Hellenic News of America
June 6 2004
The Genocide of Greeks of Pontos (Black Sea).
Professor Konstantinos Fotiadis (2004).
The Genocide of Greeks of Pontos (Black Sea).
Athens: Editions of Institution of Parliament of Greeks for the
Parliamentarism and the Democracy, p.600 + photographs.
Presentation by Theofanis Malkidis Ph.D
Demokritus University of Thrace
GREECE
1. A owed action of debt
The investigation of genocide of Greeks of Pontos (Black Sea) from
the Young Turks and Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) arrangement constituted a
question taboo for the Greek historical and political science. The
Greek-Turkish pact of friendship 1930, the simultaneous integration
of Greece and Turkey in the NATO in 1952, but also simultaneously the
called approach of two states, constituted points stations (and) for
the Pontian question. They are these parameters “that the Genocide of
Hellenism of Pontos did not acquire the compurgation that it was
imposed it acquires “, as stresses the writer in his import.
On one side because the political climate did not allow is
investigated the crime of mass murders of against Greeks, on the
other side when this became after initiative of scientists and
intellectual as minimal debt against the collective memory, faced a
very hostile environment.
However after fights and efforts of many years from Pont’s
inhabitants of second generation and associations of interior and
abroad, the Greek parliament recognized in 1994 the genocide of
Greeks of Pontos, establishing him 19 May as day of memory and price.
The law on the recognition of mass crime was from an alone him
station in the newer Greek history, that more precious perhaps it had
it offers the Hellenic state to the victims of liquidation from the
historical homeland and to their descendants, the refugees that
reached poor in Greece and nevertheless contributed in the Greek
politician, economic, social and cultural life.
The recognition of genocide by the Parliament of Greeks had a lot of
components and other so much priorities. The protection of the 19 th
May as day of memory of genocide of Greeks of Pontos, “action of duty
to the history and action of responsibility opposite in the newer
generations of Greeks”, her internationalisation in all the levels
(recognition from Turkey, the trespass of rights Pontians that lives
in Turkey and particularly in their place of existence in the
Pontos), the installation of Native of the Pont refugees from the
former Soviet Union in Greece, the documentation of genocide.
For reasons that are known and comprehensible as we reported more and
are connected with interests foreigner with the memory and the real
friendship between the populations the decision of national
delegation on the publication of documents genocide of Greeks of
Pontos, was not materialised immediately. Thus they passed 10 entire
years until the Greek Parliament publishes the book of professor
Konstantinos Fotiadis, which argued the murders of 353000 Greeks in
the Pontos the interval 1916-1923.
The book is separated in 13 chapters which cover the history of
Greeks of Pontos, the ethnological situation in the region, the
Ottoman reforms and the Young Turks arrangement, that was turned
against the Greeks (and the Armenian), program of Mustafa Kemal
arrangement for the crimes in the Pontos. The book includes primary
sources, the result of research of writer in government and owned
files of former USSR, France, Germany, Great Britain, Austria, Italy,
Vatican, Society of Nations and Greece, while is mentioned also rich
bibliography in Greek and other languages.
2.The crime
The genocide of Pont’s inhabitants (1916 – 1923) with above 353.000
victims, constitutes a big genocide the 20 th century The term
genocide as it was shaped afterwards the end of second world war,
means the methodical extermination, total or partial, national,
racial or religious team and it is a primary crime, that does not
have interrelation with martial conflicts.
The partial or total annihilation national, racial or religious team
raises, accordingly to the article of 1 special Convention, which has
voted the General Assembly of UN in 1948 in the crime of genocide,
that is different from the crimes of war, after «it does not only
force the martial rules, but the himself it constitutes crime at the
humanity, provided that it refers in concrete individuals or nation,
but concerns entire the humanity “.
Thus the genocide constitutes the heavier crime according to the
international right, for which in deed does not exist prescription.
The one which commits the genocide does not exterminate a team for
something that e you do, but for something that is, s the case of
Greeks of Pontos, because they were Greeks and Christians.
The 19 May 1919 date the arrival of s Moustafa Kemal in the
Samsounta, is the beginning for the second and harder phase of
Genocide. The terrorism, the working battalions, the exiles, the
obliteration of leadership in the Amasia in 1921 , the rapes, the
mass murders, forced the Greeks of Pontos to abandon their homes and
leave after courses, in Greece, in the USSR, Iran, Syria, and
elsewhere (Australia, USA) or as means of self-defence is undertaken
resistance action against the organised drawing of extermination. He
has become henceforth today perceptible that t a victims of genocide
would be very more, if did not exist the guerrilla movement. The
conclusion of Pontian genocide it constitutes violent liquidation
surviving afterwards 1922 -1923.
3. The importance of publication
The recognition of genocide of Greeks of Pontos and the publication
of author’s work of Mr Fwtja’di from the Parliament of Greeks despite
the delay it vindicated Hellenism of Pontos and connected the modern
Hellenism with his past via the collective memory, that is to say
truth. The particular publication of professor Fotiadis is henceforth
a basic element of memory and « it rests with in the Parliament of
Greeks it transmits in the parliaments other countries her intention
to render her respectable memory that of Genocide “. Hellenism of
Pontos is a big and important part of Greek nation and it is not
possible to be ignored from the State and the Greek society. The
safeguarding and the further appointment and internationalisation of
day memory of genocide, which exceeds the Hellenism of Pontos and
penetrate all the Greek society, it constitutes main constitutive
element of institutions and society that are defended the history and
truth. And as lead the bigger, perhaps, Pontian writer, Dimitris
Psathas “it is not allowed we sacrifice the historical truth in no
expediency, as unfortunately, it was established it becomes from the
time that was engraved the said Greek-Turkish friendship. The non
critical silence of makes of History, he was perhaps also one from
their reason s that so much bad headed the ‘ friendship ‘ with Turks.
Throw the veil of oblivion in the past, but dry with, no we hide.
Know also same the Turks what they made their parents, in order to
they avoid what they stigmatised them in the same time who want they
take the place between the civilized nations. Only knowing Turks and
knowing those us and their stigmatised past, can sometimes engrave a
Greek-Turkish friendship on solid bases “.
Destexhe, A., Rwanda and genocide in the Twentieth Century, New York:
New York University Press. 1996, p. 2
Fotiadis, op. cit. Capital I Martyrology 1921, p. 365-419.
Âë. ÖùôéÜäçò, Ê. op.cit. Chapter ÉC¨ p. 457.
Fotiadis, K. op. cit. p.17.
Psathas D. (1953) Ground of Pontos, Athens: Editions of Estia p. 8.
;lang=US

Times Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada)
June 6, 2004 Sunday Final Edition
Conversations with the dead: The bones of massacre victims have a lot
to say to a forensic anthropologist
by Tom Hawthorn
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in
Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo by Clea Koff; Knopf Canada;
271 pages; $34.95
One murder is a crime. One hundred murders, or 1,000, or 10,000,
or tens of thousands, are also crimes, although the enormity of the
wrongdoing is so great, so unbelievable, that it becomes possible
for the perpetrators to lie and cover up, making accomplices of so
many others.
Hitler, the mass murderer against whom other monsters are measured,
knew this well. Preparing plans for the extermination of the European
Jews, Hitler notoriously dismissed concerns about future world
opinion. “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the
Armenians?” he said. Indeed, when earlier this year Canada’s House
of Commons belatedly condemned those deaths more than eight decades
after the fact, the vote was denounced by the Turkish government and
its supporters as being misinformed and unhelpful.
For survivors and grieving relatives, the horror of murder is
compounded by denying the fact.
Bearing witness is an antidote to such sickness. So, the Holocaust
memoir becomes a genre because it is necessary to count as many
survivors and name as many victims as possible, if we are to take
seriously the solemn promise of “never again.”
Yet, the past decade has provided a brutal awakening for those of
us under age 65 who ever wondered how the world could ignore the
deliberate and organized slaughter of so many people.
In Rwanda, political leaders squawked orders for mass murder over
the radio. In Serbia, otherwise decent people suspended disbelief and
accepted government propaganda denying the existence of mass graves.
In Canada, we tsk-tsked over news of the latest atrocities, our sense
of moral superiority once again affirmed.
Even as a teenager, Clea Koff knew the world’s atrocities demanded
a response from her. Raised in Africa, England and the United
States, this daughter of a Tanzanian mother and American father,
both documentary filmmakers, quips that she learned about the
lumpenproletariat at the supper table before she knew about Bert and
Ernie on television.
Fascinated by the nature of death even as a girl, she collected dead
birds and studied them as prelude to backyard burial.
Koff found inspiration for a career as a forensic anthropologist from
two sources: a television documentary on bodies preserved in the ash
from an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and Clyde Snow’s book, Witnesses
from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell, which describes efforts to
find the remains of the “disappeared” victims of Argentina’s bloody
military junta of the 1970s and 1980s.
“I had known for years that my goal was to help end human rights abuses
by proving to would-be killers that bones can talk,” she writes in The
Bone Woman, a compelling personal chronicle of months spent rooting
around in mass graves.
Koff was sent to Africa in 1996 with the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), a United Nations organization formed
to bring the killers to justice. (Koff also worked for ICTY, the
tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.) She works with the remains of
murder victims, of which there is no shortage. The violence in Rwanda
was so widespread that it quickly claimed some 800,000 victims, the
vast majority killed by hand, usually by machete. Imagine every man,
woman and child in Vancouver and Burnaby hacked to death, some left
to rot where they fell, others thrown into pits and covered with dirt.
Koff finds Rwanda a beautiful, verdant land, where the serene setting
of the church at Kibuye masks the horror inflicted and a menace still
not dissipated.
While some skeletons display wounds to the arms and hands, others
bear only the fatal blows.
“The absence of defence wounds gave my image of that massacre an eerie
calmness; did people take the blows as though taking the sacrament?”
She finds herself smiling a lot in Rwanda, an incongruous reaction
to so horrid a killing field. “It is because I see not just death,
about which I can do nothing, but bones and teeth and hair, which I
can do something about …”
Bones offer clues as to age, sex, height, ancestry and cause of
death. Koff and her colleagues scrape away dirt until they uncover
remains, exchanging a pickaxe for a trowel for a pair of chopsticks
for the delicate task of flicking dirt from between finger joints.
A rational scientist, Koff has a poet’s eye in describing her
discoveries, noting in one case how “the big toe phalange (is) chunky
like a baby carrot, the other phalanges more like small licorice
pieces, held in anatomical position by a sock because the flesh of
the foot has decomposed.”
Descriptions of much of her work are not for the faint of heart (and
those now eating breakfast may wish to skip a few paragraphs). Koff
copes daily with ammonia fumes from intestines as well as saponified
remains, a state of decomposition in which skin remains tender. “If
you puncture it, something not dissimilar to cottage cheese came
foaming out …”
The smells of decomposition — “one being sharp and ripe, the other
thick and ‘hairy’ ” — permeates her own clothing, a scent she cannot
avoid even while eating lunch.
These horrors fuel nightmares that she duly records, yet an event
she witnesses causes her greater distress.
One fine evening as Koff dines al fresco on the shores of Lake Kivu,
her reverie is disturbed by a sickening sight: two desperate men
in the water being shot to death by uniformed Rwandan soldiers. “I
couldn’t conceive of which ‘side’ they were on, which side we were
thought to be on, or, indeed, if there were any sides.”
Seeking explanation, she is told the dead men were insurgents from
Zaire. The information is useless, for she has no means of judging
its accuracy.
“I hated the impotence of not being able to do more than just report
the killings and I hated the fear I now felt for my own life, even
though the bullets
hadn’t been directed at me or my teammates. And, insult upon insult,
I hated the fact I got to leave this place so easily.”
The Bone Woman was written from Koff’s journal entries, a strength
in retelling the small incidents of her labours, a weakness when
recounting the petty disputes one expects among colleagues working in
such hostile and unpalatable circumstances. She dislikes the teasing
she endures from teammates after telling a Reuter reporter that she
talks to the uncovered skeletons: “We’re coming. We’re coming to
take you out.” Her complaint is so overshadowed by the enormity of
the crimes in which she works daily as to seem callow and naive. Her
reaction is understandable perhaps for someone who marks her 24th
birthday literally up to her elbows in viscera.
Koff also exhumes bodies from mass graves in the former Yugoslavia
(“where the people who committed the crimes we would be uncovering
were still at large”) at Cerska, Nova Kasaba and a rubbish pit at
Ovcara, where missing men from the hospital at Vukovar had been dumped.
“These bodies, by their very presence, were dismantling years of the
perpetrators’ propaganda that the grave didn’t exist, that the missing
men were probably larking about in Italy, that a crime against humanity
hadn’t taken place five years earlier,” she writes.
Her work does not so much bring resolution to the crime, by uncovering
the assailant and having them punished, as restore the humanity to
those whose lives were taken. Long after the book is closed, a reader
remembers the woman in Rwanda with plastic pink necklaces; the hospital
patient who secreted his X rays in his clothing (for identification
after death? because he believed he was going to another hospital?);
the boy in Kosovo whose grave held marbles, a child’s plaything and
a reminder of our necessary outrage at his murder.
Tom Hawthorn is a Victoria reporter who last reviewed Conrad Black’s
biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Times Colonist.

Migrant loved family and his motorcycle
by Nicolle Nazarstian
Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia)
June 7, 2004 Monday
Mardiros Hatsakortzian
Refugee and family man
Born: 1910-1912
Died: May 3, 2004
MARDIROS Hatsakortzian led a simple life, its world revolving around
his family and its affairs.
But this quiet man, who was somewhat of a loner, reached minor fame
for thousands of people in the Armenian and Greek communities.
You only had to say his name to evoke instant images for which he was
synonymous — Station Pier, Port Melbourne, the Anzac Day march,
ringing of the St John’s church bell at Carlton, but, above all else,
his beloved Triumph motorcycle with its Armenian flag.
These are what Mardiros will always be remembered for.
Although known by many, very few people knew him well. He was an odd
man with an eccentric streak, which made him hard to get to know.
He was a God-fearing man, with remarkably simple tastes reflected in
all facets of his life, right down to the clothes he wore and the
food he ate.
He was very humble, but at times proud and stubborn. Religious, but
at times a rogue. Not even something as simple as his true age was
clear.
He was born between 1910 and 1912 in Dikranaged, a town on the
Armenian/Turkish border, the youngest of seven siblings.
World War I broke out and the then Turkish Ottoman Government used
the opportunity to exercise its form of ethnic cleansing against more
than a million Armenians living in the border towns and provinces
between the two countries. It became known as the Armenian Genocide.
His father, Tateyos, who had a haberdashery stall in the town’s
market, died as a result of the violence, as did many of his
neighbours.
In the chaos and whirlwind of those events, for his own safety and
survival, his mother placed Mardiros and his youngest sister in an
Armenian orphanage.
Like millions of his country’s people, he became a refugee. The
refugees spilled out to different parts of the world.
>>From about age seven, Mardiros spent the next 10-12 years in
orphanages and international relief missions throughout the Middle
East. Some were no more than tent camps, where he lived for months at
a time with thousands of other children.
He spent seven years in a Greek orphanage, from which came his love
affair with its people and traditions.
None were more loved than the blessing of the waters ritual, which
explains why in early January every year he dived into the Port
Melbourne water and raced for the cross with men less than half his
age.
At about 18, Mardiros left Greece for Egypt and eventually made his
way to Palestine by 1937. There he married Jeanette, who was 14 years
old.
When World War II began, he joined the Royal Electric Mechanical
Engineers of the British army as a fitter and turner.
It was during this time that he discovered his true love and passion:
motorcycles. It was also where he acquired the electrical and
mechanical skills that enabled him to come up with so many crazy
inventions many years later.
His two daughters were born during the war years, after which he
worked as a transport driver before migrating to Australia in 1963
and settling in Blackburn.
In Melbourne, Mardiros worked for Wormald Security alongside his
son-in-law for 15 years before retiring in 1978.
After retiring, he could almost always be found in his garage
tinkering with his motorcycle or the family Mazda, or doing something
to drive Jeanette crazy, like painting all the outdoor fittings on
their property in the colours of the Armenian flag.
Unbelievably, it was only this year, aged well into his 90s, that he
failed to dive for the cross.
I can vividly recall being with him the previous year on the pier
with hundreds of other people, all wanting to shake the hand of an
old man who had just come out of the water wearing nothing but his
underwear and a wooden crucifix.
Uncharacteristically, he made a point of wanting me to be there to
see him that year.
You could see it in his eyes on that warm, sunny day — he was tired
now, and you couldn’t help but sense that he knew this was the last
time.
Nicolle Nazarstian
(granddaughter)

Russian ex-premier Yevgeniy Primakov warns against anti-Americanism
NTV Mir, Moscow
6 Jun 04
Russia has maintained its opposition to US policy on Iraq, but has
wisely avoided a damaging lapse into anti-Americanism, ex-premier
Yevgeniy Primakov told Russian NTV Mir television.
Primakov said Moscow had been against US policy on Iraq in
circumvention of the UN from the very start, and “we have stuck to
our position”.
“But if we had allowed this policy to develop into anti-Americanism,
we would have lost out… Could you imagine antiterrorist activity
against international terrorism – this is the main threat – being
pursued without the Americans? Could it be done? Could we now seek to
do something against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
without the Americans?”
Primakov, who heads the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry,
denied Russian business interests in Iraq had suffered as a result
of the US-led war.
“I just want to say that it was necessary to prevent this from
developing into an anti-American tendency. What would we have
achieved? A return to the cold war? Would you have withstood an arms
race, I ask you now?” he said rhetorically on the “Orange Juice”
interview programme.
Primakov told presenter Vladimir Solovyev he had just been to the
Armenian capital, Yerevan, for a children’s festival and he did not
think that a conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia was imminent as
“everyone understands” that peaceful methods are needed.
Territorial integrity, he said, is an “incontrovertible value”, and
“today one must speak of self-determination without it necessarily
leading to separation”.

Turkish mayor says Armenia should close nuclear plant
Anatolia news agency, Ankara
6 Jun 04
Igdir, 6 June: Nurettin Aras, the mayor of northeastern province of
Igdir, has said that nuclear energy power plant in Armenia should be
shut down.
Speaking to the AA Anatolia correspondent on Sunday 6 June , Aras said
that the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant on Turkish-Armenian border posed
serious threat to Igdir as it was 15-20 kilometres from the province.
Noting that they had collected 2,500 signatures on the first day
of a one-week campaign launched by his office for closure of the
nuclear power plant, Aras said that they would bring their demand
to authorities.
Defending that the power plant had suffered damage in an earthquake
in Armenia in 1988 but it had not been reinforced, Aras claimed that
planes carried fuel oil to the power plant.
Recalling that the power plant was very close to city centre of
Igdir, Aras said: “Our residents are worried about any possible leak
or explosion at the power plant. Several trees near Armenian border
have died, causing us to feel we are in danger. I call on the World
Health Organization to take action as soon as possible. Necessary
initiatives should rapidly be launched to close down this plant.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Indusmin Receives Five-Year Extension of Licenses in Armenia
VANCOUVER, British Colombia–(BUSINESS WIRE)–06/06/2004–Indusmin Energy
Corp. (TSX VENTURE:IDM)(Berlin Wkn:469065) completed an agreement with Armenian
American Exploration Inc. (“AAEC”), of Solana Beach, California, on April
30, whereby Indusmin Energy Corp has acquired total interest in blocks 1 and 2,
Republic of Armenia, to Indusmin, in return for a non-disclosed override
over twenty years (see Press Release, May 25). The Armenian Energy Minister, Mr.
Armen Movsisyan has agreed to the assignment and has granted a five year
license extension to the existing licenses. After significant due diligence on
the existing data on Block 1 and 2, Indusmin has elected to relinquish all of
Block 1 in order to focus the initial activity on block 2.
“With this deal, the company is acquiring a vast geological and geophysical
database about Armenia’s Oil and Gas resources; in particular for blocks 2
and 3. At this stage there exists more technical information for the
Oktemberyan prospects than those in the Near Yerevan Basin, and with a major gas
pipeline twenty kilometers to the north, it is likely that this area will be first
priority for exploration work. On the other hand, there is a drilling rig and
considerable amounts of additional equipment already in the country. The rig
and camp are available for start working as soon as needed,” stated Carlos
Munoz President and CEO.
Block 2 extends across the basins with the greatest potential for finding
commercial deposits of oil and gas in the Republic of Armenia, these being:
1) The Armavir Basin, a sub-basin of the Ararat Intermontane Depression,
located some thirty kilometers due west of the capital city of Yerevan.
Numerous gas shows and some minor oil shows in several boreholes have been
found. Several prospects have been identified — the Karmir prospect, close to
the Oktemberyan-13E and 7P wells, with 10 BCF (billion cubic feet) of
recoverable reserves; South Artamet and North Artamet prospects with reserves of 30
and 50 BCF respectively. There are also other prospects, including one where
a major surface geo-chemical anomaly exists.
2)The Near Yerevan Basin, part of the Central Depression, located due east
of Yerevan. Ten kilometers due east of Yerevan, oil was recovered from the
Paleocene in the Shorakhpur-1P well in 1987. Azat-1, drilled by AAEC in 1998 on
a separate structure further east, encountered oil traces at a similar
geological level. Two prospects, Shorakhpur and Nubarashen, are estimated to each
contain twenty million barrels of recoverable oil.
“The Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Armenia has great hopes for block
2, especially since the addition of important information obtained from the
activities of AAEC and others since 1991. We hope that the successful
application of the mutually agreed work program will lead to a commercial discovery.
We are further encouraged because of the excellent relations between the
Ministry of Energy and Indusmin Corporation. The deal regarding block 2 is just
the starting point in the planned major cooperation between us,” Dr. Andranik
Aghabalyan (Head of Department of Fuel and Energy Underground Resources,
Ministry of Energy, Republic of Armenia).
Symbol: IDMNF (U.S.)
Symbol: IDM (Can.)
Symbol: Wkn:469065 (Berlin)
The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility
for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
CONTACT:Indusmin Energy Corp., Vancouver Carlos Munoz, 604-960-9930
President & CEO fax: 604-608-4733 email: [email protected] website:
SOURCE: Indusmin Energy Corp.
06/06/2004 15:45 EASTERN
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Los Angeles Times
June 5, 2004 Saturday
Home Edition
BOOK REVIEW;
Genocide’s mark upon a tortured soul;
The Daydreaming Boy: A Novel; Micheline Aharonian Marcom; Riverhead
Books: 214 pp., $23.95
by Bernadette Murphy, Special to The Times
“The man who has no mother’s form to form him is a sad man,
unanchored man, vile and demoniac,” confides Vahe Tcheubjian,
narrator of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s beautiful and disturbing
second novel, “The Daydreaming Boy,” which details in stark terms the
psychic aftermath of the Armenian genocide. Having written
compellingly about the 1915-1918 massacre of more than a million
Armenians in Turkey (“Three Apples Fell From Heaven”), Marcom turns
her attention to the recurring distress of that event as played out
in the life of one man.
A middle-aged, successful Armenian businessman living in 1960s
Beirut, Vahe is haunted by his past. He watches idly, smoking
cigarettes on the balcony of his apartment, his back cooled by the
cracked tiles, as scenes from his younger years replay themselves.
Raised in a Beirut orphanage after having been abandoned in the wake
of the massacre, with no knowledge of his family, he has spent his
lifetime trying to undo the memories of his youth. Over the years, he
has managed to convince himself that the child Vahe, the orphan, did
not exist. He has placed that young boy, and all the other people he
knew back then, in a “walnut box,” he tells us: “I forgot them
completely; I unexisted them and they accordingly disappeared from
the box and then the box itself disappeared.”
But the past has a way of catching up with us even when we close it
off from ourselves, and on Vahe’s 46th birthday his younger self
reappears like some monstrous dark specter, and the film of his
childhood begins “playing and replaying and forward and back,” until
the memories threaten to unravel Vahe and the small comforts he’s
found.
He soon becomes a man who can do little else but indulge in
fantasies, which alternate between scenes of nurturing comfort and
graphic sexuality, of gentle tenderness juxtaposed with
survival-driven cruelty. His desire for his lost mother’s loving
touch converges with adult lust as he hungers after his neighbor’s
teenage Muslim maid. He takes countless walks in the city’s zoo,
imagining in the monkey Jumba a lost soul like himself, and he
envisions viciously killing Jumba to relieve his own misery. Appalled
at his thoughts, he wonders, “How did I become this sort of man?”
Slowly and artfully, Marcom reveals to the reader (and to Vahe
himself) the suffering of his early life. When he was first brought
to the orphanage, he recognized the Armenian word for “mother” but
spoke only Turkish, the language of the enemy. Was his father a Turk
and his birth the outcome of his Armenian mother’s rape? He knows
nothing for sure. In the orphanage, he was taunted by the other boys,
who beat out of him the only language he knew, until he found someone
weaker than himself to be the object of their ridicule and cruelty.
Vahe himself joined in the brutality visited on the newcomer, in an
effort to shut off any tender feelings or signs of frailty. “I cannot
bear it: the wars; the bloodletting; the untold things. I cannot,”
Vahe exclaims as the memories flood back.
>>From his reverie on the balcony he moves on to a reexamination of his
hollow, midlife years married to Juliana, with whom he lives
comfortably in pre-civil war Beirut and in whom he cannot confide —
then on to explicit fantasies of sex and violence before winding his
way back to what he can remember or conjecture about his origins.
Eventually Marcom leads us into the 1980s and the destruction of
Beirut by warring Christian and Muslim factions, mirroring Vahe’s
own, interior self-destruction.
Marcom’s stream-of-consciousness writing is deft and impressionistic:
“I am lying on my back and it comes back to me; harks back to that
other summer 1915, the summer of our death and yet my birth two years
later, mine own birth after the death of a race and our tongue….
How do I know something occurred if I myself have not been witness to
it? How can the invisible history stories be so strong as to engender
a hate that will lift a knife and plunge it into the flesh of another
beast, a man; or to slaughter him with a rifle semi-automatic? … I
am no man to answer such questions, or even to posit them; I think:
what did I do to deserve this?”
Marcom answers Vahe’s initial question — “How did I become this sort
of man?” — by giving us his full and excruciating history, but that
other question, the final one, remains unanswerable. Why do humans do
horrible things to one another? How are we to survive such brutality
— except as Vahe has, by endeavoring to dream it all away?
“The Daydreaming Boy” is a dazzling and disquieting account of what
happens when our dreamscapes stop working as a defense against the
past, and the awful reality of what we do to one another reasserts
itself.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: VAHE’S STORY: In her second novel, “The Daydreaming
Boy,” Micheline Aharonian Marcom writes about a middle-aged Armenian
businessman living in 1960s Beirut who is haunted by his past.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Lawrence K. Ho Los Angeles Times

Federal News Service, Inc.
FNS DAYBOOK
June 7, 2004 Monday
SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE
SUBJECT: European Affairs Subcommittee hearing on the nominations of
Charles Ries to be ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the
United States to the Hellenic Republic; Tom Korologos to be ambassador
extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the United States to Belgium;
and John Evans to be ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of
the United States to the Republic of Armenia.
LOCATION: 419 Dirksen Senate Office Building — June 16, 2004
PARTICIPANTS: The nominees
CONTACT: 202-224-4651

Platform souls
New plans for King’s Cross in London show the massive scale of the venture.
And the smart money – including that of New York art tycoon Larry Gagosian –
is already moving in. By Jonathan Glancey
Monday June 7, 2004
The Guardian
,11710,1232857,00.html
The hype surrounding the opening of the Gagosian Gallery in King’s Cross,
London, has been so great and the plaudits have been so glittering that I
expected to find something very special indeed. Not, perhaps, a riposte to
the Bilbao Guggenheim by Frank Gehry but a landmark building; an artistic
adventure.
The Gagosian Gallery proves to be a modest creation, housed in a former
garage in Britannia Street, a rats’ alley smelling of diesel and urine,
scuttling across the Metropolitan and Circle underground lines as they
rattle between Farringdon and King’s Cross-St Pancras. Behind the gaunt
facade, Larry Gagosian’s architects, Caruso St John, best known for their
New Art Gallery, in Walsall, which opened in 2000, have opened up bright,
cavernous, concrete-floored, top-lit white spaces. These are particularly
refined white spaces; they have something of a religious air about them, not
least because on a weekday afternoon this private gallery is as quiet as an
abandoned city church. A security guard sits like a piece of isolated
artwork by the locked door, while bright young things potter about at a vast
reception desk faced with important catalogues. A solitary, studious looking
fellow surveys the brown and white Cy Twombly abstracts, which hang from the
spotless white walls with a degree of respect owed to icons and statues
elsewhere.
None of this is a criticism of this new London art space, which is one of
the best of its kind since Charles Saatchi’s original gallery in St John’s
Wood, designed by the late Max Gordon. Caruso St John are among our most
thoughtful architects, as careful with the process of building as they are
with design. And, yet, for all its graceful substance, the gallery has
something of a temporary air about it. Should the top end of the art market
take a tumble between now and the completion of the Eurostar terminal at St
Pancras in 2007, it would make a particularly fine restaurant, office or
nightclub.
The area will certainly want these as its redevelopment gathers pace over
the next five years. Seedy for decades, King’s Cross is fast-becoming a
blue-chip investment for property developers. Quite how the promethean
building works promised here will pan out is anyone’s guess. For every
impressive new civil engineering achievement, there will be routine chain
stores; for every art gallery, a fast-food joint. Expect, in time-honoured
English tradition, a mix of the sublime and the banal: the Gormenghast glory
of St Pancras raised to fresh, pinnacled heights as Eurostar trains snake in
and out on their three-mile-a-minute race to and from Paris with its cafes,
restaurants, shops and art galleries. Penny-plain King’s Cross station
stripped of 1970s tat. Both stations are attended by millions of square feet
of gleaming new offices, some 1,800 flats, dozens of shops, washed and
brushed public spaces, three new footbridges over the Regent’s Canal,
restored historic buildings and, so the developers say, more art galleries.
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This leviathan plan, announced last week, for the 67-acre area north of the
Gagosian Gallery, has been prepared by a property consortium comprising
Argent St George, Exel, London and Continental Railways. Allies and
Morrison, immaculate Moderns, and Demetri Porphyrios, the most convincing of
the Prince of Wales’s school of classicists, have been appointed architects
in charge of a development that, in scale at least, matches the heroic urban
projects that shaped Victorian London. The £2bn project will take at least
15 years to complete. It may yet be rejected by the mayor of London, who
will surely find its tallest 19-storey towers too modest and its plan not
sufficiently dedicated to the concerns of big business. It may yet be called
in for public inquiry by the government, and either held up, heavily edited
or abandoned while lawyers rack up prodigious fees.
Whatever the process – the rise and fall of commercial and professional
reputations, the jaw-dropping fees, the performance bonuses, pension
top-ups, the gongs awarded and brown envelopes exchanged – King’s Cross will
surely be redeveloped on a titanic scale within the next 10 and 20 years.
The dodgy young men, working-class street-walkers and middle-class
kerb-crawlers will move on, along with the purveyors of kebabs, tattoos and
grubby mags. Spick and span corporate offices, big-brand shops, chain cafes
and relentless street furniture interspersed with well-meant public art will
take their place.
Architects of the calibre of Allies and Morrison and Demetri Porphyrios will
do their best to raise the standards of St Pancras but they cannot hope to
control the quality of the tenants who will flock here in coming years.
There will be something like 30,000 new jobs here, while millions of
passengers travelling to and from London and the Continent, and looking for
diversion, will mill around King’s Cross. A committed few might waft down
New Britannia Street to pick up a canvas by Cy Twombly or a pickled lamb by
Damien Hirst.
Gagosian, however, ought to know what most people will want. This sharp,
silver-haired Armenian-American, nicknamed “Go-Go”, began making money in
Santa Monica in the 1970s. “I would buy prints for $2-$3, put them in
aluminium frames and sell them for $15,” says the Donald Trump of the art
world. If Gagosian likes art, he likes nothing better than closing deals. He
opened a small gallery behind Regent Street a few years ago, also a
conversion by Caruso St John, before homing in on King’s Cross, which offers
an optimum deal: a place to show big, headline-stealing artworks – tens of
tons of Serra – in a handsome setting in the sort of grubby street that
makes the art world trill with excitement, while making a quiet future
killing on the property market.
Gagosian likes art, and knows that this, with all its high society
connections, brings kudos, glamour and outlandishly big bucks. Should you
happen to be a wheeler-dealer who builds a fashionable gallery showing
fashionable artists in one of the most fashionable up-and-coming parts of
London, how can you possibly go wrong?
Gagosian’s gung-ho, yet outwardly, highly refined, venture into the London
art world and King’s Cross is, perhaps, to be preferred to the
run-of-the-mill development that could take place here if we fail to keep a
sharp eye on the area and the hugely ambitious “masterplans” dreamed up by
one developer after the other over the past 15 years. No one should doubt
that the real artwork here is the arrival of the high-speed Eurostar line.
This, like the Midland Railway’s grand Gothic entry into St Pancras some 140
years ago, will change the face of the surrounding area, including Britannia
Street, for ever.

BACKYARDS TO BE SOLD BY AUCTION
A1 Plus | 14:40:06 | 07-06-2004 | Politics |
Apartment blocks’ backyards in Yerevan are likely to be sold by
auction, Samvel Danelyan, the head of urban planning and architecture
department of the Armenian capital’s municipality said Monday.
Danelyan supposes underground garages will be constructed at the sold
areas and zones of rest will be created on the ground.
The municipality intends to tighten control over all construction
works in the capital, which will be carried out only in accordance
with its plans.