Turkish Consulate in Paris faces charges
Turks.us
Oct 11 2004
Turkish Chief Consulate diplomats are to appear before a court in
France today due to an appeal from the Campaign for the Recognition
of the Armenian Genocide of France (CDCA-France).
CDCA-France appealed to the Paris Court in July because the Chief
Consulate denied the so-called Armenian genocide on its official
internet site, Anatolia news agency said.
The CDCA said in its appeal to the court then, Turkey’s broadcasting
on the internet site was a denial propaganda targeting French people.
The CDCA wanted the court to charge the Turkish Consulate due to this
reason and close its internet site down.
Turkish State’s lawyers are expected to ask the court to dismiss the
case at the first hearing today, by saying that the Consulate had
diplomatic immunity according to the Vienna Convention. The lawyers
will also mention the matter of the freedom of expression as a part
of their defense and argue it to have the case dismissed by the court,
the agency said.
The French Parliament passed a law in early 2001 which stated; “France
recognizes the Armenian genocide of 1915.” Turkey sent a protest note
to the French government concerning the issue after the draft law was
first passed in 1998. The Turkish Parliament decided to invalidate the
draft and the military projects undertaken by France were suspended.
Turkey’s reactions postponed the final adoption of the draft by
the French Senate for about two and a half years. However, with the
coming municipal elections in March 2001, the Senate passed it on
November 2001.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry rejected and condemned the Senate
resolution. The Turkish Parliament adopted a similar resolution on
January, 2001. Despite this, the draft was once again passed at the
French parliament on January 18. Following its ratification by French
President Jacques Chirac, it became law on January 30.
A parliamentarian from the main opposition Socialist Party has
introduced a bill to the French parliament in recent months and asked
for accepting the denial of so-called Armenian genocide as a crime
in the French Criminal Code.

Armenian parliament members to participate in NATO seminar in Baku
11.10.2004 15:12:00 GMT
Yerevan. (Interfax) – A group of Armenian parliament members intends
to participate in a seminar to be held by the NATO Parliamentary
Assembly in Baku in late November, a source in the Armenian parliament
told Interfax.
“A preliminary agreement about our participation in the seminar has
already been reached and, in all likelihood, will remain in force,”
the source said.
At the same time, Mger Shakhgeldian, head of the parliamentary
commission for defense, law enforcement and national security,
told Interfax: “It’s too early to speak about an ultimate decision
concerning our participation in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s
Baku session.”
“There is, of course, the problem of ensuring the Armenian deputies’
safety in Baku, but we have reasons to hope for an adequate solution
in line with Armenia’s foreign policy,” he said, adding that the
seminar’s agenda needed to be finalized.
Armenia’s foreign policy stipulates that Armenian representatives
participate in all NATO events conducted in the South Caucasus.
The possible arrival of Armenian parliament members in Baku to
attend the session has triggered protests among Azerbaijani public
organizations. Earlier similar public protests led to the cancellation
of NATO military exercises in Baku, in which Armenian servicemen were
initially due to take part.
Armenia and Azerbaijan are in a state of conflict over the disputed
enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan lost control over the enclave
after a bloody war with Armenia in the 1990s.
From: Baghdasarian

MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARMENIA
—————————————— —-
PRESS AND INFORMATION DEPARTMENT
375010 Telephone: +3741. 544041 ext 202
Fax: +3741. .562543
Email: [email protected]:
PRESS RELEASE
08 October 2004
Deputy Foreign Minister Ruben Shugarian Addresses Participants of
Training Course on Capacity Building in International Relations in
the South Caucasus
On 7 October, Deputy Foreign Minister Ruben Shugarian, spoke before
organizers and participants of the Capacity Building in International
Relations in the South Caucasus training course in the Media Hall of
the Ministry.
The course was held in Armenia for the first time (all previous such
courses were organized in Georgia) and was attended by participants
from Armenia and Georgia. The trainers were experts and scholars from
Switzerland, Netherlands and other countries.
The training course conducted between 25 September – 9 October was
co-hosted by the Foreign Ministry and Swiss Development Cooperation
(SDC) in cooperation with Caucasus Institute for Media Development
(CIMERA).
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Armenian archbishop quizzed over spat with yeshiva student
By Amiram Barkat
Haaretz
Mon., October 11, 2004 Tishrei 26, 5765 Israel Time: 01:20 (GMT+2)
The Armenian archbishop in Israel, Nourhan Manougian, was questioned
under warning by police yesterday after he slapped a yeshiva student
during a procession marking the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in
Jerusalem’s Old City. The archbishop slapped the student after the
latter spat at the cross the Armenians were carrying and at Manougian
himself.
The incident developed into a brawl during which Manougian’s ceremonial
medallion, which has been used by Armenian archbishops since the 17th
century, broke.
The yeshiva student was also detained for questioning.
Police are now considering whether to initiate criminal
proceedings against the Armenian archbishop and to charge him with
assault. Meanwhile, the incident has sparked much anger among the
clergy of the small Armenian community in Jerusalem.
Religious Jews, among them yeshiva students, customarily spit on the
ground as a sign of disgust on seeing the cross. The Armenians, who
live adjacent to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, suffer from this
phenomenon more than any of the other Christian sects in the Old City.
Manougian says he and his colleagues have already learned to live with
it. “I no longer get worked up by people who turn around and spit
when I pass them by in the street; but to approach in the middle of
a religious procession and to spit on the cross in front of all the
priests of the sect is humiliation that we are not prepared to accept,”
he notes.
A policeman is customarily posted to guard the Armenians’ religious
processions, but doesn’t generally do anything to prevent the
spitting. The Armenians took the matter up with Interior Minister
Avraham Poraz some seven months ago, but nothing has been done about
till now.
“The Israeli government is anti-Christian,” Manougian charges. “It
cries out in the face of any harm done to Jews all over the world,
but is simply not interested at all when we are humiliated on an
almost daily basis.”
Lawmaker Rabbi Michael Melchior (Labor Party) says the phenomenon
should be tackled through educational means. “I would expect prominent
figures among the religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors, such as the
chief rabbis, to denounce this phenomenon,” he says.

The Moscow Times
Monday, October 11, 2004. Page 5.
Russian-Born Canadian Bankrolls New F1 Team
Combined Reports
Reuters
Midland Group’s first foray into Formula One is expected to cost at
least $148 million.
TORONTO — Russia stepped closer to a starring role in Formula One
on Friday with the announcement of a new team to compete from 2006.
But while the cars will be built by Italian manufacturer Dallara,
frequent winners of the landmark Indy 500 in the United States,
the backers of Midland F1 are unfamiliar faces new to motorsport.
Few people in Formula One, with the exception of the sport’s commercial
supremo Bernie Ecclestone, have heard of Russian-born businessman
Alexander Shnaider.
His privately owned Midland Group is little-known even to ordinary
Russians.
A company statement said the chairman and co-founder was a naturalized
Canadian citizen, who moved to the West as a child after being born
in St. Petersburg.
The venture is likely to cost his company at least $100 million per
year, not including the $48 million bond that any new team has to
lodge with the sport’s governing body, but he accepted that.
“Of course the team will have a Russian flavor,” Shnaider said,
adding that he hopes to hire F1’s first Russian driver and help land
a Grand Prix for Russia.
“I do hope eventually there will be a Grand Prix in Russia. It’s a
large market with a growing middle class and a lot of international
companies are looking at it as a future market,” he said. “Russia
would get very positive exposure from staging a Formula One race and it
would be a pleasure for me to be instrumental in making that happen,”
he added.
Shnaider’s move will inevitably draw comparisons with Roman Abramovich,
the Russian billionaire who has ploughed more than $450 million into
soccer through his purchase of English Premier League club Chelsea.
Abramovich has, however, steered clear of a direct involvement in
Formula One, despite being a guest of Ecclestone at grands prix.
The sport, fueled by an incessant thirst for money, has been making
overtures to Russia since the post-Soviet era made overnight
billionaires of businessmen able to acquire state companies on
the cheap.
Midland is registered in Guernsey and headquartered in Toronto,
where the company recently joined forces with U.S. casino magnate
Donald Trump in building a luxury hotel and residential complex in
the business district.
There is little glamour to be found elsewhere in their business empire,
however. Midland’s extensive interests across Russia, the former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe are mainly in old-fashioned heavy industries,
manufacturing, construction, agriculture and scrap metal dealing.
The group’s core business is iron and steel, but it bought Armenia’s
state electricity distributor in 2002 and also have a plant in Serbia
making seals for the automotive industry.
“Midland is prepared to fund the development of the team entirely,
but our unique position will help us attract sponsors,” Shnaider
said. “Basic survival in F1 requires an annual budget of $80 million
and we’re prepared for that.”
(Reuters, AP)

Yeshiva student arrested for brawl with clergy
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
Jerusalem Post
Oct 10 2004
An Israeli Yeshiva student who spat at a Sunday morning procession
of Armenian clergymen in Jerusalem’s Old City and then scuffled with
them was placed under arrest, police and church officials said.
There were no injuries reported in the morning melee, but a chain of
the deputy Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem was broken during the brawl.
Police said that the suspect, a resident of the southern Israeli city
of Beersheba who was studying at a Jerusalem Yeshiva, claimed that
he spat at the procession of clergy “in order to protest idolatry.”
The suspect was to be remanded in a Jerusalem court Sunday afternoon.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WI
Oct 10 2004
Entertainment Calendar
>>From the Journal Sentinel
Heritage Museum opening exhibit on Armenian community
The Racine Heritage Museum, 701 Main St., is celebrating the opening
of an exhibit chronicling Racine’s Armenian community with
Armenian-American Afternoon next Sunday.
The event runs from 2 to 4 p.m. and spotlights “State Street:
Racine’s Gateway Community – The Armenian Story,” the museum’s latest
exhibit. The exhibit features themes of Armenians coming to the
United States and settling in Racine, their occupations, businesses,
homes, community, religious life and continuing cultural activities.
For Armenian-American Afternoon, the museum will show the video
“State Street: The Hub of Early Armenian Settlers in Racine,
Wisconsin,” and films showing parties at John’s Shish Kebob and Grill
on State St.
Also featured will be Peter and Katrina Wardrip, U.S. Peace Corps
volunteers in Armenia, who will display paintings Katrina Wardrip
made during her time in Armenia.
Armenian language and alphabet activities will be available for all
ages, along with Armenian music and snacks.
The exhibit will run through next summer. Museum hours are 9 a.m. to
5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays,
10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays. Call the
museum at (262) 636-3926 for information.

Telegraph.co.uk, UK
Oct 10 2004
Why we must let Turkey into the EU
(Filed: 10/10/2004)
Last week a momentous decision was taken. The European Commission
recommended that the EU start negotiations over Turkish entry. The
final decision will not be taken until December. And even if the
go-ahead is given it will be 10 years at least before Turkey could
join. Nevertheless, I think the Rubicon has been crossed. So what
would be the effects of Turkish entry?
Turkish differences
Click to enlarge
Admitting Turkey would be a huge step because of its sheer size, its
culture, its location and its comparative underdevelopment. The
population is currently about 70m. As our top chart shows, that makes
Turkey the second most populous country in Europe. Moreover, because
of Turkey’s comparatively high birth rate and Germany’s low one, her
population is likely to exceed Germany’s within 20 years – and it
could be not far short of 90m 10 or 15 years after that.
Culturally, she is also radically different from all other EU
members. Most Turks are Muslims. Moreover, she has a history of
political instability, with the army seeing itself as the guardian of
the secular state, and being prepared to intervene in government
whenever it has seen this threatened, usually with widespread support
among the middle classes. To put it mildly, this is not the political
and cultural milieu of the burghers of Mitteleuropa.
Moreover, most of Turkey is in Asia, bordering Syria, Iraq, Iran,
Georgia and Armenia. Turkish entry would therefore put the EU’s
borders right in the firing line of some key Middle East hotspots –
literally.
Turkey is also extremely poor. As our lower chart shows, her per
capita GDP is in a different parish even from Greece, which is among
the old EU’s poorest countries, and is significantly lower even than
Poland’s. Levels of education, social services and infrastructure all
put Turkey in the developing country league.
Macro-economically, Turkey’s performance makes her seem like a banana
republic. Over the past 16 years, interest rates and inflation have
averaged over 60 per cent. There have recently been some big
improvements, but inflation is still running at 9 per cent and
interest rates at 22 per cent.
Admittedly, economic growth has averaged 4.5 per cent over 30 years.
But the fluctuations have been extraordinary. At times the economy
has grown by 8 per cent in a year. At other times, though, it has
contracted by 8 per cent in a year.
For or against?
Given all this, it should be obvious what an economist like myself
should think about Turkish entry. I am, of course, in favour of it.
There are two reasons. First, EU entry will be extremely good for
Turkey. History shows that the EU has brought major advantages to
poor countries with troubled political histories. Spain, Portugal and
Greece all gained from EU entry. Perhaps the greatest gains have come
not from entry itself but rather from the improvements made necessary
by the attempt to join.
Improvements extend beyond the narrowly economic into the fields of
politics and human rights. But these have economic consequences as
well. Full democracies bound by the rule of law rarely if ever
descend into the blatant incompetence and kleptocracy that is the
fate of so many dictatorships.
Much as I like and admire the Turks, though, my concern for the
Turkish interest is not purely altruistic. It is in our interests too
that Turkey should prosper. The narrow economic argument is that we
all gain by our neighbours being prosperous. This means that they
will be better able to supply us with goods and services and their
market for our exports will also grow correspondingly.
But more importantly, it is vital that a country as strategically
important as Turkey be kept in the Western ambit and that it does not
slide off towards the Islamic fundamentalists. Indeed, more
positively, if Turkey could thrive within a predominantly
post-Christian European Union, this would be a favourable model for
the secularisation and democratisation of the Middle East. In the
long run, this is of the greatest possible importance to both our
security and our prosperity.
The second reason why I am strongly in favour of Turkish entry is
quite different. In short, I think it would help to change the nature
of the EU. The fundamental narrative of the EU is the tension between
widening and deepening. Wild enthusiasts like to think that the EU
can do both, but it is becoming increasingly clear that we will not
be able to run even the current EU as an integrated political unit,
never mind a much larger union. With Turkey in, this would become
blindingly obvious.
The consequence would be that the forces pushing for a multi-level EU
would be strengthened. This would be no bad thing. Forget “slow lanes
and fast lanes”. If an inner core of countries comprising the
original six members wanted to go ahead and form a political union
then all well and good, but outside this core would be groups of
countries with different alignments on different issues – but all
under the broad umbrella of the EU, including what that means for
trading relationships and access to markets.
The EU’s achievement
Fanatical supporters of the EU believe that it is responsible for the
very good performance of the Continental economies for the first
quarter of a century after the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1956.
They are wrong. The countries of core Europe were set to grow
strongly without the EU. And more recently, its large members have
been held back by the EU’s emphasis on regulation and harmonisation
and its suppression of competition. Whatever they have achieved
recently has been despite the EU, not because of it.
But where the europhobes are wrong is jumping from this to the
conclusion that the EU has been a disaster. On the contrary, it has
been little short of a triumph. And here I do not refer to the
prevention of war in Europe – which, noble though this cause is, I
attribute primarily to other factors such as Nato and the Soviet
threat. No, the EU’s triumph has been helping the peripheral
countries of Europe to aspire to core European standards of living
and extending democracy and accountable government to countries that
had been plagued by dictatorships.
In this way, the EU has played the role that the great empires,
including the British, have sometimes played in the past, bringing a
measure of prosperity and stability to areas that might otherwise
fall prey to tinpot nationalism and bad government.
Historians will surely judge the success of the EU not by its
contribution to raising German living standards but rather by what it
has done for Spain, Portugal, Greece and the former communist states
of eastern Europe. Doing the same thing for Turkey would be an
enormous triumph.
• Roger Bootle is managing director of Capital Economics and economic
adviser to Deloitte. You can contact him at roger.bootle@capital
economics.com

Sporting Life
Oct 10 2004
Finland 3 Armenia 1
Finland dismissed Armenia for the second time in just over a month
with a hard-fought win in Tampere.
First half goals from Shefki Kuqi and Aleksei Eremenko had put the
Finns in control before Armen Shahgeldyan’s deflected shot set up a
tense second half.
But a late second from Kuqi secured all three points to put Finland
level on points with Romania at the top of Group One.
The victory follows Finland’s 2-0 win in Yerevan last month, and the
hosts got out of the traps even more quickly on this occasion, going
1-0 up after only eight minutes.
Aleksei Eremenko’s shot from just inside the area took a deflection,
and Kuqi proved quickest to the rebound, slotting the ball past Armen
Hambartsumyan from point blank range.
Armenia responded with a Andrei Movsesyan volley from the edge of the
area forcing a great save from Antti Niemi.
But Finland doubled their lead just before the half-hour when
Eremenko struck a brilliant free-kick past Armen Ambartsumyan.
The two-goal advantage lasted only four minutes, however, as Armenia
pulled a goal back when Armen Shakhgeldjan’s free-kick from the edge
of the box glanced off Liverpool defender Sami Hyypia, giving Niemi
no chance.
A cagey second half almost came to life after 75 minutes but Joonas
Kolkka’s header only found the side-netting.
However, with only three minutes left, Finland did restore the
two-goal cushion when Kuqi rifled home from fully 20 yards to make
absolutely sure of the points.
Teams:
Finland Niemi, Pasanen, Saarinen (Kallio 69), Hyypia, Vayrynen,
Nurmela, Kolkka (Johansson 84), Kuivasto (Tainio 46), Riihilahti,
Kuqi, Eremenko Jr.
Subs Not Used: Jaaskelainen, Pohja, Multaharju, Lagerblom.
Booked: Vayrynen.
Goals: Kuqi 9, Eremenko Jr 28, Kuqi 88.
Armenia Hambardzumian, Dokhoyan, Hovsepyan, Vardanian, Khachatrian
(Aleksanian 37), Nazarian, Mkhitarian, Shahgeldyan, Movsisian,
Grigorian (Manucharian 61), Tadevosian.
Subs Not Used: Gasparyan, Melikian, Galust Petrosian, Mkrtchian,
Hakobian.
Booked: Movsisian, Hovsepyan.
Goals: Shahgeldyan 32.
Att: 10,000
Ref: Herbert Fandel (Germany).
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Russian-Georgian border checkpoint reopens
ITAR-TASS news agency, Moscow
10 Oct 04
Tbilisi, 10 October: The Verkhniy Lars checkpoint reopened on the
North Ossetian section of the Russian-Georgian border today. Hundreds
of cars and passengers have passed through the checkpoint to Georgia
and Armenia, and Georgian cars have been able to enter Russia, Mindia
Arabuli, head of the Georgian checkpoint Kazbegi, which is on the
same section of the border, has told ITAR-TASS on the telephone.
He said, “The Russian side has informed the Georgian border guards
that the Verkhniy Lars checkpoint will be open until 2000 1600 gmt
today”. “There is no information so far about its future working
schedule,” Arabuli said.
The Verkhniy Lars checkpoint was closed after the tragic events in
Beslan. In the last 40 days it has been opened three times for three
to four hours. The Georgian authorities have been repeatedly asking
that the checkpoint be reopened as soon as possible.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress