Sunday Age (Melbourne)
June 27, 2004 Sunday
First Edition
The bare bones of Turkey
by Claire Scobie
Louis de Bernieres sticks to the Aegean in his new novel. By Claire
Scobie.
Louis de Bernieres famously once likened “the pressure of trying to
write a second bestseller to standing in Trafalgar Square and being
told to get an erection in the rush hour”.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin not only cast de Bernieres as a publishing
phenomenon, but at the height of Corellimania, tourism to the Greek
island of Cephallonia where the novel is set, rose by 20 per cent.
Since then more than 3 million copies of Captain Corelli have been
sold in English and it has been translated into 24 languages. So has
he succeeded with his latest novel, Birds without Wings?
“What, get an erection?” He chuckles. “Yes, to begin with I had a
ghastly sense of fatalism that everybody was going to say it wasn’t
as good as Corelli. . . Now I think it’s probably better, although it
may not be as cuddly or lovable.”
Louis de Bernieres, who was in Australia last month, is at 49 a
retiring, jovial man given to frequent bursts of belly-shaking
laughter and piquant English wit. Birds without Wings, 10 years in
the writing, is a sumptuous epic feast of love and war, about the
inhabitants of Eskibahce (literally the Garden of Eden), a town in
south-west Turkey at the turn of the 20th century.
Christians, Muslims, Armenians and Greeks co-exist, bound by history,
inter-marriage and friendship, until World War One heralds the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire and shatters their relative communal
harmony. It bears de Bernieres’ literary hallmarks – vast emotional
breadth, dazzling characterisation, rich historical detail (and
gruesome battle scenes), swerving between languid sensuality and
horror, humour and choking despair.
Its genesis was in de Bernieres’ fascination with the Turkish
accounts of Gallipoli – where, “as in Australia, Gallipoli has a role
of myth-making . . . Turks often think of Gallipoli as the point when
the Ottoman Empire was transformed into Turkey . . . because Mustafa
Kemal (later known as Ataturk) was the most important Turkish
commander at Gallipoli and then became the head of the republic”.
For his research de Bernieres trawled through the Ottoman archives,
reading primary sources in French (the diplomatic language), visited
Turkey three times and spent two weeks walking the Gallipoli battle
fields, where his maternal grandfather had fought and was shot three
times in one day. Some 40 years later, still suffering from war
wounds, “he shot himself, a late casualty of the war,” says his
grandson.
“Gallipoli was moving and made me feel very sad. Bones are coming to
the surface everywhere . . . and you have no idea whether they are
French bones or Anzac bones, or British or Sikhs. That makes you
understand the fatuousness of nationalism because you can’t tell the
nationality of a bone. You can’t tell if it is a Muslim or Christian,
just a human bone.”
While Birds was not written as a modern fable, “it necessarily is a
parable”, he says, reflecting his hatred of “certainties,
absolutism”, nationalism and religious dogma.
De Bernieres says he was an “obstinate and wilful child”, traits he
still holds dear today. He read voraciously and recalls once “trying
to dig to Australia in the orchard” but only getting “about four-feet
down”. Aged 18 he briefly served in the British army but quit
because, he “didn’t want to be told what to do”, and was much happier
strumming Bob Dylan ballads on his guitar and writing poetry.
He then travelled to Colombia, working as a teacher and part-time
cowboy. The experience had a lasting impression and aged 35, while
still teaching in London, he wrote his debut, The War of Don
Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, inspired by South American magical realism.
Two more Latin American novels followed until “by happy accident” he
stumbled across the history of Cephallonia, inspiring Captain
Corelli, for which he was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in
1995.
When the film of Captain Corelli was released in 2001, much was made
of de Bernieres’ disdain. In fact he has seen it five times, thinks
the cinematography is “marvellous”, but only wishes it could have
been “a European art-house film rather than a Hollywood blockbuster”.
He is prepared for the criticism that Birds may invite. “I am trying
to offend everybody with perfect fairness, so it should be offensive
to Turks, Greeks and Armenians.” In it he has included animals,
children and old people, who he believes are under-represented in
literary fiction.
His last endearing semi-fictionalised work, Red Dog, chronicled the
exploits of a “splendid dog” Red, from Karratha in Western Australia
who he immortalised as the canine hero who hitches rides and drops
vile “stinkers”.
De Bernieres describes writing as “a pleasure . . . a compulsion that
comes upon me, a useful form of obsessive madness I suppose. I get
obsessed about music, about golf, but they come and go, and writing
is like that”.
He has many books on the go – one about eccentric characters from the
village in which he grew up, another about the life of his paternal
grandfather. The fortune earned from Captain Corelli has given him
the freedom to choose what to write and when – he had no contract for
the latest until it was finished. A few years ago, he moved to a
Georgian rectory in Norfolk but still drives his veteran Morris Minor
Traveller.
“It’s very strange to have enough money for the first time in your
life,” he says. “Instead of buying one good pair of quite expensive
trousers you go and buy 10 cheap ones.”
In the past few years he has alternated between furious bursts of
writing, inventing words (“Shakespeare did so I don’t see why the
rest of us can’t”), gardening, pottering and serenading his cat with
his mandolin or the robins with his flute.
De Bernieres always shows the final manuscript to his partner,
actress and director Cathy Gill, 32, who is not impressed by how
famous he may be.
Finally, he says he wants to be remembered for taking the British
novel out of north London and onto a world stage.
Birds without Wings will be published this week by Secker & Warburg
at $49.95
From: Baghdasarian

Los Angeles Times
June 27, 2004 Sunday
Home Edition
Yesterday’s seeds, today’s harvest;
Beasts of the Field A Narrative History of California Farmworkers,
1769-1913 Richard Steven Street Stanford University Press: 904 pp.,
$75; $29.95 paper * Photographing Farmworkers in California Richard
Steven Street Stanford University Press: 330 pp., $39.95
by Mark Arax, Mark Arax, a Times staff writer, is the author of “In
My Father’s Name” and co-author of “The King of California: J.G.
Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire,” written with
Times business editor Rick Wartzman.
My grandfather, Aram, took the long road to California in the spring
of 1920. His migration covered 7,000 miles by ship and train. There
was no turning back.
Everything along the way seemed so farfetched to him — the Statue of
Liberty, the nation’s capital, the budding factories of Detroit. It
wasn’t until the tracks reached Fresno that America came true.
Outside his window, at the foot of the Sierra, the San Joaquin Valley
shimmered. Vineyards and orchards and vegetable fields, row after
perfect row. As his train chugged into town, my grandfather kept
muttering the same words in Armenian. “Just like the old land.”
The old land was a lazy village beneath the Mountain of Mist in
Bursa, Turkey. Every month the Anatolian sun ripened another fruit,
but it was the silk from the mulberry that gave the village its
wealth. “We had a very easy life,” he told me. “Our village was too
prosperous to do its own work. The poor Turkish workers did it all.
We used to have a name for them — ‘almost like slaves.’ ”
My grandfather survived the 1915 genocide at the hands of the Turks
by hiding in an attic with Maupassant and Baudelaire. He came down
after a year with plans to attend the Sorbonne University and write
for a living. Then the letters from his Uncle Yervant in Fresno —
“watermelons as big as small boats” — arrived. My grandfather was 19
when he took the bait.
He might have been forgiven for assuming the best when his uncle
drove up to the depot that day in a shiny Model T Ford. It wasn’t a
week later that they headed three hours south on a country road and
landed in Weedpatch. There, long before the Okies and Steinbeck
arrived, my grandfather dropped to his hands and knees and began
picking potatoes. Up and down the valley he trailed the harvest.
Watermelons, peaches, grapes, oranges and olives. This new land
wasn’t like the old land. My grandfather had become one of the beasts
of the field.
He was far luckier, it turned out, than the legions of migrant
farmhands who came before him, men whose American rebirths and brutal
journeys are vividly captured by Richard Steven Street in “Beasts of
the Field,” a stunning narrative history of California farmworkers
from 1769 to 1913. It took my grandfather four seasons working
alongside his widowed mother, sister and brother to go from fruit
tramp to farmer. He would watch his brother, Harry, become a cop
killer in 1934 and his son, Ara, become a murder victim in 1972 after
both strayed from the farm.
My grandfather taught me, the oldest child of that murdered son, that
our drama was part of a larger drama that played out in California
agriculture long before his arrival. Because I spent years gathering
his story, I thought I understood why the dreams of so many
immigrants are swallowed up by the fields. Because I live in the San
Joaquin Valley, the most productive farm belt in the world, a place
built on the backs of fieldworkers, I thought I understood their
lives. For the last six years, I’ve collected and written the
narratives of the black sharecroppers, Mexicans and Okies who came
here to pick the cotton for such giants as J.G. Boswell.
But “Beasts of the Field” is a history book that reaches into the
present and changes the way we see things. I now understand why the
lives of farmworkers so often end in the same broken place. Because
it has always been this way — as far back as the native Chumash and
Gabrielinos who plowed the first fields in the shadow of the missions
and the Chinese who erected the levees to drain the waters of the
great Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the white Europeans who
threshed the wheat as the giant metal harvester, the farm’s first
breathing machine, snorted and clawed at the earth.
For the first time, thanks to Street’s 25-year labor of love, the
whole extraordinary tapestry of that early era is before us. A
photographer, journalist and scholar, Street hails from no academy
and works for no publication. Logging thousands of miles from field
to library to newspaper morgue, he has produced a work of monumental
scholarship. One might ask if the subject hadn’t been thoroughly
mined. Countless academics and journalists, after all, have
documented in articles and books the peculiar institution that is
California agriculture. But although readers may believe that Carey
McWilliams’ seminal 1939 work, “Factories in the Field,” offered the
definitive word on the feudal empires of the soil, Street provides a
far more exhaustive, layered and satisfying portrait. Simply put,
Street’s remarkable book belongs on the short shelf of such
indispensable works of American history as Oscar Handlin’s “The
Uprooted” and Bernard Bailyn’s “Voyagers to the West.”
He steers clear of the polemics and dry scholarly treatments that
have undermined less ambitious books on the subject. Instead of
shouting his moral indignation at the lot of farmworkers, Street
builds his case pound for pound with an assiduous weighing of the
facts. He does so with language that may not be lyrical but serves
his chronological narrative well, giving a voice to those who have
always appeared to us hidden under hats, muffled in bandanas, backs
to the sun, hands in the earth.
Notably, Street, who is the Ansel Adams fellow at the Center for
Creative Photography and a onetime Guggenheim fellow, has
accomplished this while putting together a companion volume,
“Photographing Farmworkers in California,” that stands out as a
comprehensive visual record of farm labor from 1850 to the early
1990s. In the more than 270 images, we see workers picking, striking,
fighting, dancing, resting, praying and dying in photographs shot
through the lens of the famous (Dorothea Lange) and the obscure
(Ernest Lowe). His third volume, set for publication in fall 2005,
will complete the massive history, focusing on the period 1913 to
2000 and the farmworkers’ struggle to unionize.
“Beasts of the Field” follows the migrant field hands dawn to dark
through the early evolutions of a California agriculture destined for
industrial greatness. First, the missions sought a blend of salvation
and self-sufficiency. Then the bonanza wheat farms chased the numbing
notion that bigger is better. Finally, the vineyard and orchard
growers recognized that the Golden State offered a one-of-a-kind
union of soil and climate. Why waste it on mere wheat?
Street gives the reader the look, smell and taste not only of those
fields but also of the Chinatown opium dens and the skid rows
crackling with liquor, prostitution and murder where the workers’
long day ended. Nowhere in the 625 pages of text (and more than 200
pages of notes) does he shy away from his singular focus, and why
should he? The story of agriculture is the story of California from
Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who brought the first field
hands north, to Japanese immigrant Kinji Ushijima, the Potato King
who harvested 28,000 acres of spuds in the early 1900s on reclaimed
delta land. Every epic migration that transformed the state was a
migration rooted in the fields.
“Adrift in a landscape of ordered beauty,” he writes, “the
[farmworkers] illustrate the human costs required to produce a
geography of abundance, telling us not only about irony, suffering,
misery, acrimony, disorientation, resentment, cynicism and violence
but also about hope, tenacity, sacrifice and generosity.”
Who, precisely, were the first campesinos in California? That they
were brown-skinned peoples native to the land down south should come
as no surprise. By early 1769, Spain had kicked the Jesuits out of
Baja California and installed the Franciscans as missionaries who
would claim the Pacific Coast. The Franciscans dragged a group of
Cochimi Indians north for the “Sacred Expedition.” By summer’s end,
more than half the Cochimi — 180 in all — had died of disease and
starvation.
Street deals head-on with a question that has long divided scholars
of the mission period. Were the padres taskmasters or slave drivers?
Were the Indians ennobled or exploited? What was so bad about
Catholicism, hard work and an adobe roof over the head, even if they
came with the dreaded disciplina, the rawhide whip?
The padres weren’t monsters, Street agrees. They fed the newly
baptized California natives well, sweated alongside them and rarely
demanded more than a 40-hour workweek. And for their part, the
natives could be exasperating. By the droves, they feigned illness
and ran away from the missions and hid in the tules of California’s
interior, where they became addicted to booze and games of chance.
But Street ultimately comes down on the side of mission critics,
concluding that the system reduced natives to “childish dependence,
prepared them for nothing, exposed them to diseases.”
Measuring the agricultural legacy of the missions is easier. The
California natives who joined the Cochimi planted the first vineyards
and wheat fields, erected the first brush dams and dug the first
irrigation canals. A peek into the state’s future grape and wine
industry could be glimpsed at the San Gabriel mission where the
170-acre La Vina Madre, “the mother vineyard” had taken root.
Likewise, the practice of labor contractors acting as go-betweens in
the California fields began with the mayordomo, boss men selected
from the ranks of mission guards.
For the better part of a century, the male natives bent, stooped,
squatted and crawled with their poles, clippers, sacks and buckets.
The women, who weren’t allowed in the fields, had their own quotas to
meet grinding wheat and corn. Their positions hardly changed after
Mexican rule replaced Spanish rule and the natives were supposedly
free to pursue a life of small-scale farming. Instead, cast adrift,
they huddled in dusty camps like the one on the outskirts of El
Pueblo de Los Angeles, where they led “vicious and irrational lives.”
Growers in the 1850s were still so reliant on native field hands that
they pushed the newly minted U.S. state of California to enact a law
that controlled the natives and forced them to work. The Indian
Indenture Act, in the words of McWilliams, “competed favorably with
slavery.” Only when the native population dwindled to a band of old
and crippled field hands did the farmer begin his eternal search for
a new group of desperate and poor.
The late 1860s and 1870s brought fresh laborers to the fields:
hard-luck Americans of European stock who had come West with gold
fever but who now found themselves threshing and bagging California’s
booming wheat crop. Street brings to life the grinding toil of the
men who wandered farm to farm, their worldly possessions packed tight
in a bindle. He does his best writing describing how they mounted the
first leviathan wheat harvesters and bounced all day over rough
ground, jolting themselves silly. They could not escape the Central
Valley sun.
“The heat had an almost metallic characteristic,” he writes. “It was
a weight that men carried on their backs, a fiery warmth that cracked
their leather boots, heated equipment to the point where it could not
be touched without gloves and baked straw so crisp that it snapped
like glass filaments underfoot.”
He lingers on the wholesome meals served to the wheat threshers and
on the songs they sang, always swearing off another harvest season:
“Don’t go, I say, if you’ve got any brains. You’ll stay far away from
the San Joaquin plains.”
As the crops grew more diverse, the call for more dependable
farmworkers grew louder. It was answered by peasant Chinese farmers
from the Guangdong province who poured off ships in the 1850s and
fanned out to Stockton, Sacramento, Fresno, Sonoma County and Los
Angeles. Among the myths Street debunks is the notion that the
Chinese constituted a significant minority of farm laborers at any
one time. Of the 50,000 Chinese in California in 1861, only about
1,500 had moved onto farms.
Nowhere was their imprint more lasting than in the delta, where they
drained hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands with an incredible
latticework of levees. The Chinese boasted their own system of
mayordomo: “China bosses” who made good on the promise that each
field hand would pick 1,500 to 2,000 pounds of grapes a day. The
bosses won many jobs by agreeing to a pay scale of $1 a day —
cheaper than the wage for Mexicans, $1.25, and for whites, $1.50.
“Beasts of the Field” makes clear that the issue of wages has long
pitted field hand against field hand, striker against grower and
reformer against politician. The debate always seems to start and end
in the same place. The farmer believes he isn’t exploiting the field
hand because what he offers is so much better than what the worker
had back home. The reformer shouts back that the farmer is engaging
in the cheapest form of moral inoculation. It is the ideals of this
country — not the Third World exigencies of their old land — that
judge morality. A dime a day in Guangdong doesn’t excuse a dollar a
day in Weedpatch.
The picker does hold certain leverage. Crops left too long in the
field perish. A two-week delay in picking might bring a grower to his
knees. This math drove the Chinese to strike again and again in the
1880s, shutting down the fruit harvest in Santa Clara and the raisin
pick in Fresno until they got their way, the same wages as the white
man.
That the “coolies” had the cheek to strike only played into the
anti-Chinese sentiment sweeping across the land. Farmers didn’t know
what side of the fence to stand on, with their white neighbors or
with their ethnic field hands. Some tried appealing to logic:
“Americans can not go out in the hot sun and stoop over the vines all
day when the thermometer is probably 115 degrees in the shade,” one
grower asserted. “Our American sons won’t do that.”
For all its breadth, “Beasts of the Field” never quite makes the case
that agriculture’s exploitation differed from the brutality imposed
by industrial America. Was farm work worse because it took place
under the searing sun? Were the white farmers greedier as a class
than white factory owners? Were the bottom-line impulses of
agriculture different from the quotas that industry imposed on their
beasts of the steel mill?
Occasionally Street tips the scale of judgment in error. He quotes a
1913 editorial by Chester H. Rowell, a longtime editor of the Fresno
Republican, likening the perfect field hand to a manifold beast.
Rowell, it turns out, wasn’t expressing his view but what he regarded
as the unfortunate view of the farm lobby. The sarcasm is not noted
by Street.
Back on firm ground, Street details how the racist views of the
Yellow Peril culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that, over
time, dried up Chinese labor. The Japanese then staged their own
rising. At the height of their influence in 1909, about 30,000
Japanese worked on California farms, accounting for nearly 42% of the
labor force.
More than any other ethnic group, the Japanese saw fieldwork not as
an end but as a means to buy their own farms. Toward that goal, they
became tough negotiators. They confronted and boycotted growers,
withheld labor at key times and walked out during harvests. By 1910,
many Japanese had realized the dream of becoming farmers; they had
bought 17,000 acres and leased 89,000 more, dominating the
strawberry, melon and sugar beet crops.
The Yellow Peril soon raised its ugly head again. The so-called
Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1907 halted Japanese immigration. As always,
Big Ag didn’t know where to turn. Into this vacuum, miraculously,
came the Greeks, the Sikhs, the Portuguese and the Armenians.
My grandfather didn’t have the benefit of those hobo songs to steer
him clear of the San Joaquin plains. The only song he heard was his
Uncle Yervant’s naively sweet one. For that second harvest, he
returned to Weedpatch with his mother, sister and brother, this time
to work for Villa Kerkorian, a grape grower with a ferocious mustache
resembling Pancho Villa’s.
My grandfather and his family slept in the Kerkorian barn on a bed of
raisin crates and hay until one night when they began feuding.
Grandpa’s 17-year-old brother, Harry, had the gall to question the
arrangement by which Uncle Yervant picked very little and played
pinochle a lot. Challenged for the first time, Yervant stormed out of
the barn.
“That boat that brought you over,” he shouted. “I would have been
better off had it brought a sack of potatoes instead.”
They didn’t speak again for years. By that time, Harry was well on
his way to killing a cop in Long Beach and serving a life sentence in
San Quentin. My grandfather was married and farming raisins outside
Fresno. In his 80s, as he grew blind, he gave me a stack of poems he
had written to the memory of the grape and cotton pickers: “To my
white, brown, yellow and black brothers and sisters who toiled under
the hellish sun.”
A few weeks ago, as another harvest neared, I drove to Weedpatch and
tried to find the old Kerkorian ranch. Villa Kerkorian had lost all
his land during the raisin bust of 1920-28. Not long after, they
found an ocean of oil beneath his old grapes. Kerkorian didn’t live
to see his get-even: His youngest son, Kirk, came to rule MGM and
rank as one of the world’s wealthiest men.
At the edge of town, a few miles down the road from where John
Steinbeck encountered the Okies, I met a young Mixteca who had
arrived the week before from deep in Mexico, her land turning to
dust. She had been smuggled across the border in the back of a
Suburban and was using her wages from the bell pepper fields to pay
off a $1,900 debt to the coyote. I asked her why she had come and she
began to tear up. She had left behind two young children with her
mother. “For their future,” she explained. In another few days, she
will stop harvesting peppers and begin picking grapes. In the powdery
loam, she will trace the footsteps of my grandfather and the other
“beasts” whose imprint Street has so faithfully recorded.
They still walk through these fields. *
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: FIELD HANDS: Laborers pick lettuce in the Salinas
Valley in 1935, from “Photographing Farmworkers in California.”
PHOTOGRAPHER: Photograph by Dorothea Lange Courtesy of Stanford
University Press PHOTO: SUBSISTENCE: A farmworker from Mexico, idled
by freezing weather, cradles a baby outside his home next to an
Imperial Valley pea field in 1937. PHOTOGRAPHER: Photograph by
Dorothea Lange Courtesy of Stanford University Press PHOTO: LOCAL
CREW: Chinese laborers sewed wheat sacks in the San Fernando Valley
in 1898, 16 years after the Chinese Exclusion Act cut the workforce.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Courtesy of Stanford University Press PHOTO: ON THE
COVER: “Cheng’s Hands and Hat,” Roger Minick’s 1966 photograph, is
included in Richard Steven Street’s “Photographing Farmworkers in
California.” PHOTOGRAPHER: Photograph by Roger Minick Courtesy of
Stanford University Press

Associated Press Worldstream
June 25, 2004 Friday
Top two in world chess tournament in Libya advance to round four
by MAHMOUD KASSEM; Associated Press Writer
TRIPOLI, Libya
The top two seeds at the World Chess Championship advanced to round
four Friday after drawing their games, but the tournament’s
third-strongest player was knocked out.
No. 1 seed Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria and No. 2 seed Michael Adams
of England went through, but Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine was defeated
by the lower-ranked Rustam Kasimdzhanov of Uzbekistan.
Topalov ended his streak of five consecutive wins on Thursday night
when he drew with Sergei Movsesian of Slovakia.
Adams drew with Hichem Hamdouchi of Morocco. Playing white, Hamdouchi
began solidly with a Ruy Lopez opening, but black quickly took
control of the ‘a’ file as Adams doubled his rooks and threatened
white’s king with his queen. Hamdouchi ultimately fell foul of the
time limits.
Topalov and Adams, numbers 5 and 8 in the world respectively, beat
their opponents by 1.5 points to half a point.
Topalov and Adams are the only two players from FIDE’s top 10 to play
in the US$1.5 million tournament, which Libya is staging as part of a
campaign to shake off its image as a rogue state accused of
sponsoring terrorism.
In the Ivanchuk-Kasimdzhanov encounter, the players agreed to draw
their first two games Thursday, but Kasimdzhanov defeated his
Ukranian opponent in the first rapid game.
In the most beautiful game Thursday, Croatia’s Zdenko Kozul earned a
place in round four when he showed that advancing pawns and
sacrifices can be as deadly as a full-frontal attack with major
pieces.
Kozul cooly turned the tables on an over-confident queen attack by
Russia’s Sergei Rublevsky, playing a Slav defence game. Sacrificing a
rook and pushing his pawns on the ‘b’ and ‘c’ files relentlessly
forward, Kozul won an extra queen and forced Rublevsky to resign
after 47 moves.
“Kozul sacrificed a rook to create an extremely complicated and
exciting position which had everyone following this game with great
attention,” said FIDE master Geoffrey D. Borg.
The youngest player left in the tournament, 16-year-old Hikaru
Nakamura of the United States, drew his Slav defence game with
Alexander Lastin of Russia, but the result was enough to advance him
to round four following his win Wednesday.
Cuba’s Lenier Dominguez also goes through after a dazzling display.
In a Caro-Kann exchange variation with a Panov-Botvinnic attack,
Dominguez forced France’s Vladislav Tkachiev to resign after only 33
moves.
In arguably the most exciting chess of round three, Armenia’s Levon
Aronian fought against Russia’s Pavol Smirnov into the early hours of
Friday. Both players are roughly of equal strength.
His face showing the stress, Smirnov beat Aronian in the first blitz
game, lost the second, and came back in the third in play so fast
that some of the pieces were accidentally knocked over.
Going by nation, Russia has made the best show in the tournament so
far, having four of the 16 players remaining in the contest.
Round four resumes on Saturday after a rest on Friday.
The FIDE championship began June 19 amid controversy. Libya refused
to allow players from Israel to attend. Many top players decided not
to compete, apparently because they were angry that the world’s
strongest-rated player, Garry Kasparov of Russia, is to be allowed to
play the winner without taking part in the qualifying rounds.

Associated Press Worldstream
June 26, 2004 Saturday
Armenia will take part in NATO-sponsored exercises in Azerbaijan
YEREVAN, Armenia
Armenia will take part in NATO-sponsored exercises in Azerbaijan this
fall in spite of tensions between the two countries, a top Armenian
military official said Saturday.
Col. Murad Isakhanian, the chief Armenian representative at the Baku
planning conference for NATO’s Partnership for Peace maneuvers, said
Azerbaijan had given security guarantees for the Armenian contingent
at the Cooperative Best Effort-2004 exercises in the Azerbaijani
capital Baku in September.
Earlier this week, several protesters broke into the planning meeting
in Baku and called on Azerbaijan to stop negotiations with Armenia.
The incident highlighted tensions over Nagorno-Karabakh – a territory
disputed by both countries. Isakhanian and another Armenian officer
were among those attending the conference.
Protesters and hotel security guards suffered minor injuries in the
incident in the hotel. Eight people were detained by police.
Armenia and Azerbaijan are at odds over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave,
which Armenian forces seized from Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. A
1994 cease-fire has largely held, but no final settlement has been
reached. Neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan are NATO members, but both
former Soviet republics participate in NATO’s Partnership for Peace
program.
Isakhanian said Saturday that Azerbaijani authorities had apologized
for the Baku incident.

El Pais
June 27, 2004
Un nuevo rey para Las Vegas
SANDRO POZZI
Kirk Kerkorian logra hacerse con los casinos de Madalay por 7.900
millones de dolares. El leon que nunca duerme. Eso es lo que dicen en
Las Vegas del multimillonario Kirk Kerkorian, al que sus 87 anos de
edad no le pesan nada. Tampoco la inmensa fortuna que ha ido amasando
con sus manos, con la que parece no conformarse. El accionista
mayoritario de los estudios MetroGoldwynMayer (MGM) y del operador de
casinos MGM Mirage esta a un paso de convertirse en el mas grande
entre los grandes en el mundo de los juegos de azar y del negocio de
las convenciones, al anunciar la compra de su rival Mandalay Resort.
BODY:
A Kerkorian -numero 65 en la lista de los hombres mas ricos del
planeta, segun Forbes- le bastan tres minutos para oler una buena
operacion. Los negocios, dice, son “el elixir de la vida”. Y mientras
mas grande sea la operacion, mejor. Es raro ver al magnate en eventos
publicos Ni siquiera se pasea por sus casinos. Lleva mas bien una
vida al margen de la sociedad mientras teje tras las cortinas la
expansion de su imperio. Nada que ver con el ganster Bugsy Siegel,
quien en 1946 abrio en Las Vegas el primer casino con neones, el
Flamingo. Sin embargo, su historia esta intimamente ligada al
boulevard del juego desde hace 35 anos.
Kirk Kerkorian esta considerado, de hecho, como uno de los pocos
hombres de negocios que apostaron por transformar la imagen del vicio
de la Sin City -la ciudad del pecado-, para convertirla en todo un
icono del capitalismo y del negocio. La adquisicion de Mandalay
Resort por 7.900 millones de dolares, anunciada hace dos semanas, es
un paso mas en esa direccion. Sin tener que salir de Las Vegas, este
magnate californiano, hijo de inmigrantes armenios, controlara 11
hoteles de casinos, entre ellos los famosos Bellagio, Mandalay Bay,
Excalibur, Lu-xor, New York New York o el Circus Circus.
Kerkorian tendra mas plazas hoteleras de las que nunca pudieron tener
juntos el multimillonario tejano Howard Hughes y Stephen Wynn,
antiguo dueno de la cadena Mirage. Lo unico que le falta es el Caesar
Palace. Hasta el punto que dicen que Las Vegas, una de las metropolis
de mayor crecimiento en EE UU, es propiedad de una sola compania. Su
reino en el mundo del juego ira mas alla aun. Con la adquisicion de
Mandalay, su imperio se extendera a otros Estados del pais -Nevada,
Misisipi y Nueva Jersey- y Australia.
MGM Mirage, donde Kerkorian posee el 57% del accionariado, contara
con un total de 30 propiedades y sumara 75.000 plazas hoteleras, el
40% de las maquinas tragaperras y el 44% de las mesas de apuestas del
pais. A esto hay que sumarle 186 kilometros cuadrados de espacio en
centros para convenciones en las principales ciudades de EE UU. MGM
contara con 70.000 empleados y unos ingresos superiores a los 7.000
millones de dolares anuales.
La adquisicion de Mandalay es la segunda mas importante que en los
ultimos cuatro anos va a realizar MGM, tras hacerse en 2000 con el
control de Mirage en una operacion valorada en 6.400 millones de
dolares. El propio Stephen Wynn explica que Kerkorian siempre se bate
a si mismo: “Cuando habia hoteles con 400 habitaciones, el construyo
uno con 1.512 plazas en 1969. Despues se supero con uno de 2.000 y
luego otra vez con un gigante de 5.000”. Si el mafioso Bugsy Siegel
esta considerado como el creador de Las Vegas, a Kirk Kerkorian se le
atribuye la era de los megaresort.
La adquisicion de Mandalay, como todas las apuestas fuertes, esta
sujeta a varios riesgos. Por un lado, esta el control de las
autoridades reguladoras, que podrian imponer la venta de determinados
activos y la cesion de licencias para evitar una concentracion
excesiva en el sector. La otra es la amenaza de un nuevo ataque
terrorista en suelo estadounidense, que podria dejar la operacion en
zona peligrosa, ya que Las Vegas esta considerada como un objetivo
posible.

Tehran Times, Iran
June 28 2004
Labor Minister Calls For Bolstering Iran-Armenia Ties
TEHRAN (IRNA) — Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Safdar Hosseini
here on Sunday met with the head of the Presidential Staff of
Armenia, Artashes Toumanian, and called for bolstering of
Iran-Armenia ties.
Alluding to an upcoming visit of President Seyyed Mohammad Khatami to
Armenia, he expressed hope the fifth Iran-Armenia Joint Commission
session will be held without delay.
Hosseini referred to the several signed agreements on electricity,
energy, gas and oil between the two countries and praised the
countries’ “outstanding” bilateral cooperation. The minister of
labor, while praising the increasing volume of trade exchanges
between Tehran and Yerevan, said: “Both sides can bolster their
relations due to the existence of many potential.”
Toumanian lauded the efforts of the Iranians to bolster relations and
expressed hope these relations would serve the interests of both
countries even more.
Toumanian also said the project to construct the “Kajaran” tunnel is
one of the most viable joint projects under way and would have no
problems going into operation.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

27 June 2004
Bush Has Productive Meetings in Turkey, Senior Official Says
President meets with Turkish government, religious leaders
By David Anthony Denny
Washington File Staff Writer
Istanbul, Turkey — President George Bush had “very good meetings” with
Turkey’s president and prime minister in Ankara June 27, according to a
senior administration official.
Briefing the press on background at the Conrad Hotel, the official said that
Bush’s meetings with Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdowan “show that from this moment forward, Turkey sees its
aims in Iraq as parallel and consistent with” the United States. The
official said the leaders discussed territorial integrity of Iraq, and Bush
said the subject was of critical importance to the United States.
The leaders also talked about PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party) terrorists,
which operates out of Kurdish-occupied northern Iraq. Bush agreed that the
PKK is a terrorist organization, and said the United States wants to work
with Turkey to combat the group.
Bush expressed sympathy over the three Turkish workers kidnapped in Iraq
recently, the senior official said. Bush told the Turkish leaders that the
kidnapping “demonstrates the kind of enemies we’re dealing with” — those
who “seek to export chaos” to Iraq and elsewhere. International community
needs to unite to combat this threat, according to the senior official.
On the subject of Cyprus, which is now in its 30th year of division into
Greek and Turkish enclaves, Bush thanked Turkey for its “extraordinary”
efforts, the senior administration official said. United Nations Secretary
General Kofi Annan had come up with a good plan to end the division, and the
Turkish government and Turkish Cypriots “did a lot to promote this plan,”
though it was rejected by Greek Cypriots, the official said.
The U.S. and Turkish officials also discussed the Broader Middle East
Initiative, the senior official said. He noted that Erdogan had gone to the
Group of Eight summit in Sea Island, Georgia, to support the initiative.
Turkey’s a secular democracy with a Muslim majority, the official said, and
while perhaps not a model for the entire Middle East, the country
demonstrates that secular democracy can flourish in a Muslim society.
After leaving the Turkish capital and flying to Istanbul, Bush met with
several of the ancient city’s religious leaders, said the senior official.
Included in the group were the government’s general director of religious
affairs, an Islamic mufti, the chief rabbi, and Assyrian, Armenian, and
Greek Orthodox metropolitans. He said the meeting with religious leaders
also went very well. Its purpose was to recognize the contributions to the
city’s life by religious minority groups, some of which have been part of
Istanbul for centuries.
Afterward, Bush met with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. This
was, in the senior official’s words, “a terrific meeting.” He added that the
Summit was “closing in on a number of really strong” positive
accomplishments. He predicted that they may include:
— A NATO statement announcing agreement on training mission in Iraq,
containing a positive answer to last week’s request from Iraqi Prime
Minister Ayad Alawi for NATO to train Iraqi troops;
— Expansion of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for
Afghanistan, moving outside of Kabul with Provincial Reconstruction Teams
(PRT’s).
— An Istanbul Declaration on how NATO’s expanding to meet challenges of
21st century;
— A NATO contribution to President Bush’s Broader Middle East Initiative;
and
— NATO will mark the coming termination of its mission in Bosnia after nine
years.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information
Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: )

Armenian Engineers and Scientists of America, Inc.
417 W. Arden Ave., Suite 112C, Glendale, CA 91203
TEL 818-547-3372,
PROJECT HARMONY
Presents
Armenian Schools Connectivity Project (ASCP)
by
Mourad Mouradyan (Technical Manager)
Knarik Nazaryan (Senior Regional Coordinator)
Bryan Wockley (The US program Coordinator)
Tuesday 29, 2004 7:00PM
at
Armenian Society of Los Angeles
221 South Brand Blvd, Glendale, CA 91204.
Admission Free
The presentation will include past achievements of Project Harmony in
Armenia, over the last 2 years, through which 270 out of the 1400 total
number of schools have been equipped with computer labs and internet
connectivity. Recently a Mobile Computer/Internet Lab has been added to
this program to serve outlying regions that have not yet been equipped with
permanent labs.
There are several purposes for the trip around the US this summer.
Primarily, the visiting team is seeking to update the Diaspora community as
well as others interested in the development of technology education and
business in Armenia on the status of the Armenian Schools Connectivity
Project (ASCP). There have been several exciting developments recently in
ASCP including the launch of a Mobile
Computer Lab that will travel and provide internet access and training to
some of Armenia’s most remote regions on a rotating basis via satellite
uplink.
In general, the main purpose is to meet with individuals who are aware of
the ASCP network, have an interest in tech education and proliferation in
Armenia, and may be willing to serve as advisors to the program to preserve
this valuable resource.
Separately, the visiting team is looking to promote partnership
opportunities between schools and communities in the US and those within
the ASCP network in Armenia. The ECA has recently approved the proposal
for increasing the number of teacher exchanges and training opportunities
we can offer to US teachers in support of our partnership building process.
Teacher exchanges will continue for the coming three years, including
annual national follow-up training conferences for those participating in
collaborative school partnership programs.
Recently, the grant renewal for the ASCP has been approved by the State
Department to begin July 1 of this year. However, part and parcel to the
grant provision is a required plan for scaling down US Bureau of
Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) funding to internet school centers
over the course of the coming years.
There is a great interest in meeting with representatives of
schools in the Glendale and greater LA area who might be interested in
participating in Project Harmony facilitated school partnerships with
schools or communities in Armenia. Participation in these training
conferences, collaborative projects, and teacher exchanges is fully funded
by the ECA grant awarded to the Project Harmony ASCP.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Pravda.RU
WCO, EurAsEc sign memo of understanding
18:50 2004-06-26
The World Customs Organization (WCO) and the Eurasian Economic Community
(EurAsEC) that comprises Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and
Kyrghyzstan (Ukraine, Armenia, and Moldova have observer statuses) signed a
memorandum of understanding in Brussels on Friday. The document was signed
by WCO General Director Michel Danet and EurAsEC Secretary General Grigory
Rapota.
The chief of the WCO that groups 162 countries was pleased that the memo was
signed, the initiative that was supported by Russia’s State Customs
Committee.
Mr. Danet said to representatives of the EurAsEC countries that now on the
WCO could accept requests, raise funds and implement programs to reform the
national customs services thereby promoting economic growth.
“We have been cooperating with the WCO for two years now. EurAsEC has been
granted the status of its regional customs center,” said Mr. Rapota.
The five member-countries are working to create the single economic space
within EurAsEC, Mr. Rapota told RIA Novosti. “There is the council of
customs chiefs that is dealing with the problem. Since EurAsEC is not a
closed club it seeks cooperation with the whole of the international
community. The memorandum with the WCO is therefore a step towards achieving
this goal,” said Mr. Rapota.
Mr. Rapota emphasized that the WCO had singled out the Russian Customs
Academy as a regional center for training customs experts.
© RIAN

armenianow.com
25 June 2004
Chemical Concern: Mothers in farm regions threatened by harmful pesticide
By Marianna Grigoryan
ArmeniaNow reporter
Research conducted on 30 women in three regions of Armenia found that 25
had traces of the chemical DDT in their systems.
Decades ago, Soviet health officials banned the use of DDT
(dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), a pesticide used to kill weeds and bugs
in agriculture crops.
As in other countries, USSR scientists concluded that exposure to the
powerful chemical could lead to birth defects, could promote the incidence
of cancer, cause liver failure, effect the nervous system. Exposure was
especially dangerous for pregnant women.
Tests were conducted on 30 mothers.
The research began last year and is now in its second phase, testing women
in maternity homes of Ararat, Masis, and Aparan regions – farming districts
where pesticides are used for treating vineyards and other crops.
“We examine 30 women from different regions in every stage of our research,
however thousands of women have similar problems in Armenia,” says Albert
Mayrapetyan, director of Scientific Research Institute on Environment,
Hygiene and Preventive Toxicology at the Ministry of Health. “And if we’ve
found those substances in mother’s milk, this already shows that those
pesticides are put into use in the surrounding area. During the second stage
of our research we will examine the negative affect of that milk on the
health of the newborns.
“Considering the threat, prohibition during Soviet times was very strict and
DDT was out of use right away. However, our latest research shows that it is
still are a threat to people.”
“The existence of DDT in milk can lead to various negative consequences
during the period of a child’s development, beginning with mental
development damage up to nervous and immunity damage,” says Lilia Simonyan,
representative of a non governmental organization that focuses on women’s
health.
Simonyan says women become exposed to the chemical while working in gardens
or fields where DDT has been applied.
And while the rate of incidence may seem alarming, Karine Saribekyan, head
of Mother and Child Health Department at the Ministry of Health, says that
research is not yet a reason to discourage mothers from breastfeeding.
“Mother’s milk is irreplaceable for a newborn and it’s not a wise thing to
refuse from feeding babies in a natural way,” says Saribekyan. “Specialists
have to start teaching villagers how to use pesticides wisely and to find
out where DDT came from.”
There are different opinions regarding the reappearance of DDT, but there
hasn’t been any specific conclusions about its renewed use.
The chairman of the Union of Greens Hakob Sanasaryan says the DDT was not
destroyed after it was banned, but it was kept and after a while was again
put into circulation.
According to Mayrapetyan DDT is being smuggled in from Azerbaijan and Middle
Asia.
“Even though usage of DDT is prohibited, the import of pesticides is in
general free for individual small owners and it’s impossible to have a
complete control of this situation,” says the head of Plant Cultivation
department at the Ministry of Agriculture, Gagik Manucharyan.
According to specialists, during Soviet years everything was systematized
and experts oversaw the use of agricultural chemicals. Today, however,
villagers have their own land and their means of farming is practically
unregulated.
“We have been doing researches for five years in regions and carry out
information campaigns on how and what quantities pesticides have to be used
in,” says Simonyan. “The awareness level is not so high.”
Mayrapetyan says DDT in mother’s milk is not the only trace of pesticide
misuse.
“As a result of our research we found out that in the region where a large
quantity of pesticides is being applied, health problems are incomparably
higher than for instance in mountainous regions where they use very little
pesticides,” he says. “Now, another study is in process regarding the number
of stillbirths, and anomalies in the ‘risk’ area and the preliminary picture
is not encouraging at all