Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
January 12, 2005, Wednesday

AZERBAIJAN NEEDS A DIFFERENT ARMY

SOURCE: Voyenno-Promyshlenny Kuryer, No. 50, December 29, 2004 –
January 11, 2005, p. 2

by Jasur Mamedov

Azerbaijan’s participation in NATO’s Partnership for Peace Program
necessitates launching a military reform in the republican army. Baku
does not have other options because this is the essence of
integration into the alliance. What’s the essence of the conception
of modernization of the republican Armed Forces? What obstacles
hinder the reform? Major-General Tadzheddin Mekhtiyev, a
representative of the Center of military science in the Defense
Ministry and former defense minister, answers the newspaper’s
questions.

Question: The republican Army was established only 13 years ago…

Answer: Yes, and it has achieved substantial successes over these 13
years. At present the republic has an efficient army. However, we
have to do a lot. First and foremost, we must improve the material
and technical basis of the Armed Forces. In addition, its fighting
efficiency is linked with the stability in the republic. (…)

I think that we could have achieved successes that are more
substantial over the past 13 years. However, we need to take in
consideration some exterior aspects of the problem. Some countries
such as Armenia do not want Azerbaijan to create a strong army
because this is the main factor, which can make Armenia start
constructive negotiations. Armenia and its defenders know that a
strong army and liberation of occupied territories mean the same.

Question: What did you have to do over the past years?

Answer: In my opinion, we should have created a professional army
after we concluded the ceasefire agreement in 1994. I think that
contract military service is the future of our army. (…) Some moves
have been made in this direction. As far as I know, commanders of
tanks and infantry fighting vehicles are contract ensigns. However,
we do not have the necessary laws for creating a professional army.

Question: Specialists say that this would be a heavy burden for
Azerbaijan’s military budget…

Question: I agree, expenses on the maintenance of the army must
increase. It should be noted that the 2005 military budget will
increase. However, I think that the growth must be substantial, at
least 100%. (…)

There are rumors that we cannot afford to create a contract army.
However, we do not intend to reform all units at once. We could start
with one brigade. Of course, we will have to make amendments to the
system of operational control over the unit and arm it with
up-to-date weapons and military hardware. In the meantime, we need
laws to do this.

In my opinion, a contract brigade can be created within six months.
It must consist of the most experienced officers and ensigns.
Privates and sergeants must be selected among former draftees. We
could calculate expenses on the maintenance of this unit and make
decisions regarding other units.

The new brigade must become the main unit of the Army and be used in
the most important operations.

(…) The contract brigade must be equipped with the most up-to-date
mortars, automatic rifles, bazookas, sniper rifles, machine-guns,
light tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel
carriers. The most important thing is that all officers and ensigns
of the brigade must have the most up-to-date communication systems.
The unit must also use radio-technical, engineering and artillery
reconnaissance systems. In addition, it needs mobile vehicles for
transporting injured servicemen.

Question: Does the legislation in force make it possible to realize
your proposals? What do you need to change?

Answer: (…)I think that amendments must affect the laws on military
service, the status of servicemen and servicemen’s pensions. At
present, the family of a killed serviceman receives a lump sum equal
to five monthly wages. In my opinion, this sum must increase to the
Soviet levels (180 months wages). Invalids must receive lump sums
equal to 100 months wages (at present, five months wages). Servicemen
who have served for 15 years receive three months wages when they
resign. (…)

Money allowances must be revised. They must be increased by 200% to
300%. Servicemen’s children must not pay for higher education.
Dismissed officers must be placed to new jobs within three months.
Medical services for servicemen and their families must be free of
charge. Dismissed officers must have the right to spend vacations
abroad once a year.

Question: Have these proposals been submitted to the parliament of
Azerbaijan?

Answer: We have done this but we cannot influence the process of
passing these proposals. In my opinion, if a group of advisors
consisting of skilled officers and generals worked in the parliament
we would be able to pass these laws. General Vladimir Timoshenko is
the only professional serviceman in the parliament. It is no
coincidence that the parliament has passed bills, which have
decreased the significance of military service. The advisors would
have defended servicemen’s interests.

Translated by Alexander Dubovoi

Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
January 12, 2005, Wednesday

ARMENIA MEETS NEW DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY SERVICE

Armenian President Robert Kocharyan has signed a decree to appoint
Grachya Arutyunyan as first deputy director of the National Security
Service.

The press service of the Armenian president stated that Kocharyan
dismissed his predecessor Grigory Grigoryan on a pension.

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
January 12, 2005 Wednesday 6:23 AM Eastern Time

Ukraine may face Georgian scenario of 1992 – MP

KIEV

Ukrainian parliamentarian Nestor Shurfich, an ally of ex-Prime
Minister Viktor Yanukovich, expressed his opinion on Wednesday that
if opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko is inaugurated as Ukraine’s
new president, the country may be in for a violent Georgian scenario
of 1992.

“After Viktor Yushchenko is declared president, a powerful opposition
will appear in the country,” Shufrich said in an interview with the
Day daily. He believes Yushchenko will have problems, as not all
Ukrainian nationals will recognize him as head of state.

“If the Supreme Court practically approves when considering a
complaint by Viktor Yanukovich all those processes which have taken
place in the country after November 21, Ukraine may find itself in
the situation similar to that which developed in Georgia in its
time,” he said. “I don’t only mean ‘the rose revolution’, but also
the removal of President Gamsakhurdia,” he added.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Zviad Gamsakhurdia was
elected Georgia’s president. However, he could not govern the
country. Demonstrations were held against the increasingly
dictatorial Gamsakhurdia, a state of emergency was declared.
Gamsakhurdia lost control of state power and his government
eventually collapsed. He fled to Armenia, while Eduard Shevardnadze
with military backing was appointed interim president. Clashes
continued in Georgia’s self-style republics of South Ossetia and
Abkhazia, where independence had been declared.

“If the new power is established unlawfully, I believe the opposition
will have a moral right to use revolutionary methods,” the
parliamentarian said.

At the same time, Yanukovich’s representative in the Central
Electoral Commission promised that the opposition will support “all
the positive, that the government of Yushchenko will offer”. “If
those positive tendencies that were fixed by the previous government
will be developed by Yushchenko’s cabinet of ministers, I don’t rule
out that our stance will soften,” he said.

However, at first we must make sure that the new authorities “can do
something positive for our people,” Shufrich stressed.

The Times (London)
January 12, 2005, Wednesday

The long war against ‘the Infidel’ left a lasting mark on European
culture

by Michael Binyon

THE great clash of civilisations at the battle of Lepanto in 1571
captured the imagination of Europe, inspiring artists and writers for
decades afterwards. The Ottoman Turks had begun the war the previous
year, to drive and the Venetians from the eastern Mediterranean by
invading their outpost of Cyprus. More than a century after the fall
of Byzantium, Christendom was again facing defeat by its mortal
enemy.

Europe rallied to the Venetian cause. Spanish and Italian galleys
sailed for Cyprus, under the command of Don John of Austria,
half-brother of Philip II of Spain and a swashbuckling military
adventurer. To Christian Europe, the rampaging Turks seemed
invincible.

The two fleets met at Lepanto, off the coast of Greece. It took Don
John just four hours to annihilate the Turkish fleet, capturing 117
galleys and thousands of men -a brilliant victory, though one which
in the long run could not halt the Ottomans.

Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese celebrated the victory in extravagant
paintings.

Even in distant England, Lepanto was hailed as a triumph. Shakespeare
was 7 when the battle took place, and, 33 years later, the Bard made
the Venetian defence of Cyprus the setting for one of his greatest
tragedies. As Othello dies, he reminds the audience of Christendom’s
titanic struggle: “Set you down this;/ And say besides, that in
Aleppo once,/ Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk/ Beat a Venetian
and traduced the state,/ I took by the throat the circumcised dog/
And smote him, thus.”

The clash with the Muslim enemy was a common theme in Shakespeare’s
time. Henry V, courting Kate, asks her whether they should not have a
son “that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard”.
In France, 50 years later, Racine set one of his tragedies, Bajazet,
in the court of sultan Amurat, who captured Babylon in 1638.

But warfare did not stop merchants trading, travellers exploring and
emissaries negotiating. By the 17th century French and Engish traders
had established footholds in Istanbul, along with the ubiquitous
Venetians and Genoese. Working largely through Jewish and Armenian
“dragomans” (interpreters), they exploited the trade concessions
forced upon the sultans by the need for bullion, which had flooded
Europe from South America.

The Europeans settled for co-existence. Five centuries earlier the
Muslims were seen as the greatest challenge to Christendom, and
successive Popes launched crusades. In the long run, all failed. But
while these scarred the European psyche with suspicion of the Muslim
infidel, the Ottomans were regarded differently.

Religious zeal played less of a role than commercial and political
rivalry.

Byzantium had fallen. But trade went on.

And so it had for centuries. Even as the Ottomans closed in on
Byzantium throughout the 15th century, the diminishing city-state had
made alliances and deals. The Ottomans conquered a swath of territory
that brought them up against the Slavs and the Venetians. Serbia had
been beaten at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, a date that has echoed
down its history. Periodically the Venetians and the Habsburgs raised
the battle cry against the Turks, but the clashing empires worked out
a modus vivendi. For years the French kings enjoyed an entente with
Istanbul and even while the Turks were conquering Crete, French
merchants bought carpets, spices and brocades and sold wool, clocks
and luxury goods.

Ordinary Europeans had little contact, however. The big sea power,
Portugal, clashed with Turkish forces at the entrance to the Red Sea.
But Europe was by now looking farther afield -to America, Africa,
India and China. Suleyman the Magnificent tried to conquer all the
Mediterranean, but after the heroic resistance of Malta, defended by
the Knights of St John during the long siege in 1565, made no further
forays westwards.

In the Balkans, Ottoman power reached a high point at the second
siege of Vienna, in 1683. But already the empire was decaying from
within. By the 19th century the “Sick Man of Europe” was desperately
trying to modernise its creaking empire. And by the end of the First
World War it was over.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

The Times (London)
January 11, 2005, Tuesday

Knight, surgeon, author and porter

by Anjana Ahuja

Professor Sir Ara Darzi: a pioneer of minimally invasive surgery ARA
DARZI once received a memorable phone call from a colleague. There
was a rumour going around, the colleague explained worriedly, that
one of the hospital porters had masqueraded as a doctor and, during
the night, had operated on one of Darzi’s patients.

Any other surgeon might have been speechless with horror but Darzi’s
response was to chuckle. His colleague was right about the charade
but had nobbled the wrong man. It was, in fact, Darzi who had
perpetrated the deception.

The professor of surgery at Imperial College had worked a night shift
as a hospital porter before returning at 6am as a smartly dressed
surgeon to perform the life-saving operation. The undercover
experiment – conducted with the full knowledge of the management of
St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, just in case colleagues thought he
had taken leave of his senses – confirmed Sir Ara’s suspicion that
porters are undervalued and ignored by clinicians, despite being in
the front line. As soon as the suave, softly spoken professor had
swapped his dapper suit for a blue shirt, he became invisible, even
to his own students and trainees: “They wouldn’t look you in the eye.
Once the uniform was there, there was no eye contact. I was just a
porter.”

It was another display of the restless, rebellious streak that pushed
Sir Ara into medicine in the first place. His father, an engineer who
roamed the globe with his family, expected his son to follow his lead
but Darzi Jr didn’t bite. “I was brought up in an engineering way of
thinking,” he explains, of his decision to defy his father. “I’d
lived it, and seen it, and felt like I’d done it. Why do the same? I
just wanted to do something different. Medicine was so strange to me.
I’d never really been to a hospital.”

Sir Ara, 44, was born in Armenia but spent much of his childhood in
Ireland – the accent is still audible, especially when he is being
lighthearted – and he applied for medicine there. When he arrived at
university, it seemed to him that medical students, with their late
nights and fondness for alcohol, had so much more fun than anyone
else. He loved it.

It was equally obvious during training that his future lay in
surgery, with its rewarding blend of practicality and immediacy.
Since then, engineering’s loss – he still describes himself as a
“failed engineer” – has been a coup for British surgery. He has spent
the last decade applying an engineer’s eye to making surgery less
physically and psychologically traumatic, pioneering minimally
invasive surgery. When Sir Ara started his surgical career in earnest
in London at the end of the Eighties, the term “minimally invasive
surgery” barely existed. Simply, it was about making cuts smaller,
and shortening patient stays. “I was very much in the right place at
the right time,” he reflects. “There were reports of gall bladder
surgery being done the keyhole way in Lyons.”

The young academic quickly progressed, developing robotic surgery and
image guided surgery. In 1995 he was appointed professor of surgery
at Imperial College; by this time, he had became a world leader in
minimally invasive colorectal surgery.

He has also authored patents and published several textbooks.

Today he sits on a committee charged with modernising the NHS: “I
really, truly believe that you can throw as much money as you like at
anything in life, but if you don’t keep up and try to modernise, the
value of it is not the same.” That is why he dressed up as a porter,
to “stimulate the thinking within hospitals that porters do make a
big contribution to hospital care. And I can tell you one thing: they
are undervalued.”

In 2002, his achievements were rewarded with an honorary knighthood.
It crystallised his decision to become a British citizen. Why change
nationality? “I got (the knighthood) for services to medicine in this
country – I’ve made it here, and I got it because of the
opportunities here that allowed me to serve this country. I wanted to
acknowledge that.”

Just like in any profession, he says, the recognition of one person
can provoke the jealousy of many, but colleagues have generally been
delighted, as the honour recognises a field as much as an individual.
And, Sir Ara laughs, being a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent
Order of the British Empire means that his views are taken a little
more seriously.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia)
January 13, 2005 Thursday

About face has Vic a chance in Vegas

by Adrian Warren

JEFF Fenech yesterday revealed he was trying to push for his first
fully fledged world boxing champion Vic Darchinyan to make his maiden
title defence on a big Las Vegas card in March.

Armenian-born, Sydney-based Darchinyan won the International Boxing
Federation flyweight title before Christmas with an 11th-round
stoppage of previously unbeaten Irene Pacheco.

Though Darchinyan’s trainer Fenech initially talked about a first
defence against unbeaten American Brian Viloria in Hawaii, he has
been looking at other options.

Fenech, who is in the US, said he was trying to get Darchinyan on to
the undercard of the March 19 fight at the MM Grand between
featherweight superstars Erik Morales and Manny Pacquiao.

Fenech is also arranging Danny Green’s preparation for his rematch
with World Boxing Council super middleweight champion Markus Beyer in
the US.

Fenech said Green would probably leave for America around February 16
and spend about three weeks sparring in the US.

“We will go to Germany as late as we can,” Fenech said from New York.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur
January 11, 2005, Tuesday

Vladimir Putin, a favor de amistad entre Turquia y Armenia

Moscu

El presidente ruso, Vladimir Putin, se mostro hoy en una reunion con
el primer minstro turco, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a favor de normalizar
las relaciones entre Ankara y Armenia.

“El primer ministro turco y yo somos conscientes de que hay que
construir lazos de amistad con sus vecinos”, aseguro Putin, segun
recoge la agencia Interfax.

Entre 1915 y 1923 mas de dos millones de armenios fueron masacrados
durante el Imperio Otomano, el Estado que precedio a la actual
Turquia. Ankara, sin embargo, no ha reconocido el genocidio.

La enemistad entre ambas partes sigue en pie porque en el conflicto
por el enclave armenio del monte Karabaj, Turquia esta del lado de
Azerbaijan.

Putin subrayo que su gobierno favorece una “solucion de las
cuestiones pendientes relacionadas con el tema armenio”.

PanArmenian News
Jan 12 2005

FORMER ARMENIAN PRIME MINISTER ARMEN SARGSIAN CAN BACK NEW OPPOSITION
BLOC

12.01.2005 18:47

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The formation of a new opposition bloc, which has
been spoken about for a month, is being protracted as one of its
probable leaders, former Armenian Foreign Minister – Raffi
Hovhanissian. The latter is spending Christmas holidays in the US,
Haykakan Zhamanak newspaper reports. It also writes that the
announcement on the formation of the bloc might be made late January.
According to the data available, former Prime Minister Armen
Sargsian, who enjoys certain support of the population and of some
political circles in Armenia and European states is likely to back
the bloc. Haykakakan Zhamanak also informs that Republic party
leader, another former head of the Armenian government Aram Sargsian
will declare of his participation in the new opposition movement.
Justice bloc will actually cease to exist. To remind, the new
opposition will take pro-west stand in foreign policy.

PanArmenian News
Jan 12 2005

POLITICAL MOVEMENTS ACTIVATE ON THRESHOLD OF PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
IN NKR

12.01.2005 17:51

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Several political parties are being formed on the
threshold of the parliamentary elections to be held in Nagorno
Karabakh in June. The constituent assembly of “Our Home Armenia”
party is to take place one of these days. Chairman of the initiative
group of the party, Karabakh parliament deputy Ararat Petrosian said
that the idea of reunion of Nagorno Karabakh and Armenia will become
the platform for the party. Already existing parties also demonstrate
activity. For instance, the Artsakh branch of ARF Dashnaktsutyun
strictly criticized the recent reappointments in the Karabakh
government. Many politicians hold the opinion that Dashnaktsutyun
will hence be in opposition to the incumbent leadership of NKR. To
remind, in October 2004, the nominee supported by Dashnaks won a
victory over the pro-governmental candidate during the elections of
the Mayor of Stepanakert. At the same time, Dashnaktsutyun members
are occupying several posts in the NKR government, specifically in
the Security Council.

PanArmenian News
Jan 12 2005

TURKS AS ISLAMIC TERRORISTS IN AMERICAN SERIAL

12.01.2005 14:26

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Fox TV American channel is transmitting a serial
called “24”, the principal heroes of which are ethnic Turks, who are
acting as Islamic terrorists, Yerkir online newspaper reports.
According to the plot of the film, a Turkish family residing in the
US is rendering help to religious fans from Istanbul for planning
terrorist acts in the US. Each part of the film lasts 2 hours and
enjoys wide popularity in the US. The Council on American-Islamic
Relations has sent a protest letter to the film studio with the
demand to take off the film and apologize to the Turkish people.
However the authors stated they are not going to apologize either to
Turks or to Muslims on the whole.