Lloyd’s List
December 9, 2004

‘Big four’favour Euro-expansion

NATIONAL Bank of Greece, the country’s largest bank with total assets
of E58bn at the end of June 2004 and market shares of 19% and 30% in
domestic loans and deposits respectively, has the largest presence in
the Balkan area with exposure in Bulgaria, Romania and the Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, writes Philip Pangalos in Athens.

NBG, which aims to become a dominant regional player serving 60m
people in southeast Europe, also has the largest customer base in
Greece with a total of 6.5m clients and a 26% share of the mortgage
market.

NBG chief executive Takis Arapoglou has said that the bank will
continue to concentrate on southeastern Europe, with plans to grow
and expand through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions,
if they make sense.

Alpha, which is the second-largest bank in Greece with an 18% market
share, has made selective acquisitions in the Balkans and Cyprus,
which contribute about 10% to group earnings.

In the Balkans, Alpha has a presence in Albania, Romania, Bulgaria,
the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, as well as Serbia and
Montenegro.

EFG, Greece’s number three, despite only being established in 1990,
also has access to European markets through its strategic alliance
with Geneva-based EFG Bank Group. It plans to expand its presence in
the Balkans, where it has an exposure in Romania, Bulgaria and
Serbia.

Piraeus Bank has also expanded its overseas presence, mainly focused
in southeastern Europe, but also in London and New York.

Piraeus Bank has been particularly active in the Balkans and has
built up a presence in Romania with 10 local branches, while it has
another 13 branches in Bulgaria.

A joint venture with Tirana Bank in Albania gave it exposure to this
potentially important regional market through a 20-branch network.

Piraeus Bank’s Tirana Bank subsidiary, formed in 1996, was the first
Albanian bank owned by a private foreign institution and has an
ambitious branch network plan.

Despite its poverty and recent instability, Albania has caught the
interest of numerous Greek banks due to the country’s shared border,
an ethnic Greek minority in the neighbouring country and many
Albanians working in Greece and transferring funds home.

Emporiki Bank has also built up its overseas operations over the past
years and has a presence in the UK, as well as in Albania, Armenia,
Bulgaria, Georgia, Germany, Romania and Cyprus.

Catholic World News, MA
Dec 9 2004

Iraqi Catholics vow to remain despite bombings

Vatican, Dec. 09 (AsiaNews) – In Mosul, in northern Iraq, a cleric
who witnessed the bombing of the residence of the Chaldean Catholic
bishop told the AsiaNews service that Christians will remain in Iraq
as “symbols of peace.”

In an interview with AsiaNews Father Ragheed Ganni reported that the
Chaldean Catholics of Mosul had celebrated the feast of the
Immaculate Conception “as we normally do” on the day after the
bombing. “People were really frightened, but we wanted to send a
signal of hope,” he said.

Father Ganni told AsiaNews that terrorists were targeting Catholic
churches in an effort to intimidate the country’s Christian minority.
But he vowed that Christians would remain, bearing witness to the
faith; he asked for the prayers of Christians in the West, noting
that Iraqi Christians today are “bearing a heavy cross.” [For the
full interview see the AsiaNews web site.] In Rome, Pope John Paul II
(bio – news) underlined his solidarity with the Christians of Iraq
during a midday public audience on December 8, condemning the latest
terrorist bombing of two Church buildings in Mosul.

As he celebrated the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the Holy
Father told his audience that he was asking the Virgin Mary to
intercede for peace in Iraq. He made his comments after a pair of
bombings in the northern city of Mosul that destroyed the
Armenian-rite cathedral and the Chaldean-rite bishop’s residence.

Hurriyet, Turkey
Dec 9 2004

ERDOGAN OPENS GARDEN OF RELIGIONS IN ANTALYA

Religious tolerance is a valuable legacy the Turkish Republic has
inherited from the Ottoman Empire, said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan yesterday in Antalya at the opening ceremony of a new complex
of Muslim, Christian and Jewish worship sites. Erdogan pledged that
his government would remove any remaining obstacles to religious
freedom in Turkey. `By virtue of this great historical experience,
today Turkey is the guarantor of peace and brotherhood in its
region,’ he added. `Of course, we still have shortcomings which we’re
working to overcome as soon as possible.’ Also attending the ceremony
were Dutch European Affairs Minister Atzo Nikolai, whose country
currently holds the EU presidency, plus diplomats and the religious
leaders of Turkey’s Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities. `People
will be able to freely practice their religions in this center, and
this sends a very important message,’ said Nikolai. Father Joseph
Alphonse Sammut, for his part, said that while Catholics are able to
practice their religion in Turkey they lack property rights over
churches, but expressed hope that this would someday change. Armenian
Orthodox Patriarch Mesrob II also said that non-Muslim places of
worship should be opened in all major Turkish cities. `This should be
done either by renovating historical sites or by building new ones,
as the one here,’ he said. Chief Rabbi Ishak (Yitzhak) Haleva hailed
Turkey as a rare country where synagogues, mosques, and churches
exist side-by-side. `We’re lucky to be citizens here,’ he added.
/Hurriyet/

The Australian, Australia
Dec 10 2004

Return of the big bad bear
Paul Dibb

FOR more than a decade, received wisdom in the West has been that
Russia has changed fundamentally and is now a peace-loving European
power prepared to keep to itself and live by the rules. If we prove
to have been wrong about Russia, much of what has been assumed about
global and European security will need revision, too.

Moscow’s interference in the Ukrainian election, the announcement
that Russia will deploy a new type of strategic nuclear missile “that
other nuclear states do not have”, and President Vladimir Putin’s
increasingly anti-democratic attitude all point to a reversion to bad
old habits.

Putin has openly mourned the passing of the Soviet Union as “a
national tragedy” for Russia. He has launched a bid to reconstitute a
“joint economic space” on the ashes of the Soviet Union, taking in
Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Putin’s growing antipathy
towards the US is reflected in his accusation that Washington is
running a “dictatorship” over global affairs.

The visit to Moscow last week of Leonid Kuchma, President of Ukraine,
to meet Putin looked suspiciously like a Soviet era visit to report
to head office for new instructions. The West has been accused of
using the Ukraine as part of “a well-planned strike directed
primarily at Russia”, and to effect “a political takeover of the
post-Soviet area”. There have even been suggestions in the Russian
press that a Viktor Yushchenko presidency in the Ukraine could
trigger military intervention.

Bad habits have been evident for some time in the new Russia. At
home, the dominance of Kremlin advisers from the former KGB, who now
occupy 60 per cent of key decision-making positions, the suppression
of dissent in the media, and the jailing (or killing) of political
adversaries are all too familiar from the days of the Soviet Union.
Overseas, the retention of links with former client states (such as
Syria and North Korea), the suspicion of NATO, and the latent fear of
China all reflect abiding Soviet geopolitical concerns.

The days of euphoria over the expectation that a democratic Russia
would become a member of the Western strategic community are long
gone. Instead, we are now seeing an attempt by Putin to re-establish
Russia as a great power.

Most countries are prisoners of their geography and history — and
none more so than Russia. There is a deeply entrenched sense of
geographical vulnerability in Russia. Invasions by the Mongol hordes,
and later attacks by Poland, Sweden, France and Germany have left an
acute sense of paranoia.

This was reflected in a statement by Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov
last year, which identifies among the main threats to Russian
security: “the expansion of military blocs and alliances to the
detriment of the military security of the Russian Federation” and
“the introduction of foreign troops onto the territories of states,
which are adjacent to and friendly toward [Russia]”. These are
scarcely veiled references to the expansion of NATO on Russia’s
western borders and the military presence of the US in states of
former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Then there is the question of the re-emergence of Russia’s imperial
impulse. As Ilan Berman, who is with the American Foreign Policy
Council, says in The Washington Quarterly, this concept has been
present in Russian political life for centuries, and the end of the
Cold War did little to mute it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn advocated calls for a Greater Russia shortly
after the Soviet Union collapsed. Under Putin, these impulses are
beginning to be put into practice. As he said in June, Russian
officials are “now working to restore what was lost with the fall of
the Soviet Union”.

Russia’s strong economic growth is enabling it to spend more on
defence and increase its military presence in what it calls “the near
abroad”. Russia’s real defence expenditure was $US65.2 billion ($86.1
billion) in 2003 — an increase of more than 40 per cent from 2001.

This makes Russia the second-largest defence spender in the world
after the US, and ahead of China and Japan. Of course, it would be
wrong to assume that Russia is anywhere near repairing the
post-Soviet damage to its military. But Russia still has 5000
operational strategic nuclear warheads and armed forces numbering 1.2
million. And Russia under Putin is re-establishing a military
presence in neighbouring countries.

As Berman points out, the US’s new emphasis on Central Asia and the
Caucasus as part of the global war against terrorism is drawing a
strong Russian response. In Uzbekistan, Russia has negotiated an
agreement that effectively puts Moscow in charge of much of
Tashkent’s military policy. Last year, the Russian military opened
its first foreign base since the fall of the Soviet Union, in
Kyrgyzstan.

This year, Tajikistan granted Moscow military basing rights “on a
free of charge and open-ended basis”. Russia and Kazakhstan have also
inaugurated a joint action plan for security co-operation.

In the Caucasus, Russia has negotiated the use of military bases in
Armenia. Moscow continues to foment separatist tendencies within
Georgia and has threatened to cease gas supplies to Azerbaijan.

In June, Moscow commenced large-scale military exercises (called
Mobility 2004) with a clear signal to its neighbours that it
possesses the will and firepower to project force. The Russian
Foreign Ministry said they were intended to demonstrate that “any
place is within our reach”.

So, how did we get to this remove? Not all of it can be levelled at a
paranoid Russia. Had the West mounted a serious attempt to aid Russia
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we might have had a better
chance of a democratic Russia. Instead, Washington was intent on
never allowing Russia to emerge again as a major power. The expansion
of NATO up to the Russian borders, including basing NATO planes in
Lithuania, NATO activity in the Caucasus, and the prospect of the
Ukraine joining the EU and NATO, may turn out to be a fatal step in
the history of the 21st century.

President Putin has made it clear that Moscow should not allow this
erosion of Russia’s geopolitical space. The Chief of the Russian
General Staff has written: “A powerful military stationed at our
borders with no declared objective poses a threat to any non-NATO
country. Sensible leaders would realise this and prepare to counter
the threat.”

The problem is that Russia, after 400 years of autocracy, has never
felt its independence threatened in this way before from European
hegemony. The forthcoming elections in Ukraine may just provide
Moscow with the pretext it requires to assert control over what it
sees as vital geopolitical space.

Paul Dibb, a former deputy defence secretary, is chairman of the
Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National
University in Canberra.

New Statesman, UK
Dec 9 2004

The world’s first multinational
Cover story
Nick Robins
Monday 13th December 2004

NS Essay 1- Corporate greed, the ruination of traditional ways of
life, share-price bubbles, western imperialism: all these modern
complaints were made against the British East India Company in the
18th century. Nick Robins draws the lessons

In The Discovery of India, the final and perhaps most profound part
of his “prison trilogy”, written in 1944 from Ahmednagar Fort,
Jawaharlal Nehru described the effect of the East India Company on
the country he would shortly rule. “The corruption, venality,
nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early generations of
British rule in India,” he wrote, “is something which passes
comprehension.” It was, he added, “significant that one of the
Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is
‘loot'”.

For most of the succeeding 60 years, the East India Company sank from
view. No plaque marked the site where its headquarters had stood in
the City of London for more than two centuries. It was regarded as
something that could be consigned to the history books, its deeds to
be squabbled over by academics and imperial romantics. But the onset
of globalisation has revived interest in a company that could be seen
as a pioneering force for world trade. Exhibitions at the British
Library and the V&A, plus a string of popular histories, have sought
to revive the reputation of the “Honourable East India Company”. Its
founders are now hailed as swashbuckling adventurers, its operations
praised for pioneering the birth of modern consumerism and its
glamorous executives profiled as multicultural “white moguls”.

Yet the East India Company, romantic as it may seem, has more
profound and disturbing lessons to teach us. Abuse of market power;
corporate greed; judicial impunity; the “irrational exuberance” of
the financial markets; and the destruction of traditional economies
(in what could not, at one time, be called the poor or developing
world): none of these is new. The most common complaints against late
20th- and early 21st-century capitalism were all foreshadowed in the
story of the East India Company more than two centuries ago.

In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith used the East India
Company as a case study to show how monopoly capitalism undermines
both liberty and justice, and how the management of
shareholder-controlled corporations invariably ends in “negligence,
profusion and malversation”. Yet nothing of Smith’s scepticism of
corporations, his criticism of their pursuit of monopoly and of their
faulty system of governance, enters the speeches of today’s
free-market advocates.

Smith’s vision of free trade entailed firm controls on corporate
power. And, as did his own times, subsequent history shows how right
he was. If it is to contribute to economic progress, the
corporation’s market power has to be limited to allow real choice,
and to prevent suppliers being squeezed and consumers gouged. Its
political power also needs to be constrained, if it is not to rig the
rules of regulation so that it enjoys unjustified public subsidy or
protection. Internal and external checks and balances must curb the
tendency of executives to become corporate emperors. And clear and
enforceable systems of justice are necessary to hold the corporation
to account for any damage to society and the environment. These are
tough conditions, and have rarely been met, either in the age of the
East India Company or in today’s era of globalisation.

Today, we can see the East India Company as the first “imperial
corporation”, the very design of which drove it to market domination,
speculative excess and the evasion of justice. Like the modern
multinational, it was eager to avoid the mere interplay of supply and
demand. It jealously guarded its chartered monopoly of imports from
Asia. But it also wanted to control the sources of supply by breaking
the power of local rulers in India and eliminating competition so
that it could force down its purchase prices.

By controlling both ends of the chain, the company could buy cheap
and sell dear. This meant organising coups against local rulers and
placing puppets on the throne. By the middle of the 18th century, the
company was deliberately breaching the terms of its commercial
concessions in Bengal by trading in prohibited domestic goods and
selling its duty-free passes to local merchants. Combining economic
muscle with extensive bribery and the deployment of its small but
effective private army, the company engineered a series of
“revolutions” that gave it territorial as well as economic control.

After Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Palashi in 1757, the
company literally looted Bengal’s treasury. It loaded the country’s
gold and silver on to a fleet of more than a hundred boats and sent
it downriver to Calcutta. In one stroke, Clive netted a cool £2.5m
(more than £200m today) for the company, and £234,000 (£20m) for
himself. Historical convention views Palashi as the first step in the
creation of the British empire in India. It is perhaps better
understood as the company’s most successful business deal.

It was the unrivalled quality and cheapness of textiles that had
lured the East India Company to Bengal, and it would be Bengal’s
weavers who felt the full force of the company’s new-found market
power. Never rich, the weavers nevertheless had a better standard of
living than their counterparts in 18th-century England. At a time
when the British state was intervening on the side of the employer –
for example, to set maximum levels for wages – India’s weavers were
able to act collectively, aiding their ability to negotiate
favourable prices. But the East India Company eliminated the weavers’
freedom to sell to other merchants, and so crushed their limited but
important market autonomy. It imposed prices 40 per cent below the
market rate, and enforced them with violence and imprisonment. Many
weavers were driven to despair. One account reports that, among the
winders of raw silk, “instances have been known of their cutting off
their thumbs to prevent their being forced to wind silk”.

As the company transformed itself from a modest trading venture into
a powerful corporate machine, so its systems of governance completely
failed to cope with the new responsibilities that it faced. As Philip
Francis, one of its leading critics, put it, in- stead of seeking
“moderate but permanent profit”, the company had recklessly pursued
“immediate and excessive returns”. Corruption assumed epidemic
proportions and speculation overtook its shares, stoked up by insider
trading led by Clive and other executives.

In the history of financial crises, the South Sea Bubble is often
regarded as the only premodern crash worthy of note. But the East
India Company also engineered its own stock-market boom, ending in a
share-price slump that rocked the world. The company’s share price
doubled in the decade following Palashi, stoked by ever more
extraordinary acquisitions, such as the takeover of Bengal’s entire
tax system in 1765. In London, the company’s management and
shareholders fought for control of a money machine they believed
would yield unlimited returns. A swarm of “bulls” and “bears”
descended on the company’s shares, with shareholders voting for a
doubling of the annual dividend from 6 to 12 per cent in order to
cash in on the new-found wealth. This upward spiral of “infectious
greed” – to use a phrase employed by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the
US Federal Reserve, more than two centuries later – came to an end in
May 1769 when news of renewed conflict in India reached the London
markets. The share price fell 16 per cent in a single month, and
would continue a downward course for the next 15 years, reaching the
depths in July 1784 after a fall of 55 per cent.

Yet the human tragedy was just beginning. In Bengal, the annual
monsoon rains had failed. But what turned a manageable natural
disaster into a catastrophe was the manipulation of local grain
markets by East India speculators, driving up the price of food
beyond the reach of the poor. “As soon as the dryness of the season
foretold the approaching dearness of rice,” went one eyewitness
account, “our Gentlemen in the Company’s service were as early as
possible in buying up all they could lay hold of.” The situation was
compounded by the company’s decision to increase the rate of tax to
ensure that revenue levels remained stable. Estimates vary, but up to
ten million people may have died of starvation. When the full story
became known in Britain, there was fury at the firm’s negligence. As
Horace Walpole wrote at the time: “We have murdered, deposed,
plundered, usurped – nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in
which millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of provisions by
the servants of the East Indies.”

The company’s fortunes had now turned sharply downwards. By the end
of 1772 it was, in effect, bankrupt. A final slump in its shares
precipitated a Europe-wide financial crisis, and forced the company,
begging for a bailout, into the arms of the government. But not only
was the East India Company the mother of the modern multinational
corporation, it also stimulated one of the first movements for
corporate reform.

Well-versed in the history of the Roman Republic, Britain’s elite
feared that, just as the proceeds of Rome’s conquest of Asia (western
Anatolia) had been used to subvert its ancient freedoms, so the
company’s takeover of Bengal would bring despotism back home. If left
unchecked, argued one editorial, the company could “repeat the same
cruelties in this island which have disgraced humanity and deluged
with native and innocent blood the plains of India”. Prior to his
conservative turn during the French revolution, Edmund Burke pressed
repeatedly for the company to be made accountable to parliament and
for its system of exploitation to be ended. “Every rupee of profit
made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India,” he concluded, a
judgement that would probably be echoed today by millions of people
working at the wrong end of the multinational bargain.

All the tools with which we are now familiar were deployed to tame
the firm: codes of conduct for company executives, rules on
shareholder abuse, government regulation, and ultimately, as with so
many failed firms, nationalisation.

Government intervention over a hundred years transformed the company
from a purely commercial institution to an agent of the British
state. It was only in the wake of the great rebellion against company
rule, which shook northern India in 1857-58, that its anachronistic
position as a profit-making ruler was put to an end. Direct control
of the company’s territories passed to the crown, and the British Raj
was born.

Yet in spite of all the parliamentary inquiries and waves of
regulation, few of the company’s executives were ever brought to
book. Clive narrowly escaped parliamentary censure in 1773, only to
die by his own hand. Parliament then turned its attention to Warren
Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, voting twice to recall him for
mismanagement. Both times this was rebuffed by the company’s
shareholders and, as a last resort, and at Burke’s instigation, the
medieval practice of impeachment was revived and used against him.
Among the charges was that Hastings had introduced a company monopoly
over the production of opium and, in an attempt to smuggle the crop
into China, had awarded the contract at a knock-down price to the son
of the East India Company chairman, who promptly sold it on for a
tidy profit. Hastings was also the first to seek deliberately to
break China’s ban on the importation of opium. His attempt failed,
but would be pursued by his successors, with tragic consequences.
Burke won Commons majorities in support of his case, and in February
1788, the trial of Hastings began in the Lords with Burke delivering
a four-day opening speech against him.

What makes Burke’s challenge to Hastings and the East India Company
so compelling are the principles on which it was based. “The laws of
morality,” he declared, “are the same everywhere . . . there is no
action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of
bribery, and oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion,
of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and
the world over.” Against the relativism that increasingly viewed
India as an inferior land in which different standards of justice
should apply, Burke unfurled the standard of absolute values,
protesting against “geographical morality”. In the heat of his
reactions to the French revolution, Burke would oppose Tom Paine’s
Rights of Man. But in the case against Hastings, Burke argued for
companies to be judged by their respect for what we would understand
as universal human rights. The trial was interrupted, first by George
III’s madness and then by the French revolution. After eight long
years, Hastings was acquitted of all charges, a result that surprised
nobody, given the political complexion of the Lords.

Yet there is one instance where the company’s impunity was broken. In
1774, a group of Armenian merchants launched a civil case for damages
against Hastings’s predecessor, Harry Verelst. Led by Gregore
Cojamaul and Johannes Padre Rafael, the merchants alleged that
Verelst had arbitrarily locked them up in Bengal six years earlier,
confiscating their property and removing their freedom to trade. It
is a testimony to the British legal system that in December 1774, the
Lord Chief Justice decided in favour of the Armenians, judging that
Verelst had been guilty of “oppression, false imprisonment and
singular depredations”. Verelst had to pay £9,000 in damages, as well
as full costs. Thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime,
the principle of extra-territorial liability for corporate
malpractice was established in 1770s London.

Many in business regard the current upsurge of global litigation
against corporations such as Talisman, Unocal and Shell as somehow
new and unjustified. Yet Verelst’s case provides a powerful
precedent, demonstrating that more than 200 years ago, a senior
executive of the world’s first multinational was tried and found
guilty of what we would now consider human rights abuses.

It is not, however, Cojamaul’s statue that stands outside the Foreign
Office in Whitehall, but Robert Clive’s. That such a rogue still has
pride of place at the heart of government suggests that Britain has
not yet confronted the connections between its corporate and imperial
pasts. This is not mere forgetfulness, but the mark of a continued
belief that the unrestrained pursuit of market power and personal
reward is to be praised at the highest levels. In India, the East
India Company’s mismanagement remains part of the national
consciousness; here, knowledge of the company’s corruption and abuse
is almost entirely lacking. We still do not recognise the “imperial
gene” that remains at the heart of modern corporate design.

Perhaps Nehru can help us. In The Discovery of India, he examined the
consequences of England’s long domination of India in terms of karma,
the spiritual law of cause and effect. “Entangled in its meshes,” he
wrote, “we have thus struggled in vain to rid ourselves of this past
inheritance and start afresh on a different basis.” Independence was
a necessary starting point for India, wrote Nehru, but Britain, too,
needed to “start afresh”. As we approach the 250th anniversary of
Palashi, we do not need further glorification of the East India
Company’s contribution to consumerism or of the celebrity of its
executives. We need an honest reckoning with the human costs of its
quest for market domination.

Nick Robins’s Imperial Corporation: reckoning with the East

India Company will be published next year. He also takes part in

The Great Debates: Hastings v Burke (Radio 4, 29 December, 8pm)

;newDisplayURN0412130016

The New York Times:

Yerevan Journal: For Young Armenians, a Promised Land Without Promise

December 9, 2004
By SUSAN SACHS

YEREVAN, Armenia – In a smoky corner of the Red Bull bar, a favorite
hangout for university students, Zara Amatuni mulled over the reasons
she would leave her homeland.

“It’s poor, it has no natural resources, it has an undeveloped economy
and it’s unlikely to be developing in the next 10 years,” she said
with a small apologetic shrug.

Ms. Amatuni, 21, imagines herself in London or perhaps Moscow. Her
language skills might land her a well-paying job, and plenty of
Armenians have marked the trail before her.

“We can fit in anywhere,” she said. “The only place we can’t is
Armenia.”

For young people who have come of age in an independent Armenia, a
country the size of Maryland with a population of barely three million
people, it is an awkward paradox.

Their parents grew up in a captive republic of the Soviet Union. Their
grandparents escaped the massacre of Armenians by Turks in the years
of World War I. For them, and for the four-million-strong Armenian
diaspora, the creation of a sovereign Armenian homeland 13 years ago
was the fulfillment of a dream.

Yet the promised land has proved too constricting and its promise too
distant for the next generation’s ambitions. Those who want to leave
and those who want to stay are all trying to reconcile what it means
to be Armenian.

For some, no longer being part of the empire that was the Soviet Union
means a loss of significance in the world. Then there were
opportunities for well-educated Armenians to work in Moscow and
elsewhere. Independence, they had hoped, would propel Armenia into the
wider world, important on its own. Instead, they find themselves in a
backwater with a double-digit unemployment rate and where most of the
decent-paying jobs are with international aid organizations. “Let us
build Armenia here,” said Artyom Simonian, an acting student in the
struggling town of Gyumri, 75 miles northwest of the capital, where
residents are still recovering from a devastating 1988 earthquake.

He is one of those nostalgic for an imagined past. Like many of his
fellow students, Mr. Simonian, 21, was uncomfortable with what seem to
be the country’s choices, integration with Europe or tighter bonds
with Russia.

“We are trying to love foreigners too much,” he said.

He and some other students, gathered around a small table in the
chilly cafeteria of the Gyumri Arts School, understand they have fewer
opportunities than did their parents, who learned to speak Russian and
assimilated Russian culture.

So they long for a bigger, more muscular Armenia, a land that would
embrace what is now southeastern Turkey where their ancestors lived a
century ago. The snowy crest of Mount Ararat, now on the other side of
the border, floats on the horizon beyond Gyumri as a reminder of that
phantom homeland.

“I won’t consider myself Armenian until all of sacred Mount Ararat is
in Armenia,” said Alexan Gevorgian, a theater student. He saw the
world as essentially hostile and neighboring Turkey, just 15 miles to
the west, as “an animal waiting for its prey to weaken.”

His bitterness was too much for Ludvig Harutiunian, the student
council president.

“We young people should leave this hostility behind,” he
protested. “I’d like Armenia to be known for good things, not genocide
and wars and victims and mourning.”

Mr. Harutiunian had evaluated his prospects. His father was already
working in Russia, his brother was working in Spain and he was
resigned to finding a chance for artistic expression elsewhere.

“Leaving the difficulties aside, Armenian culture is not developing
and you have to go out,” he said.

Mr. Simonian interrupted, chiding, “It’s wrong to leave the country.”
The other students fell silent.

The insular views of some of these young people dismay older Armenians
who have a sharp sense of how their own horizons have shrunk since
independence.

“For 70 years we lived in a different country, where we were open to
Russian culture and history,” said Svetlana Muradian, a mother of six
in Gyumri who used to work in Russia but now supports her family with
odd jobs. “Kids now see nothing beyond Armenia. My only hope is that
my three sons will grow up and leave.”

The students gathered in the Red Bull bar in Yerevan were struggling
with a different facet of the same predicament. Fluent in English and
Russian as well as their native Armenian, they were impatient with the
growing pains of a post-Soviet state and cynical about politics.

To Gevorg Karapetian, a doctoral student in computer engineering, the
ideal leader would be a businessman, “someone educated and clever
enough to make relationships with the neighboring countries.”

The present crowd of politicians did not measure up. “Our president
and all the presidents before him just want to be president,”
Mr. Karapetian said.

Unlike the less privileged students in Gyumri, he and his friends in
the capital have reached out beyond Armenia’s borders. They get their
news from the Internet and use the Web to chat with English speakers
from around the world. They regularly meet Armenians from the United
States and Russia who come to visit Armenia, to teach at the
universities, plant trees or to set up charities.

But their relative sophistication also makes them keenly aware of the
contrast between their aspirations and their country’s opportunities.

Victor Agababov, 22, earns the princely sum of $650 a month working as
a computer programmer in Yerevan, making him the best paid member of
his university class. Yet he tends to mock his own achievement because
his job involves doing outsourced work transferred from the United
States and Japan.

“We are a cheap work force,” he said. “We’re cheaper than Indians and
probably 10 times cheaper than Americans.”

Mr. Agababov is considering moving to Moscow to find a technology job
that might promise advancement and independence.

As far the Armenian-Americans and other diaspora visitors who say they
yearn to come to the new Armenia, Mr. Agababov and Zara Amatuni, the
linguistics student, have a suggestion.

“We can swap,” Mr. Agababov said.

“Right,” said Ms. Amatuni. “They can come back and we can
go there.”

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AGBU Press Office
55 East 59th Street
New York, NY 10022-1112
Phone 212.319.6383 x.118
Fax 212.319.6507
Email [email protected]
Website

PRESS RELEASE

Thursday, December 9, 2004

AGBU NEW YORK SUMMER INTERN PROGRAM NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR
SUMMER 2005

“The AGBU New York Summer Intern Program was an amazing journey of
self discovery both as an Armenian and as an individual. I was able to
form friendships that I will cherish forever. My internship at the
United Nations helped me grow professionally and led me one step
closer to achieving my goals. I feel privileged to have had the
opportunity to participate in the program with 34 great Armenians from
different parts of the world. I sometimes wish I could turn back time
to the summer and stay there forever. The summer of 2004 will always
stay with me as one of the most memorable and exciting ones.” Sone
Davayan of Glendale, CA

New York, NY – Having concluded another successful year, the AGBU New
York Summer Intern Program (NYSIP) is currently accepting applications
for the 2005 summer session — the deadline of which is January 14,
2005. To obtain an application package, visit AGBU’s website at
, or contact the Associate Program Director, Aline
Ekmekji, by phone (212) 319-6383 ext. 132 or email [email protected].

The Program, now in its 18th season, has helped Armenian students
throughout the world by providing unique internship opportunities in
some of the world’s most prestigious institutions – from the United
Nations and Columbia University Medical Center to Wachovia Securities
and Revlon, among many others.

In addition to their internship experience, a diverse cultural and
educational program is also arranged by the Program
staff. Participants receive a whirlwind taste of both their Armenian
heritage and what New York has to offer through professional seminars
that provide resume writing, interviewing and networking tips,
community service projects to create a sense of giving back to both
the Armenian and New York communities, as well as exploring New York’s
cultural riches, including world renowned museums and trendy
restaurants.

Founded in 1987 by AGBU President’s Club Co-Chairs, Vartkes and Rita
Balian, the AGBU New York Summer Intern Program is designed to
establish professional opportunities for Armenians living in the
United States and abroad.

BBC News
Dec 9 2004

Tensions rise on Georgia’s border
By Natalia Antelava
BBC News, Georgia

Stability is essential for an oil pipeline running across the region
New tensions have emerged on Georgia’s border with Azerbaijan over
allegations of smuggling and a rail cargo dispute.
Georgian police clashed with the local ethnic Azeri population after
customs officials raided homes and confiscated what they said were
smuggled goods.

In Azerbaijan, the authorities are preventing more than 1,000 railway
wagons entering Georgia.

They claim there is evidence the cargo is bound for Armenia, a
country still officially at war with Azerbaijan.

The border between Azerbaijan and Georgia has always been notorious
for smuggling, which is the only source of income for thousands of
people who live in towns in the area.

Fragile stability

But Azeris say police are specifically targeting them, leaving local
Georgians unpunished.

For its part, Tbilisi is critical of Azerbaijani customs officials,
who are holding up more than 1,000 railway wagons on the border.

They are refusing to let them through because they believe some of
the goods inside are destined for Armenia.

Azerbaijan and Armenia remain locked in dispute over the territory of
Nagorno-Karabakh.

Georgia’s relationship with Azerbaijan is crucial to the fragile
stability of the region, where there are serious ethnic tensions and
several unresolved conflicts.

It is no less important for the multi-billion dollar Western pipeline
for the transportation of oil from the Caspian to Turkey, through
Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Reuters
Persian Journal, Iran
Dar al-Hayat, Saudi Arabia
Dec 9 2004

Iran’s mullah-run judiciary arrests three cultural officials

Iran’s mullah-run judiciary has arrested three cultural officials for
organising a festival containing a brief display of dancing by a male
and female theatre group, the government-run Iran newspaper reported
on Thursday.

One hardline newspaper said the festival in the southern city of
Ahvaz contained “obscene and repulsive scenes of lewdness and ethical
violations in the guise of art.”

Physical contact between unrelated men and women in public is
outlawed under Iran’s strict Islamic moral code and female dancers
and singers are banned from performing in front of men.

Social and cultural restrictions have eased somewhat under the
government of moderate cleric President Mohammad Khatami.

But powerful conservatives deeply opposed to Western cultural
influences have stepped up their efforts to stamp out any watering
down of Islamic values in recent months.

Festival organiser Alireza Ajang, head of the Culture and Islamic
Guidance Ministry in southern Khuzestan province, and two of his
colleagues were arrested on charges of “encouraging immorality”. The
three were later released on $19,500 bail.

Deputy Culture Minister Mohammad Haqshenas said the incident had been
blown out of proportion.

“The whole festival should not be questioned due to three minutes out
of an Armenian group’s 70-minute performance,” Iran newspaper quoted
him as saying.

But the hardline Kayhan newspaper in, an editorial, called for the
officials to be sacked.

“The dancing of women in revealing gowns under the light of strong
projectors, the mixed dancing of men and women, and other ugly scenes
… were just some of the scandalous incidents of that day,” the
paper said.

IFEX, Canada
Dec 9 2004

ARMENIAN, AZERI JOURNALISTS FORGE DIALOGUE AMIDST CONFLICT

Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave in the Caucasus region that has seen
heavy fighting in the past between Armenia and Azerbaijan, is a place
that provokes fiery debate and even deep-seated hatred among citizens
of both countries. Local journalists compare it to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and governments on both sides use the
media to stoke fear and fan the flames of ethnic tension.

But despite a decades-long divide between Armenia and Azerbaijan,
journalists are working together in small but remarkable ways to
promote more fair and balanced media coverage, reports the Committee
to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

In its latest issue of “Dangerous Assignments,” CPJ documents several
cross-border initiatives, including the use of non-traditional media
to promote civic dialogue and fill an “informational vacuum” that
lies between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Radio Van, an Armenian broadcaster, features talk shows that allow
listeners to discuss “hot topics,” including Nagorno-Karabakh,
environmental problems and minority rights. Denied government
permission to broadcast beyond the capital, Yerevan, the station uses
its website to reach more listeners.

On , a website launched by the
Yerevan-based Region Centre, more than 150 journalists from the
Caucasus exchange ideas and opinions in online forums. The website
gives journalists a chance to publicise their work online and conduct
“cross-border interviews” with government officials and other
newsmakers. Journalists must pledge to uphold media ethics when
reporting.

Meanwhile, local press clubs in Yerevan and the Azeri capital, Baku,
organise joint press conferences by satellite, during which
journalists from both countries interview politicians and government
leaders, discuss the news and then report what they learn in their
own media.

While some say these initiatives may not have much influence because
of government control over the media in both countries, others
believe cooperation will go a long way in defusing tension and
dispelling stereotypes. “Fair information has the power to make us
change our perception and to make rational decisions, while unfair
information reinforces stereotypes, stirs up anger and leads to
stupid decisions,” says John Boit, regional director for Internews.

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