to members of the House and Senate. Six days
later, the N.S.A. began the formal process which would lead to his
getting fired, and to having his clearance revoked permanently. “What
happened to me was total Stalin-era tactics,” he says. “Everyone I
know or ever worked with says I’m perfectly sane. Yet I just don’t
know what to do next. I’ve been in intelligence all my life, but
without a security clearance, I can’t practice my trade.”
Echoing Cole and German, one of the congressional staffers who
heard Edmonds’s secure testimony likens the FBI to a family, “and
you don’t take your problems outside it. They think they’re the best
law enforcement agency in the world, that they’re beyond criticism
and beyond reproach.” To an outside observer that ethos alone might
explain the use of the state secrets privilege against Edmonds. But,
the staffer adds, some of the wiretaps she said she translated
“mentioned government officials.” Here may lie an entirely different
dimension to her case. Vanity Fair has established that around the time
the Dickersons visited the Edmondses, in December 2001, Joel Robertz,
an F.B.I. special agent in Chicago, contacted Sibel and asked her to
review some wiretaps. Some were several years old, others more recent;
all had been generated by a counter-intelligence that had its start
in 1997. “It became apparent that Chicago was actually the center of
what was going on.”
Its subject was explosive; what sounded like attempts to bribe
elected members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican. “There was
pressure within the bureau for a special prosecutor to be appointed
and take the case on, “the official says. Instead, his colleagues
were told to alter the thrust of their investigation – away from
elected politicians and toward appointed officials. “This is the
reason why Ashcroft reacted to Sibel in such an extreme fashion,”
he says “It was to keep this from coming out.”
In her secure testimony, Edmonds disclosed some of what she recalled
hearing. In all, says a source who was present, she managed to listen
to more than 40 of the Chicago recordings supplied by Robertz. Many
involved an F.B.I. target at the city’s large Turkish Consulate,
as well as members of the American-Turkish Consulate, as well as
members of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish
American Associates.
Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references
to large scale drug shipments and other crimes. To a person who
knew nothing about their context, the details were confusing and it
wasn’t always clear what might be significant. One name, however,
apparently stood out – a man the Turkish callers often referred
to by the nickname “Denny boy.” It was the Republican congressman
from Illinois and Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. According to
some of the wiretaps, the F.B.I.’s targets had arranged for tens of
thousands of dollars to be paid to Hastert’s campaign funds in small
checks. Under Federal Election Commission rules, donations of less
than $200 are not required to be itemized in public filings.
Hastert himself was never heard in the recordings, Edmonds told
investigators, and it is possible that the claims of covert payments
were hollow boasts. Nevertheless, an examination of Hastert’s federal
filings shows that the level of un-itemized payments his campaigns
received over many years was relatively high. Between April 1996 and
December 2002, un-itemized personal donations to the Hastert for
Congress Committee amounted to $483,000. In contrast, un-itemized
contributions in the same period to the committee run on behalf of
the House majority leader, Tom Delay, Republican of Texas, were only
$99,000. An analysis of the filings of four other senior Republicans
shows that only one, Clay Shaw of Florida, declared a higher total in
un-itemized donations than Hastert over the same period: $552,000. The
other three declared far less. Energy and Commerce Committee chairman
Joe Barton, of Texas, claimed $265,000; Armed Services Committee
chairman Duncan Hunter, of California, got $212,000; and Ways and
Means Committee chairman Bill Thomas, of California, recorded $110,000.
Edmonds reportedly added that the recordings also contained repeated
references to Hastert’s flip-flop, in the fall of 2000, over an
issue which remains of intense concern to the Turkish government –
the continuing campaign to have Congress designate the killings of
Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 a genocide. For many years,
attempts had been made to get the house to pass a genocide resolution,
but they never got anywhere until August 2000, when Hastert, as
Speaker, announced that he would give it his backing and see that
it received a full house vote. He had a clear political reason,
as analysts noted at the time: a California Republican incumbent,
locked in a tight congressional race, was looking to win over his
district’s large Armenian community. Thanks to Hastert, the resolution,
vehemently opposed by the Turks, passed the International Relations
Committee by a large majority. Then, on October 19, minutes before
the full House vote, Hastert withdrew it.
At the time, he explained his decision by saying that he had received
a letter from President Clinton arguing that the genocide resolution,
if passed, would harm U.S. interests. Again, the reported content
of the Chicago wiretaps may well have been sheer bravado, and there
is no evidence that any payment was ever made to Hastert or his
campaign. Nevertheless, a senior official at the Turkish Consulate
is said to have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert
to withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000.
Hastert’s spokesman says the congressman withdrew the genocide
resolution only because of the approach from Clinton, “and to insinuate
anything else just doesn’t make any sense.” He adds that Hastert has
no affiliation with the A.T.C. or other groups reportedly mentioned
in the wiretaps: “He does not know these organizations.” Hastert is
“unaware of Turkish interests making donations,” the spokesman says,
and his staff has “not seen any pattern of donors with foreign names.”
For more than years after Edmonds was fired, the Office of the
Inspector General’s inquiry ground on. At last, in July 2004, its
report was completed – and promptly labeled classified at the behest
of the F.B.I. It took months of further pressure before a redacted,
unclassified version was finally issued, in January 2005. It seemed
to provide stunning vindication of Edmond’s credibility.
“Many of Edmonds’ core allegations relating to the co-worker [Melek Can
Dickerson] were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses,”
the report said. “We believe that the F.B.I. should have investigated
the allegations more thoroughly.”
The F.B.I. had justified firing Edmonds on the grounds that she had a
“disruptive effect,” the report went on. However, “this disruption
related primarily to Edmonds’ aggressive pursuit of her allegations
of misconduct, which the F.B.I. did not believe were supported and
which it did not adequately investigate. In fact, as we described
throughout our report, many of her allegations had basis in fact,”
the report read. “We believe … that the F.B.I. did not take them
seriously enough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most
significant factor in the F.B.I.’s decision to terminate her services.”
Meanwhile, Edmonds had new lawyers: the A.C.L.U.’s Ann Beeson, who is
leading the challenge to the state-secrets privilege, and Mark Zaid, a
private attorney who specializes in national-security issues. Zaid has
filed a $10 million tort suit, citing the threats to Edmonds’s family,
her inability to look after her real-estate and business interests
in Turkey, and a series of articles in the Turkish press that have
vilified her.
In July 2004, a federal district court had ruled in favor of the
government’s use of the state-secrets privilege. Like Ashcroft’s
declaration, its opinion contained no specific facts. Next came a
bizarre hearing in the D.C. appeals court in April 2005. The room
was cleared of reporters while Beeson spoke for 15 minutes. Then
Beeson and Edmonds were also expelled to make way for the Department
of Justice lawyers, who addressed the judges in secret. Two weeks
later, the court rejected Edmond’s appeal, without expanding on the
district court’s opinion. At press time, she was set to file a brief
with the U.S. Supreme Court. If the court agrees to take the case,
the government’s reasons for its actions may finally be forced into
the open; legal experts say the Supreme Court has never allowed
secret arguments.
A week after the April appeal hearing, Edmonds gathered more than 30
whistle-blowers from the F.B.I., C.I.A., National Security Agency,
Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies to brief staffers
from the House and Senate. Among the whistle-blowers were Daniel
Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971,
and Coleen Rowley, the F.B.I. agent from Minneapolis who complained
that Washington ignored local agents who in August 2001 had raised
concerns about a flight student named Zacharias Moussoui, who has
since admitted being an al-Qaeda terrorist.
Many of those present had unearthed apparent breaches of national
security; many aid their careers had been wrecked as a result. At
a press conference after the briefings, Congressman Edward Markey,
Democrat of Massachusetts, praised Edmonds and her colleagues
as “national heroes,” pledging that he would introduce a bill
to make it a crime for any agency manager to retaliate against
such individuals. Afterward, the whistle-blowers mingled over hors
d’oeuvres and explored their common ground and experiences. By July,
they are working to formalize their not-for-profit campaign group, the
National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. “When they took on Sibel,”
says Mike German, who is now the coalition’s congressional liaison,
“they made the wrong woman mad.”
“I’m going to keep pushing this as long as I can, but I’m not going
to get obsessional,” Edmonds says. “There are other things I want
to do with my life. But the day the Iranians tried to arrest me,
my father told me, “Sibel, you only live your life once. How do you
choose to live? According to your principles, or in fear?” I have
never forgotten those words.”
–Boundary_(ID_Ln/YiTYPgwI+JGmyqreqeA)–

Resource Investor, VA
Aug 4 2005
Monumental Opportunity in Azerbaijani Gold & Copper
By Stephen Clayson
03 Aug 2005 at 11:28 PM EDT
LONDON (ResourceInvestor.com) — One of the most intriguing new issues
of the year so far is Anglo Asian Mining [AIM: AAZ], which made its
market debut last Friday after raising an impressive £20m to fund
the exploration and development of its gold and copper concessions
in Central Asian petrostate Azerbaijan.
The company is the result of several years’ effort on the part of John
H. Sununu, formerly US President George H.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff,
and Reza Vaziri, formerly a Minister at the Imperial Court of the Shah
of Iran, both of whom worked to secure the mineral exploration rights
to substantial amounts of Azerbaijan before forming AAM in order to try
and develop them. Sununu and Vaziri now sit on the company’s board,
the latter as Chairman. Among others, the board also includes ex-UK
Energy Minister Tim Eggar.
AAM’s Chief Executive Charles Hancock, a corporate financier
by background, reports that the company’s flotation was twice
oversubscribed, even at its comparatively large value of £20m. To have
raised such an amount is indicative of a company with something of a
buzz about it, given the softness arguably afflicting the market for
junior resource stocks in London, though this condition is probably
better characterised as retrenchment after overexcitement.
So far since their flotation, AAM shares have more than held their
own in trading, rising from an initial price of 77p each to just under
90p. This reflects interest in the company’s very large portfolio of
assets, which purportedly contains all in around 15.6moz of Soviet
classified gold equivalent resources with potential according to
the company for up to 78moz more – a hefty figure indeed if it can
be verified.
But how does Azerbaijan stack up as a viable location for
realising these resources? The country’s recent past is a chequered
one. After gaining independence from the Soviet Union by dint of its
disintegration in 1991, Azerbaijan entered a period of dire political
instability. By the mid 1990s the situation had simmered down under
the yoke of the now deceased President Heydar Aliyev. Aliyev has
now been succeeded as President by his son Ilham, who rules in an
essentially absolutist fashion and has maintained ostensive stability
in the country for some time. Nonetheless, the country carries a high
degree of political risk to foreign investors.
Of concern too is a lingering conflict with neighbouring
Armenia over the majority ethnic Armenian province of Azerbaijan,
Nagorno-Karabakh. While this conflict has been in abeyance for some
time and the withdrawal of Armenian forces from the affected area is
expected during the next few years, a flare up is still a possibility.
AAM actually claims substantial mineral licences within
Nagorno-Karabakh, some parts of which are presently being mined on an
ad hoc basis by opportunistic parties, but the company is currently
unable to gain access. It hopes that this situation will eventually be
rectified if and when a lasting settlement regarding the area between
Armenia and Azerbaijan is reached and a withdrawal of Armenian troops
is agreed, but for now the licences cannot effectively be touched
and the company itself ascribes them no significant value.
In Azerbaijan’s favour as a location for mining investment, Hancock
avers that it in fact belies its reputation for turbulence, and is a
reasonable place to work. The country undeniably has its benefits as
far as the industry is concerned, these being most notably extremely
cheap energy and an abundance of cheap labour that includes experienced
geologists and mine workers.
The presence of British Petroleum as the largest extractor of
Azerbaijan’s extensive hydrocarbon reserves is also a stabilising
factor, given that the company is rumoured to have the ear of the
government in a significant way, and trickle-down revenue from this
sector of the economy, particularly with energy prices as they are,
goes some way towards promoting relative social order.
However overall, investment in Azerbaijan still carries a considerable
degree of risk in terms of the potential for political instability,
administrative difficulties or open conflict, either internecine or
with Armenia. In partial palliation though, the steering of AAM through
any troubles that may emerge in Azerbaijan is where the heavyweight
political content of the company’s board may come into its own.
The legal substrate of AAM’s involvement in Azerbaijan is a 30 year
Production Sharing Agreement with the country’s government, a bargain
which is expected to attribute approximately 55% of any resulting
cash flow to AAM. The agreement covers ground amounting to 1062sqkm,
not including the acreage claimed in the unruly Nagorno-Karabakh
region in which the PSA in theory also applies. Within the currently
accessible ground twenty two mineral prospects can be identified,
of which eight have been reviewed by the company to date.
Of these eight, AAM has selected one prospect that it hopes to bring
rapidly to production at a rate of around 250,000oz gold per year.
Other priorities for the company over the coming two years, the period
for which its initial tranche of funding is planned to last, will be
the reclassification to Western standards various Soviet reserves and
resources and the undertaking across its property portfolio of other
developmental tasks, including the completion of two pre-feasibility
and two full blown feasibility studies.
AAM believes that several practical factors will in time conspire to
make it a low cost producer of copper and gold. These are namely: the
fact that 7 of its 8 prospects would, if proven amenable to production,
be open pit mines of higher than average grade material; that all its
sites are relatively accessible by road and rail and comparatively
well supplied with water and power; and that no issues are anticipated
with disturbance of either the environment or the local populace.
The potential of AAM is clearly almost Brobdingnagian, and hence so are
the possible returns for its shareholders. Nevertheless, the company
must beware the distracting complexity of being a small outfit juggling
a large portfolio of properties in a region of a world that can have
its problems. To its advantage though, AAM can boast an impressive
board of directors of wide ranging experience and connections, and
some very interesting mineral assets. As such, it merits attention.
–Boundary_(ID_Ae0dl7wxhUGqVrhiTOv77Q)–

International Crisis Group expects peace accord during Aliyev-Kocharian talks
Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
Aug 4 2005
Baku, August 3, AssA-Irada — The International Crisis Group hopes
for a peace accord at the upcoming meeting of the Azerbaijani and
Armenian presidents Ilham Aliyev and Robert Kocharian in Kazan, Russia.
ICG is an organization engaged in the prevention of deadly conflicts
worldwide.
“An agreement on the Upper Garabagh conflict settlement may be reached
at the August 26 meeting of the two Presidents. The talks on the issue
carried over the past year enable this conclusion”, the organization’s
project director on South Caucasus Sabin Frasier told Radio Liberty.
Frasier said that the people were not provided with enough information
on peace talks, which has led to public discontent and different
speculations in the media.
“Regardless of whether any agreement is reached, the Azerbaijani and
Armenian government should provide the people with clear information.
Otherwise, the public will disapprove any issue being agreed upon.”
The International Crisis Group’s regular monthly report says that the
mediating OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, during their recent visit to the
region, expressed optimism concerning the peace process. The media
have been covering the issue of holding a ‘referendum’ in Garabagh,
which is denied by the Azerbaijan Foreign Ministry, it said.
“Although public opinion remains harsh in Azerbaijan, it is relatively
mild in Armenia”, the report said. It also indicated that with the
parliament election approaching in the country, international pressure
on Azerbaijan is increasing, as the United States, European Union
and OSCE are making statements calling for a free and fair vote.*