New York Times, NY
Aug 7 2004

Trying to Stop Surge of Illegal Migrants, Mexican Authorities Meet
Them at the Airport
By GINGER THOMPSON

Published: August 8, 2004

Arturo Fuentes for The New York Times

Illegal migrants being held last week at a detention center east of
Mexico City. Mexico has detained 112,000 illegal migrants so far this
year, and the authorities expect total detentions in 2004 to reach
200,000.

MEXICO CITY, Aug. 7 – It’s 6 p.m., the busiest time of night during
the busiest time of the year at Benito Juárez International Airport.

The migration supervisor, Alberto Pliego, calls it Jumbo Hour. It
looks a lot like a human salmon run.

Mr. Pliego has at least six 747’s pulling in from Frankfurt, Madrid,
Paris, Amsterdam and Vancouver, and five agents. Their job is to
stand in front of the flow of passengers pouring from the planes and
pick out which ones are tourists and which are migrants trying to get
past them and get to the United States.

“A migrant who makes it past the airport today,” Mr. Pliego said,
“will be in Tijuana tomorrow, and probably in Chicago the day after
that.”

Migrant smugglers – whose business is worth an estimated $1 billion
in this hemisphere, second in profits to drugs – do a brisk business
at the airport, which receives about 10,000 passengers each day.

Mr. Pliego’s suit and tie made him look a little too buttoned down to
guard against some of this country’s most unscrupulous criminal
operations. But by the end of the night, he had stopped more than a
dozen Brazilians who tried to enter Mexico as tourists, but lacked
suitcases, hotel reservations or credit cards. He supervised the
deportation of two undocumented Armenians. Three Guatemalans were
caught trying to enter the country with false visas. And one of Mr.
Pliego’s agents caught four undocumented Chinese travelers lingering
over soft drinks and sandwiches in an airport restaurant.

The agent spoke no Chinese. The Chinese spoke no Spanish. But in
limited English, each side seemed to completely understand the other.

The agent speculated that the Chinese men were waiting for a guide to
help them get past migration checkpoints.

The Chinese said they were hungry.

The agent asked the Chinese for their travel visas.

The Chinese said they planned to stay in Mexico for only one night.

The agent escorted the Chinese men back to the same airplane on which
they had arrived, ordering them back to Amsterdam.

The Chinese boarded without putting up a fight.

The Mexican authorities report that a surging number of migrants from
all around the world are traveling through Mexico to get to the
United States. So far this year, Mexico has detained nearly 112,000
illegal migrants, compared with 150,000 in all of 2001. Authorities
said they expected total detentions for this year to reach 200,000.
The Mexicans are under tough pressure from the United States, which
since Sept. 11 has feared that global terrorists could easily slip
into Mexico and then cross into the United States.

The overwhelming majority of those detained are from Central and
South America, authorities report. But there are also increasing
numbers from as far away as Pakistan, Armenia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Poland, Ethiopia and China.

The migrants often arrive at Mexico’s main airports and then travel
by land to the border. But illegal migration routes and methods are
as diverse as the people who use them. On Wednesday, the Mexican
authorities detained four Chinese migrants on a private jet that made
an emergency landing for fuel in the southern state of Chiapas. The
pilots reported that they had picked up their undocumented passengers
in Caracas, Venezuela, and that they planned to deliver them to
smuggling contacts at a small airport north of Mexico City.

At a migration detention center to the east of Mexico City holding
500 people of every background, each farmer, bricklayer, auto
mechanic and accountant had an epic story to tell. The director of
the center, Hugo Miguel Ayala, said the migrants came from more than
a dozen countries.

Among them was a 35-year-old Ethiopian woman named Alemayehu, who
said she traveled from her homeland to Egypt, Moscow, Havana and
Nicaragua before boarding a bus bound for Mexico City, hoping to
reach New York.

And there was Yu Youqiang, who left his wife and small daughter in
Fujian, China, to seek work in New York. He said he traveled to
Frankfurt, then to Mexico taking nothing but a backpack and travel
instructions from a smuggler scribbled on a scrap of paper.

A 32-year-old vegetable vendor, Mr. Yu said he had made it all the
way to the border before he was caught by the Mexican authorities in
a town whose name he could not recall. He said he had paid smugglers
$5,000 for help reaching the United States. Relatives, he said, had
agreed to pay $25,000 more once he arrived in New York.

“We come through Mexico because it’s cheaper,” he said in English and
through a translator. He said some Chinese migrants flew directly to
the United States from Hong Kong. But false visas cost a lot. And
entering the United States through an airport is much harder than
entering through the border.

“They say that it’s easy to get across,” Mr. Yu said. “You just have
to walk.”

It’s fairly easy for Brazilians to enter Mexico. They are among 46
nationalities that are not required to get Mexican visas. The Mexican
authorities report that Brazilians are coming in droves, and heading
straight for the United States.

Migrants’ passage through Mexico, while not new, is surging. The
country’s border with the United States has long made it a natural
transshipment point for all kinds of illegal trafficking including
drugs, guns and migrants. But since the Sept. 11 attacks against the
United States, migration has become a national security priority –
and often the source of diplomatic tensions – for authorities on both
sides of the United States-Mexico border.

The United States has pressed hard on the Mexican government to
increase security at its airports and borders, and to crack down
against the criminal organizations that smuggle migrants into the
United States, arguing that smugglers – known in Mexico as coyotes –
could be easily enlisted by terrorists.

Mexico, cash poor and rife with corruption, struggles to comply with
its neighbor’s demands.

In an interview, Interior Minister Santiago Creel said Mexico had
made important strides in preventing this country from becoming a
transshipment point for terrorists. In December, the government
upgraded systems that track foreigners who enter and reside in
Mexico. In the last two years, Mr. Creel said, the government has
dismantled more than 10 important migrant smuggling organizations,
including one that was led by some 44 migration agents and police
officers. But so far, the authorities have not detained any suspected
terrorists trying to enter the United States from Mexico.

Mexico seems burdened in the struggle. While illegal migration
through Mexico has increased by 144 percent over the last year,
authorities said, the National Migration Institute has grown less
than 10 percent. Magdalena Carral, the commissioner of the institute,
says she has about $140 million a year to spend on security at all of
Mexico’s airports, seaports and land borders. The United States
spends some $700 million to secure its borders, and the United States
Border patrol has tripled in size. Ms. Carral said that while more
than 14,000 American agents patrol the 2,000-mile United
States-Mexico border, Mexico has fewer than 329 agents covering its
700-mile border with Guatemala.

“The question we must ask is are we in a better position today to
stop the flow of migrants through the country, and the answer to that
question is yes,” said Mr. Creel, the interior minister. “But if you
ask do we have systems that are able to stop anyone and everyone from
crossing, the answer is no.

“We do not have such systems,” he added, “but neither does the United
States.”

That point became alarmingly clear two weeks ago with the arrest of a
48-year-old woman carrying a ripped South African passport and $7,000
in assorted currencies.

United States Border Patrol officers detained the woman, Farida
Goolam Mahomed Ahmed, at an airport in the border city of McAllen,
Tex. Initial reports following Ms. Ahmed’s detention indicated that
she was being held in federal custody as a suspected terrorist. Two
weeks later, authorities have failed to charge Ms. Ahmed with
anything more than illegally entering the United States and altering
a passport.

Still, Mexicans and Americans said her case was a reminder that the
border they share remains porous and unsafe, that migrant smuggling
thrives and that the threat of a terrorist entering from Mexico
remains real.

One Mexico City columnist proclaimed this week, without supporting
evidence, that Al Qaeda was operating in Mexico. The American
authorities and a high-level intelligence official in Mexico’s
Interior Ministry dismissed the column. However, the Mexican official
acknowledged that the possibility is worrisome.

“Welcome,” he said, “to my nightmare.”

Gustavo Mohar, a migration expert who formerly served in Mexico’s
Foreign Ministry, said: “It is a very frightening scenario, but real.
If we continue to have a border that allows tens of thousands of
people to cross without papers, you never know when you are going
have someone cross who is a threat.”

Daily Times, Pakistan
Aug 8 2004

Tehran’s diplomatic offensive to end isolation

The Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, was in the trans-Caucasian
state of Azerbaijan two days ago, the first visit by an Iranian head
of state to Baku since 1993. The two sides have had strained
relations on a number of issues, not least access to oil in the
Caspian Sea. The Azeris are Shia Muslims and share the faith with
Iran but they are ethnic Turkic and are closer to Turkey on that
basis. As part of the Soviet Union until December 1991, they were the
most secular and westernised of all the Muslim states. They also have
a historic feud with Armenia, another Soviet republic which is now an
independent state. That dispute in the nineties spilled over into war
on the issue of the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan was
defeated. Turkey could not do much on the side of the Azeris because
of its own agreement with Moscow to stay out of the area. At the
time, Iran and Turkey were also vying with each other for influence
in the Central Asian republics.

Tehran finds itself increasingly besieged by the Americans. Mr
Khatami’s Baku visit therefore appears to be the beginning of a
diplomatic offensive in the region to re-establish good relations
with Iran’s neighbours. Pakistan-Iran relations have also been
nose-diving since the first gulf war, the struggle in Afghanistan and
Iran’s growing fondness for India. Recently, Iran, finding itself
hemmed in by America and the European Union on the nuclear issue,
implicated Pakistan in the clandestine nuclear programme it is
running. That created a major embarrassment for Islamabad. Therefore
Pakistan has reason to be suspicious of Iran. Even so, given the
contiguity and historical ties, there is every reason for the two
countries to have good relations. However, the onus of taking the
initiative to that end lies with Iran, not least because Tehran has
involved India into this equation and is also embarked on a nuclear
programme, which is a source of worry for the world and embarrassment
for Pakistan.

An additional problem with Iran is the internal struggle there
between the hard-liners and the reformers, with most Iranians sick of
the hard-liners for refusing to open up and disappointed with the
reformers for being unable to deliver. It is difficult to figure out
who Pakistan should talk to. Also, if Iran is trying to reach out now
to end its isolation and keep America at bay on the nuclear question,
then Pakistan may not have much to give Tehran because the latter’s
nuclear capability is a cause of concern for Pakistan too. *

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Assyrian International News Agency, Iraq
Aug 8 2004

Amid Escalating Fear of Massacres, Assyrians Commemorate Martyr’s Day

(AINA) — Less than one week after the deadly Assyrian Church
bombings in Baghdad and Mosul (photo gallery), Iraq, Assyrians once
again will gather to commemorate Assyrian Martyr’s Day. August 7
marks the memorial day for legions of Assyrian (also known as
Chaldeans and Syriacs) victims of massacres, pogroms, and genocide in
general, but in particular commemorates the fateful day in 1933 when
the newly established Iraqi army massacred upwards of 3000 Assyrian
civilians in and around Simmele, Northern Iraq (account of the
massacre). This year’s Church bombings coinciding with the 71st
anniversary of the massacre have rekindled the same Assyrian concerns
about security in Iraq and reignited calls for a “Safe Haven” in an
Assyrian administered area.

In the early stages of the last century, Great Britain enlisted the
support of the Assyrians as an ally in World War One. The autonomous
Assyrians were drawn into the conflict following successive massacres
against the civilian population by forces of the Ottoman Empire
consisting of Turks and Kurds. Although many geopolitical and
economic factors were involved in provoking the attacks against the
Assyrians, a jihad or “holy war” was declared and served as the
rallying cry and vehicle for marauding Turks, Kurds, and Persians.
Although the Muslim holy war against the Armenians is perhaps better
known, over three-fourths, or 750,000 Assyrian Christians died by
outright murder, starvation, disease and the all too familiar
consequences of genocide, between 1914-1923 during the Assyrian
Holocaust along with a significant number of Pontic Greeks.

The conflict and subsequent Assyrian Holocaust, commemorated on April
24 of every year as Sayfo (“The Sword”), led to the decimation and
dispersal of the Assyrians. Those Assyrians who survived Sayfo were
driven out of their ancestral homeland in Turkish Mesopotamia
primarily toward the area of Mosul Vilayet in Iraq, Jazira in Syria,
and the Urmi plains of Iran where large Assyrian populations already
lived. The massacres of 1915 followed the Assyrians to these areas as
well, prompting an exodus of many more Assyrians to other countries
and continents. The Assyrian Holocaust of 1915 is the turning point
in the modern history of the Assyrian Christians precisely because it
is the single event that led to the dispersal of the surviving
community into small, weak, and destitute pockets.

On account of the Assyrians siding with the victorious Allies during
World War One, Great Britain had promised the Assyrians autonomy,
independence, and a homeland in order to ensure their security and
survival. The Assyrian question was addressed during postwar
deliberations at the League of Nations. However, with the termination
of the British Mandate in Iraq, the unresolved status of the
Assyrians was relinquished to the Iraqi government with certain
minority guarantees specifically concerning freedom of religious,
cultural, and linguistic expression.

Many of the Assyrians surviving Sayfo had been gathered in refugee
camps in Iraq pending final resettlement in an autonomous Assyrian
homeland. In 1933, however, the Iraqi government declared an
ultimatum giving the Assyrians one of two choices: either to be
resettled in small populations dispersed amongst larger Muslim
populations that had recently been violently antagonistic or to leave
Iraq entirely. Some Assyrians chose to leave to neighboring Syria and
so notified the Iraqi government of their intention. In response, the
Iraqi government dispatched the Iraqi army to attack the Assyrians
fleeing into Syria. In their subsequent defeat, the retreating Iraqi
army massacred over 3,000 Assyrian civilians in Simmele and other
surrounding towns in northern Iraq in August of 1933. Eyewitness
accounts recorded babies hurled into the air and bayoneted and women
and elderly being run over by vehicles repeatedly. Upon his return to
Baghdad, the commanding officer, a Kurd named Bekir Sidqi, who
executed the massacre was hailed as a conquering hero. Thus, the
first official military campaign of the Iraqi army served as the
newly independent government’s final solution to the Assyrian
question. The demoralized Assyrian refugee population in Iraq was
thereby resettled in dispersed villages while the other surviving
isolated communities languished in the areas of Tur Abdin, Turkey;
Jazira, Syria; and Urmi, Iran.

The lessons of World War I and 1933 remain fresh in the Assyrian
psyche. On the one hand, deep apprehension about the peaceful
intentions of their neighbors is coupled with profound suspicion
about the reliability and commitment of Western powers. These same
lessons were re-inscribed into the Assyrian psyche on August 1, 2004
as old wounds were once again torn open.

For Assyrians, today’s circumstances in Iraq mark striking
similarities to those of 1933. Again today, Assyrians find themselves
in a period of flux, insecurity, threat, and uncertainty. The
official Assyrian political aspiration of an administered or
semi-autonomous area in the Plains of Nineveh hark back to the
appeals made to the League of Nations. The negligible commitment of
the West to protect Assyrian Christians mirrors the neglect of the
past as well. And now rising attacks against Assyrians1 climaxing in
the bloody Church bombings rekindle the same Assyrian suspicions and
apprehensions felt in August 1933 when Bekir Sidqi schemed to cleanse
yet another region of Assyrians.

However, some welcome differences are not deniable either. Whereas in
1933, the government of Iraq marked the bayoneting of babies by
Sidqi’s henchmen with parades and medals, today’s Iraqi government
and leading Islamic leaders were quick to condemn the attacks. The
rapidity of blaming the attacks on Jordanian born Zirqawi — a
non-Iraqi Al-Qaeda operative — attempted to send a quick signal that
this could not have been an inside Iraqi attack on fellow Iraqi
Christians. One Assyrian analyst who welcomed the condemnations from
across the Iraqi political and religious spectrum as a refreshing sea
change, never the less viewed the quick declaration by the government
that Zirqawi had orchestrated the attack as at least premature if not
wholly disingenuous. “Clearly a non-Iraqi Al-Qaeda may have committed
these attacks, but so too could have others such as Kurds, former
Baathists or anyone else fighting US forces who may in their own
twisted way link Assyrian Christian Churches to the American
‘Christian’ forces. For the government to quickly blame Zirqawi
without an investigation or a claim of responsibility smacks of a
political decision to absolve or whitewash — as it were — any Iraqi
or Iraqi society itself for that matter of such a heinous crime.
August 7, 1933 and the subsequent decades of persecution by
successive regimes remind us that Iraq has been and indeed is capable
of such acts. Sweeping such attacks under the rug will not serve the
progress of Iraqi society due justice. The history of abuse and
massacre of Assyrians by the Iraqi state must be recognized. Only
when we come to terms with the historical facts and realities and
accept the Assyrian people’s aspiration to live in security in their
ancestral towns and villages in the Nineveh Plain can we begin to lay
Assyrian concerns to rest.” On a hopeful note, the analyst noted “The
early signs from Iraq with nearly universal condemnation of the
attacks is indeed encouraging, however.”

This year, less than one week after five Christian Churches were
bombed, Assyrians will gather on August 7 in their Churches, social
halls, and cemeteries for poems, prayers, and recollections (story).
This year, armed with haunting images of smoke billowing from their
churches, Assyrians will again become determined to rebuild and
refortify. This year, Assyrians will couple the memories of the
Simmele massacre with fresh images of bloodied and dead worshipers as
they redouble their efforts to transform the historical dream of a
self administered area into a safe, secure, and lasting reality.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Space Ref
Aug 7 2004

NASA Space Station On-Orbit Status 6 August 2004

SpaceRef note: This NASA Headquarters internal status report, as
presented here, contains additional, original material produced by
SpaceRef.com (copyright © 2004) to enhance access to related status
reports and NASA activities.

All ISS systems continue to function nominally except those noted
previously or below.

Before breakfast, FE/SO Michael Fincke performed the 24-hr. data
registration of the acoustic dosimeters (two body-worn and one
static) deployed yesterday. Readings will again be taken tonight
before sleep time. [Before turning the dosimeters back on again,
their batteries were changed out. The dosimeters were then
statically deployed for approximately 16 hrs in specified locations.]

In preparation for more upcoming ADUM (Advanced Diagnostic Ultrasound
in Microgravity) activities, the Science Officer set up and took
another training session on the ADUM experiment’s On-board
Proficiency Enhancer (OPE). [Mike used the ADUM OPE compact disk on
the HRF PC/laptop, focusing on cardiac, thoracic & bone scanning,
plus data acquisition (probe positioning) and principles of remote
guidance, ultrasound and anatomy.]

Previous Reports

ISS On-orbit Status [HQ]
ISS Status [JSC]
Shuttle Processing [KSC]

CDR Gennady Padalka meanwhile set up and configured equipment for
another test of the Russian ASN-M satellite navigation system’s NPM
receiver module, using the ASN-2401 antenna system and Laptop 3.
[Purpose of today’s experiment is to test the NPM’s performance under
real flight conditions, including assessment of the precision of the
acquired state vector (SV), generation of statistics for the
successful operation of the NPM test mode on orbit, evaluation of the
NPM data integrity in flight as well as its Cold and Hot start times,
verification of software functionality in the ASN-M NVM (navigation
computing module), and analyzing navigation satellite signal and ISS
structures multipath effects on the NPM. When functioning, the ASN
will use GLONASS satellites (the Russian GPS equivalent) to update
the SV without using the ground (which up to now has to uplink daily
SV updates) or requiring SV transfers from the USOS from time to
time. The ASN equipment was originally installed in the SM but was
found faulty and had to be returned to the ground. After repair it
was shipped again to the station on Progress 11P and re-installed by
Yuri Malenchenko on 7/8/03, followed by various troubleshooting
attempts en suite.]

In the Lab module, Mike Fincke powered up the HRF GASMAP (Human
Research Facility/Gas Analyzer System for Metabolic Analysis
Physiology) and its laptop for the regular routine 30-day health
check (without environmental sampling), for a minimum run of six
hours. Afterwards, the equipment was turned off again.

Mike also activated the EXPRESS Rack 5 laptop computer (ER5 ELC) for
the subsequently scheduled payload activities. Using the new SNFM
(Serial Network Flow Monitor) application, the SO then initiated a
3-hr. session to capture packet data traffic on the LAN-2 science
network on the ELC during the subsequent SAMS (space acceleration
measurement system) repair. Later tonight, ER5 ELC will be powered
off again. [The software automatically transmits stored files to
the ARIS POP computer (Active Rack Isolation System/Payload On-orbit
Processor) in ER2 for later downlink and analysis on the ground.]

On the SAMS, Fincke performed a software upgrade, installing the
newly revised software load, then downloaded files from the SAMS ICM
(interim control module). After reviewing an OBT (onboard training)
course for operating the CGBA (Commercial Generic Bioprocessing
Apparatus), the FE later tonight will activate the payload for
autonomous operation.

In the Service Module Work Compartment (SM RO), Gennady removed two
IMU-128-2 microaccelerometers behind wall panels and replaced them
with new units brought up on Progress 14P. The old IMUs were
discarded as trash to be loaded on the next Progress. Part of the
task was to take photo documentation of the new accelerometers with
the Nikon D1 digital camera.

Padalka had an additional hour on his schedule reserved for stowing
remaining EVA tools, batteries etc.

At ~9:30am EDT, the CDR started another run of the Russian BIO-5
Rasteniya-2 (“plants-2”) experiment in the “Lada-5” greenhouse,
setting it up for operation and activating it by turning on
environmental control power (pumps, light and fan), priming the
tensiometers and setting laptop mode to cultivation. [Rasteniya-2
researches growth and development of plants under spaceflight
conditions. After hardware installation, Gennady planted six seeds
of acacia leaf peas between the wicks of the root module, made power
connections and locked the tray. Regular daily maintenance of the
experiment involves monitoring of seedling growth, humidity
measurements, moistening of the substrate if necessary, and
photo/video recording.]

Later today, CDR Padalka is to perform the periodic replenishing of
the Elektron’s water supply for electrolysis, filling the KOV thermal
loops’ EDV container with purified (deionized) water from the BKO
multifiltration/purification column unit. [The procedure was
specially designed to prevent air bubbles from getting into the BZh
liquid unit where they could cause micropump impeller cavitation and
Elektron shutdown, as numerous past times. In the procedure, the EDV
water is drawn from the BKO and the air/liquid separator unit (GZhS)
while the crewmember checks for any air bubbles in the EDV (and, if
visible, estimates their number).]

On the basis of yesterday’s tagup and an uplinked list of
instructions, Mike Fincke assembled the new flexhose cover box from
its individual pieces delivered on Progress. The box was then
installed on the U-jumper flexhose at the Lab science window, to
protect it from inadvertent “grasps” by crewmembers hovering at the
window.

The daily routine maintenance on the SOZh life support system was
performed by Gennady, who also prepared the daily IMS “delta” file
update, while Mike took care of the standard routine checkup of
autonomous Lab payloads.

Mike Fincke also worked on the PC printer, printing out revised ODF
(operations data file) Warning pages, complete with P&I (pen & ink)
updates.

Padalka conducted his weekly IMS (inventory management system) tagup
with ground specialists, discussing open issues concerning
identification of equipment and storage locations for updating the
IMS database.

For the SO’s OBT preparation for the MFMG (Miscible Fluids in
Microgravity) demo scheduled for the next “Saturday Science” program,
POIC (Payload Operations & Integration Center) uplinked sample movies
showing Mike Foale performing MFMG.

Fincke and Padalka performed their full regimen of physical exercise
on VELO with force loader, RED (resistive exercise device) and TVIS
(treadmill with vibration isolation and stabilization).

Working off the Russian task list, the CDR was to conduct another run
of the Russian Uragan earth-imaging program, using the Kodak 760 DSC
(digital still camera) with 800mm-lens from SM windows #9. [Among
today’s observation targets are the Altai glaciers, the South shore
of the Baikal Sea, Trans-Baikal population centers, the Amur river,
the Far East coast towards Sovetskaya Gavan, Sakhalin Island,
volcanoes in Armenia and Yerevan, etc.]

The station continues to fly in XPOP attitude (X-axis perpendicular
to orbit plane), pitch: 0.8 deg, yaw: -8.0 deg, roll: 0 deg.

Asia Times, Hong Kong
Aug 7 2004

Muqtada stirs new storms
By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE – The recent series of attacks on Christian churches in
Iraq that left 12 people dead and scores injured have drawn Iraq’s
Christian minority into the insurgency, and an exodus of Christians
from Iraq to countries such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Australia
can be expected.

Meanwhile, Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr – whose supporters are said
to be behind the attacks on Christians – on Thursday declared a
“revolution” against US-led forces in Iraq. This followed a truce of
two months and led immediately to fighting in the holy city of Najaf
and other Shi’ite areas that claimed the lives of at least 50 Iraqis
and an American soldier, and brought down a US helicopter.

The fighting continued on Friday, with US military forces conducting
a second day of air strikes in Najaf. Aircraft bombed positions held
by Muqtada’s Mehdi Army as American soldiers and Iraqi security
forces advanced on the insurgents.

In the attacks on Christians, a wave of well-coordinated bombs ripped
through four churches in Baghdad and two in Mosul last Sunday. Aimed
at having maximum impact, the attacks coincided with the evening Mass
when worshippers would be present in the church in large numbers.

The attacks are the most significant on the community since the fall
of the Saddam Hussein regime 15 months ago. Individual Christians
have been attacked over the past year, but those were more in the
nature of vigilante violence or moral policing by Islamist groups.
Several Christian storeowners have been victimized – some have had
their shops burned and others have been sent letters threatening them
with death. And some have been killed. But these acts of violence and
threats have to do with the fact that most shops selling alcohol or
Western music cassettes in Iraq are owned by Christians.

These latest bombings are said to be the work of supporters of
Muqtada as part of the larger strategy of Islamic militants seeking
to create an Islamic society in Iraq. Their violence is aimed at
enforcing an Islamic code of behavior, including the wearing of the
veil by women and a ban on alcohol.

Several Iraqi Christians have been kidnapped over the past year. This
again has to do with a general perception in Iraq that the Christian
community is wealthy. But not all Christians are, and some of those
who have been abducted have not been able to raise the enormous
ransom demanded by their kidnappers.

Because of their religion, and the fact that many Iraqi Christians
speak English or have relatives abroad, there is also a perception
that Christians are pro-American and that they are supporters of the
US occupation of Iraq. This perception has proved costly to the Iraqi
Christian community.

Some of the Christians who have been murdered over the past few
months are believed to have been working with the occupation force,
providing intelligence or simply providing services as launderers,
interpreters, supplying groceries and so on.

The Iraqi Christian community, concentrated around Baghdad and in the
northern cities of Kirkuk, Mosul and Irbil, is one of the oldest in
the world. The 800,000-strong Christian community constitutes 3% of
Iraq’s population. Most Iraqi Christians belong to the Chaldean
denomination. Other denominations include the Assyrians, who
constitute a sizable section, Catholic and Orthodox Syriacs, as well
as Catholic and Orthodox Armenians.

The Christian community in Iraq has not suffered general persecution
as such. But it has been at the receiving end of violence from time
to time, usually in periods of transition. In 1932, for instance,
when Iraq gained independence from the British Empire, hundreds of
Assyrian Christians were slaughtered by the Iraqi military. Their
villages were destroyed, their houses, shops and churches burned. The
Assyrian Christian collaboration with the British colonial power is
said to have triggered the violence.

Iraqi Christians consider themselves generally well treated under
Saddam’s largely secular rule. Some Christians even rose to top
positions in government – former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz is
one example. The Saddam Hussein government is also said to have kept
anti-Christian violence under check. But as part of the “relocation
programs”, which sought to create Arab majorities near strategic
oilfields, Christians, too, suffered. Christians living in the
oil-rich areas were among the communities that were forced to move
out. But Christians did not suffer the kind of persecution that the
Shi’ites or the Kurds did. The Ba’ath Party did not consider the
Christians as threatening and so allowed them considerable religious
freedom in return for their political submission.

The exodus of Christians from Iraq grew in the 1990s, especially
after the Gulf War and the imposition of sanctions thereafter.
According to a 1987 census, there were about 1.4 million Iraqi
Christians compared with about 800,000 today. The fall of the Saddam
Hussein government last year, the weakening of the generally secular
atmosphere, the growing Islamization and the spread of lawlessness
has prompted hundreds to flee.

All Iraqis are suffering on account of the deteriorating security
situation in the country. Iraqis irrespective of their religion have
been targets of violence by insurgents and the occupation forces.
What has led to the heightened feeling of vulnerability among the
Iraqi Christians now is that a sizable section of the Iraqi militants
view the US-led coalition as a Christian crusade and Iraq’s Christian
community as its supporters and collaborators.

Analysts have blamed the recent church bombings on groups with links
to al-Qaeda. They point to similar church bombing by outfits linked
to al-Qaeda in the Philippines, Indonesia and Pakistan as evidence of
this trend.

Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Tawhid and Jihad, which
has al-Qaeda links, has emerged as the foremost suspect for the Iraqi
church bombings. The aim was not only to heighten terror among
Christians and deepen divisions in Iraqi society (as part of an
effort to destabilize society) but also to undermine the US-appointed
interim government. The attacks might also have been aimed at
inflaming anger among President George W Bush’s supporters in the US
Christian Right.

While the coalition forces might be more favorably disposed toward
Iraqi Christians, members of the community have suffered, as have
Iraqi Muslims, on account of random searches, bombings, food and
power shortages, and the daily humiliation that the coalition forces
mete out to Iraqis. At the same time, the Christians are viewed as
collaborators with the “crusader forces”, making them vulnerable to
violence from Iraqis. As the movement for the Islamization of Iraq
gathers momentum, their religious rights – and more worryingly, their
personal survival – is likely to come under further threat. Clearly,
this community is caught in the crossfire.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent researcher/writer based in
Bangalore, India. She has a doctoral degree from the School of
International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi. Her
areas of interest include terrorism, conflict zones and gender and
conflict. Formerly an assistant editor at Deccan Herald (Bangalore),
she now teaches at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

Tehran Times
Aug 8 2004

Tabriz To Host 12th Int’l Iran-Tabriz Exhibition

TABRIZ (IRNA) — The 12th International Iran-Tabriz Trade Exhibition
is to open in this northwestern province on Wednesday, the
exhibition’s general manager, said.

Some 844 domestic companies and 15 foreign countries from Turkey,
China, Armenia, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, Italy, France, Sri
Lanka, Spain, Holland, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and
India will be participating in this seven-day exhibition, Habib
Mahuti told IRNA on Saturday.

Leather, home appliances, foodstuff, chinaware, motor oil, paraffin,
various steel products, calculators, automatic doors and computers
will be among the items that will be showcased in the trade fair.

The Times Higher Education Supplement
August 6, 2004

Young Turks Who Set Stage For The Century Of Slaughter
by: William Rubinstein

The Burning Tigris: A History of the Armenian Genocide. By Peter
Balakian. Heinemann 473pp, Pounds 18.99. ISBN 0 434 00816 8

The 20th century has often been called the century of genocide, and
the first of its genocidal horrors, at least in the Western world,
was the Armenian genocide of 1915. Carried out by the Turkish
Government and its allies among the local populations of northeastern
and central Turkey against its own citizens, it anticipated many of
the enormities made familiar to the world in the Nazi genocide of the
Jews a quarter of a century later. In some respects, the Armenian
genocide provides an archetype for most subsequent state-sponsored
mass killings down to Pol Pot and beyond.

The Armenian genocide originated among the ultra-nationalist
extremists of the Committee for Union and Progress (the CUP), also
known as the Ittihad (Union), or, more popularly, the “Young Turks”,
who had seized power in the Ottoman Empire in 1908. Originally a
broadly based modernising movement, its Turkish majority became ever
more committed to extreme Turkish nationalism, entailing the
elimination of most Armenians and Greeks from the Turkish economy.
Their extremism was accentuated by the progressive loss of territory
suffered by Turkey in the Balkans and elsewhere up until 1914. In
1915, during the First World War, extremists within the CUP took the
smokescreen provided by the war as their opportunity to eliminate
most of the Armenians in Anatolian Turkey. At least 600,000 Armenians
perished – other estimates are far higher – often in ways and
circumstances that directly anticipated the Nazi Holocaust.

Many thousands were deported in sealed boxcars to remote desert
areas; many were machine-gunned in pits at the edge of towns. For one
of the first times in modern Western history, this slaughter spared
no one, not even women, children and the elderly, who are normally
protected to a certain extent in wartime. (On the other hand,
conversion to Islam spared the lives of some, while many Armenian
women wound up as Islamified wives or concubines of Turks.) This
harrowing story has attracted a growing literature in the burgeoning
and controversial field of “genocide studies”, but Peter Balakian’s
work is perhaps the first general account of the Armenian genocide
intended for a literate mass audience; it is clearly meant to
parallel the many popular accounts of the Holocaust, regularly
drawing analogies with the Nazi genocide.

Among its many merits are a full discussion of the appalling
persecutions endured by the Armenians in the decades before 1914, and
of the not-inconsiderable efforts of the Western democracies,
particularly the US, to publicise their fate and relieve their
suffering. This work is likely to become the best-known book on the
Armenian genocide. Balakian, professor of humanities at Colgate
University in New York state, is one of a growing number of
historians of Armenian descent who have assessed and publicised the
tragedy of their people. The work includes harrowing photographs of
the 1915 genocide that beggar belief.

Granted all of this, one must also point out that much about the
Armenian genocide of 1915, as diabolical as it obviously was, can be
interpreted in a somewhat different light compared with the sequence
of events typically set out in recent accounts of this event. First,
it seems clear that there was no pre-existing plan among Turkish
leaders to exterminate the Armenians, as is now frequently suggested
by many scholars. The last Ottoman Parliament, elected in 1914 just
before the outbreak of the war, saw 14 Armenians elected among its
259 members, exactly the same number as in the previous Parliament,
elected in 1908. Early in 1914, both the Armenian and Greek
communities in Turkey – the Greeks also being targeted by Turkish
extremists – carried out extensive and successful negotiations aimed
at guaranteeing their existing percentages in future Ottoman
parliaments. At this stage, a number of Armenians were major figures
in the CUP movement, for instance Bedros Halacian, the public works
minister. The contrast between this and the situation of the Jews in
Nazi Germany, ostracised from day one, is self-evident.

It was also plainly the case that Turkey did not start the First
World War and could not have foreseen the course of catastrophic war
declarations and mobilisations that unfolded in mid-1914. Indeed,
Turkey remained neutral for the first three months of the conflict,
declaring war only on October 19, 1914. In fact, most Turkish elite
opinion was originally pro-British rather than pro-German, with
Britain traditionally seen as the Ottoman Empire’s protector, and
arguably only the extraordinarily inept handling of the situation by
the British Government – something for which it has received
insufficient criticism – prevented Turkey from joining the Allies
rather than the Central Powers, with profound consequences.

>From October 1914, however, Turkey found itself at war with Russia.

Turkey’s nationalist extremists saw its Christian Armenian minority
as likely to be a subversive force working for Russia. Turkey then
proceeded to invade the Russian Caucasus, with disastrous results,
leading, in late November 1914, to a Russian counter-invasion of
northeastern Anatolia, which resulted in its seizure of much of the
area. Many Armenians supported the Russian drive against the hated
Turks. That Russia had successfully invaded northeastern Turkey in
1914-15 is obfuscated and camouflaged in the most recent accounts of
the Armenian genocide.

It was at this point, in the spring of 1915, that the CUP Government,
now dominated by extremists, decided forcibly to transfer its
Armenian population in northeastern Anatolia to the southern part of
Turkey. This forcible transfer was carried out with the utmost
brutality and inhumanity, and certainly included the deliberate
murder of tens of thousands of Armenians, by the nationalist
extremists who controlled the Turkish Government as well as their
henchmen among anti-Christian Muslim fundamentalists, Kurds and
criminals recruited especially to carry out the transfers as brutally
as possible.

The genocide occurred when the very existence of Turkey was certainly
threatened by its enemies, creating a mood of panic where murderous
fanaticism became the order of the day. While the parallels with the
Holocaust are clear, there were obvious differences as well: most
killings by the Nazis occurred in Poland and Russia, which Germany
had invaded largely for ideological reasons, the persecution of the
Jews being at the very core of Hitler’s world-view. In contrast,
Turkey inflicted slaughter on its own people while being invaded.

It is also no coincidence that the Armenian genocide occurred during
the First World War. The profoundly destructive effects of that
conflict led to the triumph of extremist, genocidal ideologies whose
impact was arguably not made good until the fall of Communism 75
years later.

William D. Rubinstein is professor of history, University of Wales,
Aberystwyth.

The Times Higher Education Supplement
August 6, 2004

No Victory In The Peace To End Peace

by Annette Becker

The Origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger
H. Herwig. Cambridge University Press, 537pp, Pounds 45.00 ISBN 0 521
81735 8

Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War
at Sea. By Robert K. Massie. Cape, 865pp, Pounds 25.00 ISBN 0 224
04092 8

The Great War: An Imperial History. By John H. Morrow Jr. Routledge,
352pp, Pounds 25.00 ISBN 0 415 20439 9

The First World War: A New Illustrated History. By Hew Strachan.
Simon and Schuster 350pp, Pounds 25.00. ISBN 0 7432 3959 8

Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War. By Nicholas J.
Saunders. Berg, 254ppPounds 50.00 and Pounds 15.99. ISBN 1 85973 608
4and 603 3

The great diplomat and historian George Kennan, who celebrates his
100th birthday this year, called the First World War “the great
seminal catastrophe of this century”. Certainly, from beginning to
end it was a tragedy, in which different ages of war came together:
the old way of fighting with industrial-scale killing, soldiers and
home front populations who consented to their nation’s cause together
with the victimised civilians of invaded and occupied territories. At
the time, it was thought that the horror culminated on the
battlefields of Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli. Then the 1915
Armenian massacre (called retrospectively genocide after the
industrial mass killing of the Jews during the next war) came to play
a significant role in the way people thought about the savagery of
the 20th century as a whole.

The Great War has come to be studied more and more as a laboratory of
horror. These books follow this pattern, bringing different ages of
historiography to the intellectual field. Some of the books stick,
sometimes brilliantly, to the old way of telling stories, and offer a
history of military events led by presidents, emperors, prime
ministers, generals and diplomats, without mentioning ordinary
people, mentalities and representations; others look at public
opinion and war culture – from the culture of mobilisation and
sacrifice to that of rejection; some try to take in the twists of
race and gender; and some speak of a total war – or more accurately a
totalising war – using the tools of total history.

Writing this review in summer 2004, on the 90th anniversary of the
outbreak of the war in August 1914, it seems more important than ever
to understand its origins. There has long been talk about the
discrepancy between this war’s causes and the infernal tragedy it led
to. Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig, who argue persuasively that
this discrepancy is false, have asked 11 authors to address the
question of causes. Although the book is sometimes a good summary of
the diverse known explanations, the attempt to synthesise is
difficult, probably because the various contributors have tried to
answer country by country, and are not always the best specialists in
the countries they describe; it is surprising to see an exclusively
English bibliography in a discussion about France or Italy, for
example.

Drawing on research carried out over the past 20 years, the book
ignores earlier archives – strange for a book published by Cambridge
University Press that aims to be a textbook. Moreover, if historians
today widely accept the argument about a universal fear of aggression
at the time, and consequently the need to attack to prevent attack,
the book still prompts the question: are the usual suspects the real
suspects? Must we go back to Sarajevo and the Black Hand, back to
Gavrilo Princip, back to the escalation of the third Balkan War into
a European war?

Asking why the war started is not enough. The question belongs to a
dated historiography, where it was logical first to blame the enemy,
then war itself. It is the “how” that we need to explore. The process
of decision-making by rulers is one thing, but what of the process
that leads people to go to war, and to continue it for weeks, months,
years? Now that historians have nearly killed the idea of “1914
enthusiasm” – except when it refers to “Gallant little Belgium” and a
few members of the elite among the various aggressors – the real
historical task is to explain how it was resolved to go to war for a
short time, then to hold on for such an incredibly long time amid all
its horrors. How was it possible for the people involved to consent
to this and to suffer so much and to go on suffering when they were
more and more convinced of the absurdity of their sacrifice?

At least Robert Massie, a popular historian since the publication in
1992 of his Dreadnought, the story of the arms race between Britain
and Germany between 1890 and 1914, claims not to explain but to tell
a story. With Castles of Steel, he prolongs his story of the British
and German navies at war. He follows every ship and every submarine,
forgetting no section of engine or cannon, nor any of the men who
served in them, from the admiral to the last seaman; he sits with
Winston Churchill in the War Room at the Admiralty, and knows
everything about Admiral Holtzendorff sending in his U-boats in a
last gamble to win the war by starving Britain into surrender.

This is not a history that asks hard questions about the conflict but
it is, nevertheless, highly researched. The theme is particularly
fascinating because during this war – paradoxically considering the
fantastic arms race described by Massie in his book – there was
nearly no real naval battle, except at Jutland. But unlimited
submarine warfare led to the declaration of war by the US and,
ultimately, to the defeat of Germany. While the Allies did not secure
the victory at sea, it was because they did not lose at sea – notably
as a result of the convoys they organised – that they were able to go
on feeding their war effort and their populations when the Central
Powers could not because of the blockade.

A blockade was an old-fashioned way to win a modern armed conflict
involving the entire world, beginning with the colonies. If Hamilton
and Herwig treat the old imperialist mono-causal reason offered for
going to war with contempt, it does not mean that once the war was
engaged, the colonies played an insignificant role – on the contrary.
It is this story that John Morrow tells in The Great War: An Imperial
History. His argument is that to be a great power in 1914 you had to
have colonies, and that Germany wanted to be as great as Britain and
France. Indeed, Germany lost because of this lack of colonies – a
thesis again arguing for the success of the blockade. But the
colonial question became more complicated – with racism, social
Darwinism and eugenics probably the “fittest” winners of the war.
These surfaced again in the next war, when Nazi Germany would look
for vital space in Eastern Europe – another method of colonisation –
with brutal consequences.

The First World War was global from the start, three years before the
US entered the conflict. As Morrow says, “Prior to August 1914,
Europeans had presumed to control the world; they were now to learn
that they could not control themselves.” The “European civil war” was
not understood as such at the time, since everything was seen in
terms of race; there was nothing civil – nothing shared with the
enemy – about it.

While Morrow’s overall thesis is perfectly accurate and well put, his
book does not entirely keep the promise of its title and
introduction. Morrow is an excellent military historian who follows
quite strictly the war’s events on the various fronts, revealing the
colonial effort in troops and economics, but his is not a full
“imperial history”. Such a book – putting together the prewar
colonial practices of the European aggressors and the war racism of
Germany as seen, for example, in the September 1914 manifesto of 93
German intellectuals – is still to be written.

The text describes how the Germans’ horror of British and French
colonial troops, combined with supposed Russian inferiority, was used
both to hide German atrocities on the Western Front and to give
simultaneously a war aim to the German populace. Morrow is right: the
Great War was a war of race, a war of the self-appointed “superiors”
against the “inferiors”, and they all needed the “inferiors” to win.
Because Germany had very few colonies and did not engage colonial
troops on the European fronts, it used racist propaganda to overcome
what it lacked and show the inferiority of the enemies. It probably
worked enough to pour the poison of racism into Europe for a very
long time, a Europe already infiltrated by 19th-century race
classifications and colonial atrocities.

Hew Strachan forgets none of these points in his book The First World
War.

It was published as the companion to a Channel 4 series. But it is
much more than that. This Oxford historian has been able to put the
most recent scholarship into a clear and readable form, while using
research from his three-volume work, of which the first volume, To
Arms – also the title of the first chapter of this book – was
published in 2001. The two other volumes will follow soon. The book
is also extremely well illustrated, thanks to Gregor Murbach, who did
the research for the television series.

The match between one of the major international experts on the Great
War and a historian of photography skilled at discovering new and
fresh resources – especially in beautiful autochromes – has been
perfect; the subtitle, “A New Illustrated History”, is entirely
accurate. This is not a coffee-table picture book, but a work of very
serious scholarship, in which photographs and text enhance each other
and give meaning to the whole enterprise. In one photograph, a little
girl in Reims looks tenderly at her doll near two rifles and a
haversack, left as if by accident. It looks similar to C. R. W.
Nevinson’s famous painting, Taube, except there is a light of hope in
the photograph; Nevinson’s child is dead. Another photograph depicts
two mutilated soldiers on their beds, with bandages covering their
legs; the war turned them into mummies.

The autochromes show the poppies of Flanders’ fields in all their
beautiful and horrifying red. The choice of colour photos also
highlights the presence of colonial troops. The front photographers
took numerous photographs of the Senegalese, Indian and Indo-Chinese
soldiers and workers – probably because they were exotic for those
who had never been to Africa or Asia; Strachan and Morrow share the
thesis about globalisation of war even before it was total.
Black-and-white photos are also all extremely well chosen, with some
that will be new to readers. An Austro-Hungarian soldier smiling
behind the gallows of a “traitor”, for example, reveals the extreme
brutality and cruelty of the Eastern Front, including the brutality
against civilians – something often overlooked both at the time and
by historians. It is the attention to every front, including an
interesting chapter called “Jihad” about war in the Ottoman Empire
and the extermination of the Armenians, that adds value to Strachan’s
book.

If the home fronts are treated a little marginally in the first
chapters, they come into their own with the blockade and its
consequences for the Central Powers and, ultimately, for the outcome
of the war and engagement of the next. The author states very well
the series of contradictions involved: “The Second World War
irrevocably demonstrated that the First World War was not, after all,
the war to end all wars. But it also enabled posterity to have it
both ways. It venerated the writers who condemned the war of
1914-1918 but at the same time condemned those who embraced
appeasement, the logical corollary.” On top of the millions of dead
and wounded, on top of the grief and mourning, on top of the
destruction of the old political order and national boundaries, the
First World War had broken old illusions and brought new ones: no
more universal rights – or universal anything – more than a “victory
without peace”, a “peace without peace”, or, as a British officer
quoted by Morrow stated in 1919, a “peace to end peace”. What was
left were conflicting memories and their counterparts, silence and
forgetting.

By his unique ability to mix anthropology and the study of material
culture, Nicholas Saunders has invented a field that attempts to look
for and explain all kind of traces of the war fronts. The name Trench
Art appears a little restrictive, but it is how curators and
collectors refer to these front relics. With his book, Saunders
proves that through sites commemorating battlefields, and the home
front, through the objects touched, created and discarded by
societies at war, the anthropologist can get to the roots behind the
thinking of aggressor societies. The objects speak of a time that
seems near yet remote, of people who are nearly our contemporaries –
our grandparents, our great-grandparents – yet are at the same time
distant. Further, he helps us to understand other wars and the entire
scope of violence and suffering in modern times. Going beyond George
Mosse’s idea of the trivialisation of war through kitsch objects, he
proves that these front or home-front productions are, in a way, the
essence of modern war: the more you produce, the more waste you have;
the more people are engaged in war, the more they carve metal, wood,
stone or bone, to fight against boredom or express their love for
their families or their gods and their desire, in times of hardship,
to live.

It is a fascinating book that puts the Great War at its centre, with
its “unimaginable technologies of destruction”. The author includes a
few pages on earlier and later conflicts too: the picture on the
jacket shows a Vietnam War sculpture called “dressed to kill” – a
“beautiful” woman of steel with bullets for hair. Trench art could be
seen and studied today as a category of “Raw Art”; the surrealist
Andre Breton already considered the rings he saw soldiers polishing
at the front amazing. Another of the book’s pictures shows a
metalsmith decorating an artillery shell case fired by the Bosnian
Serbs into the city of Sarajevo during the war of 1992-1995. Does the
name sound familiar? Take a look back at June-July 1914.

Annette Becker is professor of modern history, University
Paris-X/Nanterre, France, and a director of L’Historial de la Grande
Guerre, Peronne, Somme.

The Times (London)
August 7, 2004, Saturday

Bridget Riley’ first solo show
by: Joanna Pitman

Ida Kar made some of the most brilliant artist portraits of the
Sixties.

This contact sheet of her session with the then 31-year-old Bridget
Riley, taken in 1962, is among her best.

Riley had been invited by Victor Musgrave, Kar’s husband, to do her
first solo show at his gallery, Gallery One. Monica Kinley,
Musgrave’s second wife, recalls how ahead of its time the work was.
“Victor gave Bridget Riley her first really serious show. Her work
was extremely challenging and avant-garde in those days and Victor
found it very interesting. Victor was very good at picking artists
with potential to show in his gallery. Many of them were at the start
of long and important careers.”

Born Ida Karamian of Armenian parents in Tambov, near Moscow, in
1908, Kar was educated at French lycees in Cairo and Paris. She took
up photography with her first husband, Edmond Belali, and worked in
Cairo as a surrealist photographer under the name Idabel. She met
Victor Musgrave in Cairo and moved to London in 1945. She lived and
worked in Soho, photographing London’s bohemia, including every new
and important writer and artist from Doris Lessing to T.S. Eliot,
from David Hockney to Margot Fonteyn. She had a solo show at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1960, in which she showed large prints of
French and British artists. She died in 1974.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Associated Press Worldstream
August 7, 2004 Saturday 8:25 AM Eastern Time

Nagorno-Karabakh warns Azerbaijan against military solution

YEREVAN, Armenia

A top military official in the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave on Saturday
warned Azerbaijan against using military action to try to regain
control over the territory.

“If military activity began, Azerbaijan would suffer serious losses,”
said Movses Akopian, head of Nagorno-Karabakh’s army headquarters.

Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, has
been de-facto independent since its Armenian-backed forces drove out
Azerbaijan’s military in 1994. Despite a cease-fire, the two
countries continue to face off across a demilitarized zone, and
shooting occasionally erupts. No final settlement has been reached,
and the conflict continues to aggravate economic troubles and
threaten unrest in this already volatile region.

In recent months, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliev has repeatedly
expressed frustration with the decade-long stagnation over the
enclave and has raised the prospects of military action.

“There is no point in paying any attention to threats from Baku (the
Azerbaijani capital) about a military solution to the Karabakh
problem,” Akopian said.

Earlier this week, Nagorno-Karabakh launched a 10-day military
exercise that Azerbaijan warned could further hamper peace process.