Author: Jilavian Emma

DINK LAWYERS PETITION FOR ERGENEKON EVIDENCE

Today’s Zaman
13 October 2009, Tuesday

Dink lawyers petition for Ergenekon evidence – Lawyers for the
co-plaintiffs in the trial over the murder of Turkish Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink yesterday requested documents found during
the searches of homes and offices of suspects from the prosecutor
investigating Ergenekon, a clandestine organization whose alleged
members are currently standing trial in two separate court cases.

Dink was the editor-in-chief of the bilingual Agos daily until he was
killed in January of 2007. The 11th hearing of the murder suspects’
trial was heard yesterday with suspects Ogun Samast, Erhan Tuncel,
Yasin Hayal, Ahmet Ä°skender and Ersin Yolcu being brought to the
courtroom by prison officers. Lawyers representing the co-plaintiffs
in the Dink trial have long alleged that the Dink murder was the
doing of Ergenekon.

In yesterday’s hearing, lawyer Fethiye Cetin demanded that the court
request documents seized during the Ergenekon probe relating to the
organization’s Psychological Action Plan against minorities in Turkey.

Cetin stated that Sevgi Erenerol, currently in jail as an Ergenekon
suspect, prepared briefings for certain units of the General Staff,
including the Land Forces Command, against missionaries in what
she said were presentations pointing fingers at Turkey’s Armenian,
Christian and other minorities. She also recalled that CDs and DVDs
with similar content had been found during searches of Ergenekon
defendant DurmuÅ~_ Ali Ozoglu’s property. "We are particularly
interested in activities in the Black Sea region regarding Armenian
minorities. The Ergenekon prosecutors have said that Ozoglu worked
in the ‘psychological operations’ of the organization."

Ergenekon’s plan against minorities

Cetin stated that Dink’s killing, along with the 2006 killing
of an Italian priest and the 2007 killing of three Christians in
Malatya, was part of an operation in the works being carried out by
Ergenekon. Cetin stated that the a pects in turning Hrant Dink into
a target for ultranationalist people and groups were very "open." She
recalled that when Dink was facing charges under the Turkish Penal Code
(TCK) Article 301, which then criminalized "insulting Turkishness,"
some of the people who are in jail now as alleged Ergenekon members
brought crowds of protestors and even attacked Dink and his supporters
as they entered and left the courtroom.

The court’s response was not clear by the time Today’s Zaman went to
print yesterday.

In addition to the suspects, a large number of high-profile spectators
including Dink’s wife, Rakel Dink, and other family members; Democratic
Society Party (DTP) deputy Sebahat Tuncel; Justice and Development
Party (AK Party) deputy and head of the Parliament’s Human Rights
Commission, Zafer Uskul; co-chair of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary
Commission, Helene Flautre; Ali Yurttagul, a political advisor for
the Greens in the European Parliament; and Vincent Niore and Alexandre
Couyoumdjian, representing the Bar Associations of Brussels and Paris,
also attended yesterday’s hearing.

Meanwhile, a group gathering at the BeÅ~_iktaÅ~_ Barbaros Square,
not far from the courthouse, protested the Hrant Dink murder by
unrolling posters that read, "For Hrant, for Justice."

Wanting justice for Dink

Actor Mahir GunÅ~_iray, in a statement on behalf of the group, claimed
there were attempts to cover up the real culprits behind the murder.

Indeed, the Dink murder trial has been riddled with controversy
from the day the hit-man, Ogun Samast, was arrested for the murder. A
parliamentary committee investigating the probe established in a report
in April last year that the security forces were tipped off about the
plot to kill Dink before the murder but did not act. This committee
also called on high-ranking gendarmerie officers to testify, but none
of them showed up on the day they were scheduled to testify. Similar
details have come up in previous trials. For example, CoÅ~_kun Ä°gci,
a local security informer n etown of most of the suspects — and
a relative of one of the accused, Yasin Hayal, told the court that
many people, including himself, knew that Hayal had been preparing
to kill Dink for a long time. He also confirmed that he was unable
to stop him from acquiring a gun and out of anxiety got in touch with
two gendarmerie security officials on more than one occasion.

ECONOMIC MINISTER TOOK PART IN BAKU-HOSTED MEETING ON BTK RAILROAD
Mari Imedashvili

Georgian Business Week
Monday, October 12, 2009 – 06:55

Progress has been reported on 600m USD project to extend rail service
to Turkey that would link Georgia to Turkey and the European rail
network. The coordination council for the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railroad
announced Oct. 9 that the construction company entrusted to complete
the project will be announced soon.

With rehabilitation reconstruction and construction of new connecting
railway line from Georgia’s Marabda to the border of Turkey on the
agenda, the bilateral council’s seventh meeting was held in the
Azerbaijani capital.

The Georgian Economic Minister, his Azeri counterpart as well as heads
of railway departments of both countries attended the meeting. The
Georgian delegation was led by the Minister of Economic Development
Zurab Pololikashvili.

According to ministry’s press statement posted on its website,
Azeroshaat Service Construction Company and LTD Marabda-Krtsanisi
railroad project management group presented information about the
work already completed and the future priorities. Projects for the
second stage of the project were also discussed.

"This has been the seventh meeting already," said Mamuka Vatsadze, head
of transport in the Ministry of Economic Development. "It was important
that a tender was announced on the construction-rehabilitation of
Marabda-Tetrtskharo segment."

In his opinion, it is also important that Marabda-kartsakhi railroad
project group was commissioned to revise the project and present the
final version of the remaining two segments.

"Construction is going on progressively and I am sure that the
construction works will meet the deadline," Vatsadze said.

The project involves 98 kilometers of new track to be built between
Kars in eastern Turkey and Akhalkalaki in Georgia. Some 68 kilometers
will be in Turkey with the remaining 30 kilometers in Georgia. The
existing line from Akhalkalaki on to

The new railroad is intended to provide an alternative route to the
existing Kars Gyumri Akhalkalaki (Turkey-Armenia- Georgia) railway
line which has been out of operation since 1993, when Turkey closed
its border with Armenia in solidarity with Azerbaijan which went to
war with Armenia over the breakway Nagorno-Karabakh region.

A multi-lateral agreement to build the strategically important rail
link was signed by the three countries in 2005. The European Union
and the United States, however, have refused to support the project
since the railroad bypasses Armenia.

Azerbaijan is providing a 220m USD loan, repayable in 25 years,
with an annual interest rate of 1 percent for the Georgian segment
of the railroad.

Construction works are scheduled to end in this year with the railway
opening by next year.

News.am

Tigran Balayan: Signing of Protocols historic moment for Armenia, Turkey
00:43 / 10/11/2009

The signing of the Armenian-Turkish Protocols is a `historic moment
for both Armenia and Turkey,’ stated Tigran Balayan, Press Secretary
of the RA Foreign Office.

According to him, the signing ceremony was successful.

Balayan explained the reason for the delay ` the Turkish side’s
attempt to include a phrase in the final statement, which was
unacceptable to the Armenian side. `We managed to thwart the
attempts,’ said Balayan. He did not go into details concerning the
wording. He pointed out that the sides decided to refrain from any
final statements.

Referring to diplomatic sources, Today’s Zaman reported that the
Tujrkish side’s statement on the signing results included a mention of
Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenian side made a protest.

DEMONSTRATORS HELD RALLY AT PRESIDENTIAL RESIDENCE IN YEREVAN PROTESTING AGAINST PRECONDITIONS

PanARMENIAN.Net
09.10.2009 18:41 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Over 20 000 demonstrators participated in a
protest rally at Presidential residence, chanting "No to Protocols",
"No Concessions to Turkey", "No to Preconditions". According to
PanARMENIAN.Net reporter, ARF Dashnaktsutyn representative Vahan
Hovhannesyan delivered a statement, urging RA President to refrain from
ratification of Protocols, posing a threat to national security. He
added that in case documents are ratified, ARFD will continue with
protest rallies and, in case of necessity, initiate the process of
power change.

ARFD Supreme Body representative Armen Rustamyan read out the
statement, specifying that RA external policy deviated from its course
and poses threat to Armenia’s national security and future. The
statement was further presented to Head of RA Presidential Staff
Karen Karapetyan.

Head of RA Presidential Staff emphasized that demonstrators’ demands
"will be taken into consideration", adding that the statement will
be submitted to the President.

At the moment, demonstrators are marching in the direction of
Tsitsernakaberd Genocide victims’ memorial. The number of rally
participants keeps increasing.

KUPFERBERG CENTER OPENS AT QUEENSBOROUGH COMMUNITY COLLEGE
By Nathan Duke

YourNabe.com
Thursday, October 8, 2009 9:15 AM EDT

Holocaust survivors hope building will inform students, descendants
through exhibits, catalogs and events

Attendees view the exhibits during a special opening ceremony at
Queensborough Community College’s Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg
Holocaust Resource Center and Archives. Photo by Nathan Duke More
than 50 Holocaust survivors took part in a special ceremony last week
at Queensborough Community College’s long-awaited Holocaust center,
where speakers said they hoped the 9,000-square-foot structure of
glass, steel and Jerusalem stone would stand as a beacon of tolerance
for years to come.

The Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center
and Archives will officially open Oct. 18 following five years of
planning for the $6 million facility. The center, which had been in
the basement of the Bayside school’s library since 1983, was named
after late Malba philanthropist Harriet Kupferberg, who donated $1
million to the center, and her husband.

"This undertaking was a very important obligation so what happened to
the survivors of the Holocaust would not be forgotten," said Arthur
Flug, the center’s executive director. "We wanted to make a special
effort that their stories would become a part of our educational
program."

On Friday, the center held a pre-opening ceremony for a group of
Holocaust survivors, many of whom were interviewed and featured in
displays at the center. The survivors said they were pleased students
at the school would hear their stories.

"My story is not the usual story," said Eddie Weinstein, a Little
Neck resident who escaped Poland’s Treblinka death camp at the age of
18 as well as fleeing five other times after being recaptured by the
Nazis. "It’s a story about daring to resist. I escaped six times. The
longest time I was incarcerated was 23 days and the shortest time
was 24 hours. I kept running, I survived."

Diana Albert o Little Neck said she escaped the Warsaw ghetto at age 9,
but most of her family was killed. She eventually fled to the United
States and later attended Queensborough.

"I was the only survivor from my entire family," said Albert,
whose brother, father, mother, aunts and cousins died during the
Holocaust. "It’s good we now have a place to get together where people
who have this in common can talk about these things."

The center includes a permanent interactive exhibit that merges
personal accounts with historical data, a gallery, customized exhibits
and catalogs, a program that will train teachers and students about
how to deal with hate crimes, a terrace adjacent to the center and
a 150-foot space that will be used for outdoor events.

It will also host a variety of events, including a series of films
created in Hollywood during World War II to torment Hitler’s regime
as well as a bi-monthly program of Yiddish film, music, speakers,
books and discussion groups for Holocaust survivors.

Flug said the center will also hold an upcoming event during which
grandchildren will be able to trace their grandparents’ stories. The
interviews between them will be captured on film.

ADVERTISEMENT * The center’s exhibit has a timeline of the Holocaust
as well as interviews with a number of survivors. One classroom in
the building features a history of genocides throughout the past 100
years in nations such as Rwanda, Darfur and Armenia.

Eduardo Marti, Queensborough’s president, said he wants the college’s
donors to put together a $5 million endowment for the center to ensure
its building remains a Holocaust center.

"I want to make sure that students 100 years from now are learning the
lessons of the Holocaust," he said. "I know that the 15,000 students
on this campus come from 130 different countries and a lot of them
do not know about World War II or the Holocaust. But all of them,
at one point, have been the subject of bullying. So this is not a
memorial or a museum. It’s a laboratory, a classro we use the lessons
of the Holocaust to teach students about prejudice to ensure something
like this never happens again. We can teach the lesson that unless
students speak up, something like the Holocaust can take place and
become institutionalized."

Reach reporter Nathan Duke by e-mail at [email protected] or by
phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 156.

TURKEY: ANKARA TRIES TO KEEP ARMENIA-AZERBAIJANI FEUD OFF THE SOCCER FIELD

eav100709.shtml
10/07/09

Anxious to keep politics out of a World Cup qualifying match between
Turkey and Armenia, municipal authorities in Bursa, the Turkish
city that will host the match, reportedly want to ban the display of
Azerbaijani flags in the stadium on game day, Turkish and Azerbaijani
media outlets are reporting.

The match is scheduled to be played on October 14, four days after
Ankara and Yerevan are expected to sign a framework agreement
for rapprochement. [For background see the Eurasia Insight
archive]. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan may attend the game.

Turkish ally Azerbaijan, locked in a bitter dispute with Armenia over
the Nagorno-Karabakh region, is watching closely from the sidelines.

Turkey’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, Hulusi Kilic, denied the reports of
a flag ban, but admitted that Turkish authorities will try to prevent
inflammatory gestures at the game, the APA news agency reported on
October 7. "This is pure soccer, with no politics. Politics is not
pertinent here," Kilic told APA in an attempt to assuage Azerbaijani
anger.

ERDOGAN WISHES TO SEE CO-CHAIRS DURING SIGNING

News.am
13:20 / 10/07/2009

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not see any problems
with Protocols’ signing, "as the world has known and will see again
we always stick to our promises," the Premier said in the interview
with The Wall Street Journal.

"Our Foreign Minister is going to sign this agreement with the Armenian
Foreign Minister Nalbandyan on October 10," he stated, underlining
that Turkish side is ready to sign the documents "so long as there
is no change to the text."

"We’d also like to see the Minsk group witness the signing of this
agreement actually — and if the French don’t come perhaps the
Americans or the Russians will come. And in addition to that the
meeting in Moldova is very important because although the Armenians
sometimes say this agreement has nothing to do with the Azeris,
there is in fact a relationship. Because most recently, I believe
when president Sargsyan was on an international visit, he was faced
by a reaction from the Armenian Diaspora. So what he does in face of
the reaction of the Diaspora is very important. If he can stand firm,
and if it is the government of Armenia and not the Armenian Diaspora
that is determining policy in Armenia, then I think that we can move
forward. As far as we’re concerned there is no problem. But it is up
to the Government in Armenia," he reckons.

HISTORIANS INVITED TO STUDY ARMENIAN MASSACRES

AFP
10/7/2009 0:22:38

ISTANBUL: Turkish President Abdullah Gul yesterday urged foreign
historians to join a commission to study the massacres of Armenians
under the Ottoman Empire, envisaged under a peace deal between Ankara
and Yerevan.

"There are all sorts of allegations about what happened a century ago.

It is clear that people who do not know what happened where or how are
not able to take decisions on this matter," Gul said in an interview.

"What we hope is that historians, archive specialists study this matter
and we are ready to accept the conclusions of this commission. To
show that we are sincere, we even said that if a third country is
interested in this matter, if French historians, for example, want
to take part in this commission, they are welcome," he added on the
eve of a visit to France.

The establishment of a commission to study the massacres is part of
two protocols that Turkey and Armenia said they would sign in a bid
to establish diplomatic ties for the first time and open their border,
sealed since 1993.

The most contentious issue between the two neighbours is the World
War I massacres of Armenians

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were systematically killed
between 1915 and 1917 as Turkey’s predecessor, the Ottoman Empire,
was falling apart. Turkey rejec ts the genocide label and argues that
300,000-500,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil
strife when Armenians took up arms against their Ottoman rulers and
sided with invading Russian troops.

OBAMA BACKS SARKISIAN EFFORTS ON ARMENIA-TURKEY THAW

Asbarez
ama-backs-sarkisian-efforts-on-armenia-turkey-thaw /
Oct 6th, 2009

WASHINGTON (RFE/RL)-U.S. President Barack Obama expressed his support
for the Armenian leader’s efforts to achieve normalization of relations
with Turkey as the two spoke on the phone recently.

As reported by the Armenian president’s press office, the phone
conversation took place during President Serzh Sarkisian’s stop
in Los Angeles, California, where he was on Sunday as part of his
continuing tour of major Diaspora Armenian communities to discuss
his latest initiative for Armenia to end the century-old feud with
its big neighbor and historical foe, Turkey.

Obama reportedly reaffirmed the United States’ official position that
Armenian-Turkish normalization should proceed without any preconditions
and should not be linked to the settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijani
conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

During the phone talk with Obama, Sarkisian also reportedly thanked the
U.S. president for "the huge mediatory work" conducted by the United
States as part of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that advances international efforts
on settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. As reported by his press
office, Sarkisian emphasized Armenia’s readiness to move forward on
the way of achieving a peaceful settlement of the problem. He said the
basis of this settlement should be "the decision by Nagorno-Karabakh’s
people about their ultimate legal status by the free expression
of will, which is the basis of the Madrid principles of settlement
presented by the Minsk Group mediators."

Sarkisian was quoted as expressing his gratitude to the U.S. leader
for the support in the process of Armenian-Turkish normalization and
also as presenting his impressions of the Diaspora tour.

According to the release for the media, the Armenian president
emphasized that "the concerns and fears of the Armenian Diaspora
regarding the process are natural, considering the fact that the
Armenian people was subjected to genocide by Ottoman Turkey, about
which Obama has repeatedly mentioned in his public speeches."

Sarkisian last week embarked on a weeklong tour of major Diaspora
communities, including Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Beirut
and Rostov-on-Don, to try and gain support for the beleaguered
Turkey-Armenia Protocols, which have been met with resounding rebuke
by Armenians around the world. Sarkisian has already completed his
meetings with prominent Diaspora members in Europe and the United
States and is in Lebanon now, after which he will fly to Southern
Russia.

More than 12,000 Armenian Americans from throughout California
converged on the Beverly Hilton Hotel to protest Sarkisian on
Sunday. Hundreds more gathered at the Genocide Memorial in Montebello
the next morning to stand guard the monument in the case Sarkisian
attempted to use the site for a photo-opp. Thousands similarly
protested the president when he visited New York, forming a picket
line at his hotel. The mass demonstrations against the president
began in Paris Friday, where a thousand Armenians who were holding
a peaceful sit-in at the Gomidas genocide memorial were violently
attacked by Police, clearing the way for Sarkisian to walk u to the
statue to get his photo taken.

MARIANNA GRIGORYAN WINS PRESS AWARD

2009/10/06 | 13:42

Media

A young journalist from Armenia has won the Press Freedom Award
by a jury of the Austrian branch of the Reporters Without Borders
organization. Marianna Grigoryan won the prestigious award from a
pool of contestants from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Rubina Mohring, President of the Austrian branch of Reporters
Without Borders, noted that the 12,000 Euro prize aims to foster the
comprehension of the importance of democracy and encourage journalists
to continue theur work in the name of human rights and freedom of
the press.

Albert Rohan, spokesperson for the jury and former chief secretary of
the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that this year’s winners
were selected based on three criteria – journalistic quality, societal
importance of issues exposed and the personal bravery of reporters.