Author: Hunanian Jack

MORE THAN 0 THOUSAND RAISED DURING TELETHON HELD FOR PURPOSE OF RAISING QUALITY OF ARMENIAN LESSONS AT AMERICAN STATE SCHOOLS

Noyan Tapan
July 21, 2009

GLENDALE, JULY 21, NOYAN TAPAN. On July 19 at 6-12 pm, the fund-raising
telethon, held for the purpose of raising the quality of Armenian
lessons at American state schools, was broadcast live on three Armenian
local channels, Horizon, AABC and Hayvision.

It was already the second marathon held by Davtian and Mariamian
educational institution and the whole money raised during it will be
given to the solution of problems of preservation of Armenian identity
and especially to the working out and publication of textbooks,
with the help of which more than 1000 Armenian pupils of 29 American
state schools of Glendale and its nearby towns will study their mother
tongue and culture.

According to the hayernaysor.am electronic newspaper, RA Minister of
Diaspora Hranush Hakobian greeted the participants of the marathon
in the live broadcast through a TV-bridge from Yerevan attaching
importance to the role of Davtian and Mariamian educational
institution in children’s education in the Armenian spirit and in
the difficult problem of preservation of Armenian identity. "The
Davtian and Mariamian Fund teaches Armenian to pupils at 29 American
schools, tries to make them faithful to their roots, community,
church. Thanks to their parents and teachers for sparing no efforts
in giving children education in the Armenian spirit," the Minister
noted in her speech. According to H. Hakobian, "it is the Armenian
school that ties with the language of the ancestors, with history,
with Armenian age-long history, it is in Armenian school where an
Armenian child likes and values them and realizes that he/she has a
homeland which is the land of Armenia."

The Minister also answered the questions addressed to her. The
questions referred to the Come Home program which is now working
at the RA Ministry of Diaspora, and within the framework of which
Armenian lads and girls visited Armenia.

The hall of the marathon with special warmth received the news about
00 donated by the RA Ministry of Diaspora.

The active participants of the telethon were not only the Armenians
of Los Angeles and Glendale, but also individuals from Yerevan with
not very big sums, who watched the telethon on July 20 at 6-12 am on
website of Horizon TV station, as well as
on the mindiaspora.am and hayernaysor.am electronic newspaper of the
RA Ministry of Diaspora. In total, more than 0 thousand was raised
during the telethon.

ARMENIA SHOULD KEEP CONTROL OVER LIBERATED TERRITORIES

/PanARMENIAN.Net/
21.07.2009 14:48 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The main provision of the Madrid Document is return
of territories. The others derive from it, according to Zhirayr
Sefilyan, veteran of Karabakh war and coordinator of Miatsum movement.

"Armenian authorities never tried to prevent such menace but obeyed
the orders of superpowers," he told a news conference today.

"Sifilyan insists that the incumbent leadership should stop the talks
and start them anew from another position," he said when responding
to a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter’s question.

"This should be the position of force," he said.

According to Aram Safarian, rearrangements are possible in home
political sphere after RA and Azeri Presidents’ meeting

YEREVAN, JULY 18, NOYAN TAPAN. We think that the goal of the
negotiations is Nagorno Karabakh’s international recognition. Aram
Safarian, the Secretary of the RA National Assembly Bargavach Hayastan
(Prosperous Armenia) faction, stated at the July 17 press conference.
In his words, if progress is recorded in solution of this problem,
concessions are possible in other issues.

Speaking about the recent statements by Azeri officials, A. Safarian
said: "All these statements come to say that Azerbaijan continues its
propaganda attacks upon Armenia." In his words, Azerbaijan has a goal
to discredit Armenia’s image in the international sphere and to return
the negotiations process to the level of 1988-91.

A. Safarian also said that rearrangements are possible in the home
political sphere after RA and Azeri Presidents’ meeting. "There can be
moments in the home political life, when parties can reunite," he said.

FR Federation Council ratifies agreement on EurAsEC Anti-crisis Fund creation
18.07.2009 16:15 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ At Saturday sitting, FR Federation Council will
ratify an agreement on creation of EurAsEC Anti-crisis Fund and a
Contract on funds managements of, RIA Novosti reported.

EurAsEC member states, with participation of Armenia signed an
agreement on creation of EurAsEC Anti-crisis Fund to overcome
financial crisis consequences and integrate economy in CIS member
states.

The EurAsEC created a USD 10 billion fund to deal with the global
financial crisis, USD 7,5 billion will be funded by Russia.

The money would be allocated to member states facing grave social and
economic problems as well as used for funding of intergovernmental
investment programs.

The Eurasian Economic Community includes Byelorussia, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan and Russia. Moldavia, Ukraine and Armenia have observer
status

ARMENIA MOURNS THE DEATH OF AIR CRASH VICTIMS: CONDOLENCE BOOK TO BE OPENED AT MFA

armradio.am
16.07.2009 12:02

On July 15 President Serzh Sargsyan signed a decree on declaring July
16 a Day of Mourning in the Republic of Armenia connected with the
human losses, including Armenian citizens as a result of the crash
of the Tehran-Yerevan plane.

Throughout the day, flags will fly at half-mast on the buildings of
governmental organizations and Armenian embassies abroad.

Entertainment events have been cancelled and changes have been made
in the program schedules of radio and TV channels.

>From 2 to 4 p.m. a Book of Condolences will be opened at the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs.

UAE LEADERS CONDOLE IRANIAN AND ARMENIAN PRESIDENTS ON VICTIMS OF PLANE CRASH

WAM – Emirates News Agency
July 15 2009
UAE

WAM Abu Dhabi, 15th July 2009 (WAM) — President H.H. Sheikh Khalifa
bin Zayed Al Nahyan has sent cables of condolences to Presidents
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia on the
victims of a plane crash in west of Iran.

The president expressed heart-felt condolences to families of the
victims and prayed The Almighty to grant them patience and solace.

Similar cables of sympathy were dispatched to the Iranian and Armenian
presidents by Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of
Dubai H. H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and H.H. Gen. Sheikh
Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy
Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces.

AHMADINEJAD ORDERS PROBE

Times of India
July 16 2009

Armenian president Serzh Sarkisian declared Thursday, July 16, a day of
mourning in Armenia after a Tehran-Yerevan flight crashed on Wednesday

afternoon killing all 168 people on board, including many citizens
of Armenia and ethnic Armenians.

His counterpart in Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered his country’s
roads and transportation ministry to launch a probe into the disaster.

Sarkisian cut shot his provincial trip and returned to capital Yerevan
upon learning the news, his presidential office said. In his words of
condolences released by his office, Sarkisian said: "We can’t recover
the losses, but we express our support to the families and friends
of the victims."

"It is difficult to find words of consolation for the people who
lost a family member or relative. I wish them spiritual strength and
courage to overcome this great tragedy," said Sarkisian.

DURING THE OSCE MONITORING OF THE CONTACT LINE OF NAGORNO KARABAKH AND AZERBAIJANI ARMED FORCES NO VIOLATIONS OF THE CEASEFIRE REGIME REGISTERED

ARMENPRESS
JULY 15, 2009
YEREVAN

YEREVAN, JULY 15, ARMENPRESS: On July 15, in accordance with the
earlier achieved agreement with the NKR authorities the OSCE mission
conducted a regular monitoring of the line of contact of Nagorno
Karabakh and Azerbaijani Armed Forces in the Askeran direction.

NKR MFA Press-Service told Armenpress that from the positions of the
NKR Defense Army the monitoring was conducted by Field Assistants of
the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office Vladimir
Chuntulov (Bulgaria) and Zhaslan Nurtazin ( Kazakhstan).

The monitoring passed in accordance with the planned schedule. No
violation of cease-fire regime was registered.

The monitoring mission from the Karabakhi side was accompanied by
representatives of the NKR Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs.

SOMETIMES NOBODY IS RIGHT

Examiner.com
July 14 2009

I’d written a few days ago about the possible fallout in the United
Nations Security Council if Turkey, a non-permanent member, were to
introduce a resolution condemning the recent actions of the People’s
Republic of China in the Xinjiang Autonomous Province, home to most
of the Muslim Uighur population of China.

Now today, China’s state news agency, Xinhua, is accusing the Turkish
government of "twist[ing] the facts," given Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s remarks that what the Chinese government is
doing in Xinjiang is "a kind of genocide."

This is humorous — or would be humorous, would it not for the fact
that people had been dying — for two reason: (1) China is in no moral
position to preach to anyone about twisting facts; and (2) Turkey is
the perpetrator of the first major genocide of the 20th century, and
they refuse to acknowledge it, going so far as to punish those that
would state it happened for the crime of "defaming the Turkish nation."

China’s fact-manipulation is as old as its communist régime. The
massive failures of the combined collectivized-farming and
industrialization experiment of the 1950 known as the Great Leap
Forward were kept a secret from the world until the death of Chairman
Mao in the mid-1970s. So too were the massive human-rights excesses
of the Cultural Revolution kept under wraps, and even when its crimes
were uncovered, Mao was let off the hook and the primary responsibility
put on the Gang of Four.

Any country in which the government controls the dissemination of
information is one in which Orwell’s dictum, from 1984 — "He who
controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past
controls the future." — is going to be taken to an extreme. However,
Turkey offers an example where a comparatively free press still is
held subject to Orwell’s formulation.

As I wrote nearly two years ago, Turkey needs to face its past and
its allies need to stop coddling it for fear that pressing Turkey
to acknowledge its genocide of hundreds of thousands of Armenians
during World War I will cause it to move geopolitically in a direction
unfavorable to the U.S., U.K., and Israel. So it rings a bit hollow
when Turkey then flings accusations of genocide at other countries.

Granted, I would say that what China is doing now and has been doing
in Xinjiang (and Tibet) constitute acts of genocide, although not
outright genocide. Furthermore, it’s clear that the desire of the
Chinese government to disseminate Han Chinese throughout its borders
in an attempt to make ethnically and religiously distinct regions
such as Tibet and Xinjiang "more Chinese" can be seen as a type of
ethnic cleansing.

Such allegations, however, are going to fall on deaf ears when they
come from the Turkish government. Part of the reason why Prime Minister
Erdogan’s excoriation of Israeli President Shimon Peres over the seize
of Gaza fell on largely deaf ears was that Erdogan’s accusations of
genocide against Peres’s country were coming from a man whose country
has committed genocide and refused to admit it.

Of course, few countries with any real power have not engaged in, at
the very least, acts of genocide. But at least if the United States or,
e.g., Germany attacks China for what it’s doing and throws out the "G
word" in the process, the accusation is then not coming from a country
that denies the genocides committed by its previous governments. We
in the United States, unless we are congenitally insensitive or
historically ignorant, know that our country was built on the bodies
of the indigenous population of this continent. Germany, for its part,
has gone out of its way to take culpability for the Nazi Holocaust.

But not so Turkey with the case of the Armenians. And, unfortunately,
this makes Turkey more like China than perhaps it would like to
admit. Sure, the Xinhua news agency’s accusations against the Turkish
government are ridiculous, but so are Turkey’s allegations when they
come from, well, Turkey — or at least from a Turkey that has such
a hard time accepting its own past.

HRANT MARGARIAN: WE HAVE TO PREVENT MISTAKES

Yerkir
10.07.2009 11:57
Yerevan

ARF Bureau representative Hrant Margarian delivered a speech at
the pan-Armenian conference held in Stepanakert and organized by
the ARF’s Hay Dat Central Council. The full text of the speech is
available in Armenian.

We all are the children of our country. We have lived and live in a
historically responsible period and need to have positions on issues
that directly deal with our state and the future of our nation. This
conference, the composition of the representatives from all the
Armenian layers is a unique opportunity to formulate our superior
interests and formulate a united position.

We can give a momentum, trust to the current and future leaders of
our two states so that they are guided by solely the interests of
Armenia and Armenians.

We have gathered here, in the capital of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic,
that has been liberated with the help and sacrifice of all Armenians,
to show that this is Armenia and will remain Armenia. Artsakh issue
and the Armenian-Turkish relations are on our agenda today.

There is no Karabakh issue separately, there are no separate historic
issues, there are no Armenian-Turkish relations separately, and there
are no domestic policies separately. Everything is a whole issue
with its past, present and future. And only with realizing this is
it possible to secure our dignified place20in the world.

We have gathered here to discuss the key national issues of our time
because we see mistakes and dangerous developments that may have
dire consequences. Turkey is still talking to us with preconditions,
it discusses the Karabakh issue with everyone in all international
meetings, Aliyev presents his versions of regulations. Naturally, we
have to do whatever it takes to prevent mistakes and help each others.