Armenian president delays visit to France

YEREVAN. April 4 (Interfax) – Armenian President Robert Kocharian
has delayed his visit to France scheduled for April 4 because of a
leg injury, a source in the governmental press service told Interfax
on Monday.

Diplomats are coordinating a new date for the visit, the source said.

The president planned to discuss the Karabakh settlement process
with the French president, which co-chairs the OSCE Minsk Group for
Nagorno-Karabakh together with Russia and the United States.

Saakashvili Comments on the Armenian President’s Visit

Civil Georgia, Tbilisi
2005-04-04 12:11:12

In an interview with the Rustavi 2 television network on April 3,
President Saakashvili said that there was nothing surprising in
Armenian President Robert Kocharyan’s unplanned visit to Georgia on
April 1-2.

“When there are some issues that need to be discussed, or even if there
are not any, we can visit each other without any prior notifications
and meet and have a talk. We will always have something to talk about
with our neighbors, including Armenia and Azerbaijan. Because, we
are inter-linked, inter-dependent, there are many mutual problems,
so you would be a fool to reject these contacts,”

Saakashvili denied speculations that Robert Kocharyan arrived
in Tbilisi at the request of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Armenia is an independent state and a well-disposed country towards
Georgia,” Saakashvili said.

–Boundary_(ID_bR5ZBR68LpDa0PHSRUZTcw)–

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Experts hear death bells ringing for Russia’s CIS
By Marielle Eudes, Agence France-Presse

Manila Times, Philippines
Monday, April 04, 2005

MOSCOW: The Commonwealth of Independent States, an organization
loosely uniting all former Soviet republics minus the three Baltic
states, was always fragile to begin with, but with three consecutive
revolutions among its members within a year and a half, it is now
all but crumbling.

Even Russia, which has been the organization’s driving force since
its inception 14 years ago, now seems increasingly resigned to seeing
the 12-member CIS sink into irrelevance.

The CIS was founded in December 1991 on the very day the Soviet Union
disappeared. Dominated by Moscow, it was meant to be the instrument
that would allow Russia to retain its influence over the former
Soviet empire.

But over the past year and a half, three faithful Kremlin allies
were toppled in peaceful revolutions: Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia,
Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine, and, last week, Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan.

In Moldova, the revolution occurred as a quiet change of hats at the
top-the ruling Communists who came to power on a pro-Russia ticket
won a recent election fielding a clear Western-friendly agenda.

In Georgia and Ukraine, the new authorities have swapped their
predecessors’ pro-Kremlin allegiance for a clearly pro-Western stance.

Even though Kyrgyzstan’s new interim leaders have vowed to continue
their deposed predecessor’s Moscow-friendly policies, the lightning
toppling of the government there has spawned speculation that the
CIS would soon collapse.

“The CIS is currently undergoing the most critical phase of its
history,” Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus,
recently admitted. “There is more and more talk about its uselessness
… It has transformed, but no one really knows into what any more.”

Even Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed the organization’s
insignificance, during a visit to Armenia last week.

The CIS was only created “to allow a civilized divorce” between
the Soviet republics and “never had economic super-tasks,” Putin
said. But it remains “a useful club for exchanging information and
studying political and humanitarian questions,” he said.

Even if this discussion club does survive, indications are that it
will be little more than an empty shell, a far cry from the 1990s’
grandiose declarations on a common, 12-member common economic space
and the thousands of joint documents its members have signed over
the years, observers said.

“Many suspected the CIS was not viable, but the Russian president’s
declarations are its official epitaph,” the Russian weekly Itogy
wrote last week.

Besides their shared Soviet past, the 12 members of the CIS never
had much in common.

Some, like Armenia and Azerbaijan, have waged war on each other over
disputed land, in this case the Nagorno Karabakh enclave. Some,
like Georgia and Ukraine, allowed the opposition to own media,
while the leaders of others, like Belarus and Turkmenistan, turned
to authoritarianism reminiscent of Soviet times.

Consensus among all was always minimal, and reached only on such
uncontroversial issues like sharing each other’s air space or fighting
terrorism.

As a result, “the CIS eventually ceased to interest its main
financial sponsor, Russia,” Russian daily Vremya Novostyey wrote
earlier this week.

“With US [military] bases standing along Russian bases in Central
Asia, US military specialists being invited to Georgia while Tbilisi
is trying to get rid of Russian military, and peaceful revolutions
being staged in one CIS member after the other, Moscow has come to
the pragmatic conclusion that it is better off investing its money
and its efforts” in more useful relations, Vremya Novostyey added.

This does not mean, however, that the Kremlin has renounced all
ambitions in the post-Soviet space. But it will increasingly act
through other channels.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday inaugurated a new
economic center aimed at encouraging integration within the zone.

He said efforts should now be concentrated on agreements signed
between two countries, like the loose Russian-Belarus “Union,” four
countries, like the Economic Space uniting Russia, Belarus, Ukraine
and Ka­zakhstan, and six countries, like the Collective Security
Treaty grouping Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus
and Russia.

“The CIS has played an important part, but it must now be replaced
by more efficient mechanisms,” said the center’s new director,
Alexander Lebedev

–Boundary_(ID_h/1vV/R4VCfc5iFjKUcAxw)–

Armenian community in Upper Garabagh should be considered Azeri citizens”

Baku, April 2, AssA-Irada

Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers should meet frequently
to achieve results in the “Prague talks”, Foreign Minister Elmar
Mammadyarov said.

“If the Prague talks” are suspended or yield no results, a new
situation with settlement of the Upper Garabagh conflict will
emerge.” Mammadyarov said he could not elaborate on whether military
operations will be launched, saying that the conflict will not be
solved through military action.

“We should consider the Armenian community in Upper Garabagh the
citizens of Azerbaijan. From this point of view, there is a need for
maintaining peace in Azerbaijan’s territory” the Minister said.*

Upper Garabagh’s Azeri community leader criticizes MG co-chairs

Baku, April 2, AssA-Irada

Leader of the Azerbaijani community of Upper Garabagh Nizami Bahmanov
stated that the OSCE Minsk Group (MG) co-chairs are delaying settlement
of the Upper Garabagh conflict, at a meeting with Dimitrij Rupel,
the OSCE chairman-in-office, on Saturday.

Bahmanov told a news briefing that he came up with a proposal relating
to the involvement of all MG members in the process. “Italy, Turkey,
Finland and Sweden, members of the MG, adhere to an unbiased position
on the conflict,” said Bahmanov, noting that the MG co-chairs ‘have
frozen’ the process.

Bahmanov noted that he extended to Rupel his dissatisfaction
with some provisions mentioned in the report prepared by the OSCE
fact-finding mission that conducted monitoring in the conflict zone.
“The fact that the report does not mention Armenian’s involvement in
the illegal settlements is unfair,” he said.

Bahmanov went on to say that ceasefire breaches on the frontline
become frequent after the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of
Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution on Upper Garabagh and Armenian
Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian failed to meet with his Azerbaijani
counterpart in Prague.

“By breaching ceasefire, Armenia intends to keep the people living
close to the frontline in fear,” Bahmanov added.*

Prosecutor: Slayings Of Foreigners Solved
By Galina Stolyarova, STAFF WRITER

The St Petersburg Times
#1057, Friday, April 1, 2005

NEWS

City Prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev on Wednesday announced that the
murders of two foreigners last year have been solved, and has stated
unequivocally that the motive was racial hatred.

He said the suspects in the killing of Khursheda Sultanova, nine,
who was stabbed to death on Feb. 9, and those who murdered Vietnamese
student Vu An Tuan on Oct. 13 have been charged. Both murders produced
reactions of horror, fear and condemnation from city leaders and
the public.

“Seven of Khursheda’s attackers have been charged with hooliganism,
and one – with the racially motivated murder of a helpless person,”
Zaitsev said. “The guy who is charged with the murder was 14 years
old when the crime was committed.”

Fourteen youths face charges over the slaying of Tuan near a student
hostel on Vasilyevsky Island.

The prosecutor refused to give any names.

The investigation revealed that the defendants, who were aged between
14 and 21, had committed other crimes against foreigners and Russian
nationals, Zaitsev said.

“Five new criminal cases have already been opened,” the prosecutor
added.

Hooliganism is the usual charge against those who attack foreign
citizens in St. Petersburg, with law enforcement agencies apparently
reluctant to level more serious charges when racist motives are
alleged.

The city prosecutor’s office has been criticized by human rights
advocates for ignoring such motives when witnesses report that
attackers have chanted phrases such as “Russia for the Russians.”

Zaitsev acknowledged that the city has problems with extremist groups,
but said it should not be exaggerated.

“In many cases, crimes against foreigners and citizens of former
Soviet states have common, domestic, rather than racial or nationalist
motives,” the prosecutor said.

Governor Valentina Matviyenko made an enthusiastic statement Wednesday,
saying that “all ethnically motivated crimes in the city have been
solved.”

“Our city, which is known to the country and to the world for its
intelligentsia and tolerance, has several times been shocked by
horrible murders on racial grounds,” Matviyenko said in her annual
televised speech. “We are not going to tolerate the escapades of
extremists. […] I firmly say that we will confront all manifestations
of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and discrimination.”

But some experts say it is much too early to trumpet
successes. Matviyenko’s statement sounds overblown to human rights
advocates, who note that the murder of Nikolai Girenko, the country’s
leading expert on ethnic crimes, who was gunned down on the doorway
of his apartment on June 19, 2004, hasn’t been solved.

Vladimir Lukin, the federal ombudsman for human rights who released his
2004 report on Thursday, expressed concern about growing nationalism
and chauvinism in the country.

On Wednesday, Zaitsev also announced the start of a new investigation
against an extremist group.

Eight people have been detained in connection with the activities
of Mad Crowd, a group of young nationalists who have been attacking
natives of Armenia, Azerbaijan, China and Korea.

The group’s organizer has gone missing, Zaitsev said.

Earlier this week web site Fontanka.ru reported that 15 Arab students
were planning to drop out of their universities in St. Petersburg
and leave the city in protest over the regular attacks on them.

The publication quoted Gannam Mohamad, head of the Union of Arab
students, as saying that “the situation has gotten to the point when
the students can only guess whether they will make it to the hostel
each night.”

But on Thursday, Fontanka said Mohamad denied the earlier statement.

“There is no mass exodus of Arab students from the city, and there
won’t be,” he was quoted as saying in a letter to Alexander Viktorov,
head of the city committee for Science and Higher Education.

“The problem is currently in the process of being resolved positively,”
Mohamad added.

Lira bishop among Pope’s last selection
By Steven Candia

New Vision, Uganda
Monday April 4, 2005.

WHILE on his deathbed, the Pope John Paul II, who passed away on
Saturday, appointed Fr. Giuseppe Franzelli as bishop of Lira diocese.

Franzelli was among 17 bishops and archbishops appointed worldwide.

Franzelli, a Comboni missionary priest, now leads the diocese, which
has about 980,600 people.

The diocese had been under Bishop Paul Kalanda as its apostolic
administrator, , since the resignation of Bishop Joseph Oyanga in
December 2003.

In his last appointments, the pontiff accepted the resignation of six
others and also appointed a bishop in Kenya and in the DR Congo in the
mass nominations and resignations that included bishops in Europe,
Asia, Latin America, the republics of the former Soviet Union and
the Pacific.

The nominations and resignations were made over the last few weeks
by the Holy Father but only made public on April 1, according to a
Vatican statement.

The appointments and resignations were widely seen as an indication
that the curtain was about to drop on the life of the 84-year-old
pontiff and bring to an end his 26-year-long papacy of the one
billion-member catholic church.

The appointment of Bishop Manuel Urena Pastor of Cartagena, Spain,
as metropolitan archbishop of Zaragoza, Spain and Archbishop Luigi
Pezzuto, apostolic nuncio in Tanzania, as apostolic nuncio in El
Salvador was an indication that the Pope wanted to clear unfinished
business.

Urena succeeds Archbishop Yanes Alvarez, whose resignation from the
pastoral care of the same archdiocese the Pope accepted, upon having
reached the age limit.

In the provisions he appointed Msgr. Giambattista Diquattro, counsellor
to the apostolic nunciature in Italy, as apostolic nuncio to Panama.

He appointed Bishop Nechan Karakeheyan, of Ispahan of the Armenians,
Iran, as Ordinary for Armenian Catholics of Eastern Europe.

Published on: Monday, 4th April, 2005

Prisoners In Their Own Fortresses
By Robert Fisk

CounterCurrents.org, India

04 April, 2005
The Independent

I drove Pat and Alice Carey up the coast of Lebanon this week to look
at some castles. Pat is a builder from County Wicklow, brave enough
to take a holiday with his wife in Beirut when all others are thinking
of running away. But I wanted to know what he thought of 12th-century
construction work.

How did he rate a Crusader keep? The most beautiful of Lebanon’s
castles is the smallest, a dinky-toy palisade on an outcrop of rock
near the village of Batroun. You have to climb a set of well-polished
steps – no hand-rails, for this is Lebanon – up the sheer side
of Mseilha castle and then clamber over doorsills into the dark,
damp interior.

So we padded around the battlements for half an hour. “Strongly made
or they wouldn’t be still here,” Pat remarked. “But you wouldn’t
find any company ready to put up the insurance. And in winter, it
must have been very, very cold.”

And after some minutes, he looked at me with some intensity. “It’s
like being in a prison,” he said.

And he was right. The only view of the outside world was through
the archers’ loopholes in the walls. Inside was darkness. The bright
world outside was cut off by the castle defences. I could just see the
splashing river to the south of the castle and, on the distant horizon,
a mountainside. That was all the defenders – Crusaders or Mamlukes –
would have seen. It was the only contact they had with the land they
were occupying.

Up at Tripoli is Lebanon’s biggest keep, the massive Castle of
St Gilles that still towers ominously over the port city with its
delicate minarets and mass of concrete hovels. Two shell holes –
remnants of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war – have been smashed into
the walls, but the interior of the castle is a world of its own;
a world, that is, of stables and eating halls and dungeons. It was
empty – the tourists have almost all fled Lebanon – and we felt the
oppressive isolation of this terrible place.

Pat knew his Crusader castles. “When you besieged them, the only way to
get inside was by pushing timber under the foundations and setting fire
to the wood. When they turned to ash, the walls came tumbling down. The
defenders didn’t throw boiling oil from the ramparts. They threw sand
on to the attackers. The sand would get inside their armour and start
to burn them until they were in too much pain to fight. But it’s the
same thing here in Tripoli as in the little castle. You can hardly
see the city through the arrow slits. It’s another – bigger – prison.”

And so I sat on the cold stone floor and stared through a loophole
and, sure enough, I could see only a single minaret and a few square
metres of roadway. I was in darkness. Just as the Crusaders who built
this fortress must have been in darkness.

Indeed, Raymond de Saint-Gilles spent years besieging the city,
looking down in anger from his great fortress, built on the “Pilgrim’s
Mountain”, at the stout burghers of Tripoli who were constantly
re-supplied by boat from Egypt. Raymond himself died in the castle,
facing the city he dreamed of capturing but could not live to enter.

And of course, far to the east, in the ancient land of Mesopotamia,
there stand today equally stout if less aesthetic barricades around
another great occupying army. The castles of the Americans are made
of pre-stressed concrete and steel but they serve the same purpose
and doom those who built them to live in prisons.

>>From the “Green Zone” in the centre of Baghdad, the US authorities
and their Iraqi satellites can see little of the city and country
they claim to govern. Sleeping around the gloomy republican palace
of Saddam Hussein, they can stare over the parapets or peek through
the machine-gun embrasures on the perimeter wall – but that is as
much as most will ever see of Iraq.

The Tigris river is almost as invisible as that stream sloshing past
the castle of Mseilha. The British embassy inside the “Green Zone”
flies its diplomats into Baghdad airport, airlifts them by helicopter
into the fortress – and there they sit until recalled to London.

Indeed, the Crusaders in Lebanon – men with thunderous names like
Tancred and Bohemond and Baldwin – used a system of control remarkably
similar to the US Marines and the 82nd Airborne. They positioned
their castles at a day’s ride – or a day’s sailing down the coast in
the case of Lebanon – from each other, venturing forth only to travel
between their keeps.

And then out of the east, from Syria and also from the Caliphate
of Baghdad and from Persia came the “hashashin”, the “Assassins” –
the Crusaders brought the word back to Europe – who turned the Shia
faith into an extremist doctrine, regarding assassination of their
enemies as a religious duty.

Anyone who doubts the relevance of these “foreign fighters” to
present-day Iraq should read the history of ancient Tripoli by that
redoubtable Lebanese-Armenian historian Nina Jidejian, which covers
the period of the Assassins and was published at the height of the
Lebanese civil war.

“It was believed that the terrorists partook of hashish to induce
ecstatic visions of paradise before setting out to perform their
sacred duty and to face martyrdom…” she writes. “The arrival of the
Crusaders had added to .. latent discontent and created a favourable
terrain for their . activities.” Ouch.

One of the Assassins’ first victims was the Count of Montferrat,
leader of the Third Crusade who had besieged Acre in 1191 – “Saint
Jean d’Acre” to the Christians – and who met his death at the hands
of men sent by the Persian “terrorist” leader, Hassan-i Sabbah. The
Assassins treated Saladin’s Muslim army with equal scorn – they made
two attempts to murder him – and within 100 years had set up their
own castles around Tripoli. They established a “mother fortress”
from which – and here I quote a 13th-century Arab geographer – “the
Assassins chosen are sent out thence to all countries and lands to
slay kings and great men”.

And so it is not so hard, in the dank hallways of the Castle of St
Gilles to see the folly of America’s occupation of Iraq. Cut off from
the people they rule, squeezed into their fortresses, under constant
attack from “foreign fighters”, the Crusaders’ dreams were destroyed.

Sitting behind that loophole in the castle at Tripoli, I could
even see new meaning in Osama bin Laden’s constant reference to the
Americans as “the Crusader armies”. The Crusades, too, were founded
on a neo-conservative theology. The knights were going to protect the
Christians of the Holy Land; they were going to “liberate” Jerusalem –
“Mission Accomplished” – and ended up taking the spoils of the Levant,
creating petty kingdoms which they claimed to control, living fearfully
behind their stone defences. Their Arab opponents of the time did
indeed possess a weapon of mass destruction for the Crusaders. It
was called Islam.

“You can see why the Crusaders couldn’t last here,” Pat said as we
walked out of the huge gateway of the Castle of Saint Gilles. “I
wonder if they even knew who they were fighting.”

I just resisted asking him if he’d come along on my next trip to
Baghdad, so I could hear part two of the builder’s wisdom.

Copyright: The Independent

Turkey Allows a First New Year for a Tiny Minority
By KATHERINE ZOEPF

New York Times
Published: April 4, 2005

MIDYAT, Turkey, April 1 – A windswept hilltop here in southeastern
Anatolia has become the site for a reunion that once would have
been unthinkable, as thousands of Assyrians from across the region
have converged to openly celebrate their New Year in Turkey for the
first time.

Like many other expressions of minority ethnic identity, the Assyrian
New Year, or Akito, had been seen by Turkey as a threat. But this
year, the government, with an eye toward helping its bid to join
the European Union, has officially allowed the celebration by the
Assyrians, members of a Christian ethnic group that traces its roots
back to ancient Mesopotamia.

Yusuf Begtas, one of the celebration’s organizers, said that because
most of Turkey’s tiny Assyrian population – about 6,000 people in all
– lives in a heavily Kurdish region that has seen frequent clashes
between the Turkish government and Kurdish militias, strong assertions
of Assyrian ethnicity have long been politically impossible. But
Turkey’s political culture has been changing rapidly.

“Turkey is showing itself to the E.U.,” Mr. Begtas said. “When we
asked the authorities for permission to celebrate this year, we knew
it wouldn’t be possible for them to deny us now. Turkey has to show
the E.U. that it is making democratic changes.”

The festivities here on Friday were the culmination of a celebration
that started on March 21, the first day of the Assyrian New
Year. Behind Mr. Begtas, on a raised stage near the wall of the Mar
Aphrem monastery, a balding baritone sang in Syriac, the Assyrians’
language, a Semitic tongue similar to Aramaic.

He was followed by a group of girls wearing mauve satin folk costumes,
dancing in lines with their arms linked. They were cheered on by an
audience of about 5,000, including large groups of visiting ethnic
Assyrians from Europe, Syria and Iraq.

Iraq, where Akito is celebrated openly, has the world’s largest
population of Assyrians, about a million. Most of Turkey’s Assyrians
were killed or driven away during the Armenian massacres early in
the last century, and the bullet scars on some of Midyat’s almost
medieval-looking sandstone buildings still bear witness to those times.

In recent years, Assyrians have suffered quieter forms of persecution
and discrimination. Since the 1980’s, under those pressures, thousands
of Assyrians have emigrated abroad. Kurds, with whom Assyrians have
long had a tense relationship, are now a majority in Midyat, which
until just a generation ago was 75 percent Assyrian.

Haluk Akinci, the regional governor of Nusaybin, a district next to
Midyat, suggested that the Turkish government might see allowing the
New Year celebration as a partial atonement for past persecutions.

“In the past, freedoms for minorities were not as great as they are
now,” he said, though he noted that in years past, private Assyrian New
Year celebrations had generally been ignored by the authorities. “The
Turkish government now repents that they let so many of these people
leave the country.”

After years of intense political and population pressure, the Turkish
Assyrians say, public celebrations like Akito have huge emotional
significance, and the participation of Assyrians from abroad has
become particularly meaningful.

Terros Lazar Owrah, 60, an Assyrian shopkeeper from Dohor, in northern
Iraq, said he had driven 14 hours for the opportunity to attend the
celebration. “So many of us are leaving the region,” he said. “It’s
very important for Assyrians from everywhere to get together in
one place.”

Thanks in large part to greater political freedoms granted recently in
Iraq and Turkey, the Assyrians say, a sense of pan-regional Assyrian
identity seems to be gathering strength. And though Turkey does
not have any legal Assyrian political parties, there are those who
would like to turn this rapidly developing sense of solidarity into
a political voice, even into a discussion of nationhood.

Representatives from several overseas Assyrian political parties were
present at the celebration.

Emanuel Khoshaba, an Iraqi Assyrian who represents the Assyrian
Democratic Movement in Damascus, pointed out that Midyat lies between
the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Mesopotamia that the Assyrians
believe to be their rightful homeland.

“Protecting our national days is as important to us as preserving the
soil of our nation,” Mr. Khoshaba said. “Whether they live in Iraq or
Syria or Turkey, our goal is to bring Assyrians together as a nation.”

That is unlikely to happen. With countries in the region increasingly
wary of the flowering of Kurdish nationalism in northern Iraq, smaller
nationalist movements seem to have even less of a chance of finding
political support in the region.

Still, the relaxation of Turkish antagonism toward the New Year’s
celebration was a significant enough start for many who attended.

“It’s about coming together in spite of our rulers,” said Fahmi Soumi,
an Assyrian businessman who had traveled from Damascus to attend
the Akito festivities. “When we unite like this, there is no Turkey,
no Syria and no Iran. We are one people.”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

A1 Plus | 15:17:41 | 04-04-2005 | Social |

“A1+” IS DEMANDED ALSO IN SWEDEN

Citizens of not only Armenia joint the continuous action in defense
of A1+. The editorial office receives many e-mails from different
countries.

For example, Vahe Avetisyan living in Sweden writes in his latter, “The
members of the 3K web express their support to your complaint. We are
sure that free speech can be limited for a time only, and the limits
make it still more hearable. We wish you strength, courage and patience
and we do not doubt that justice will win and ignorance will lose.”