Author: Nargizian David

ARMENIAN, AZERBAIJANI, TURKISH DELEGATES CROSS SWORDS AT ROSE ROTH SEMINAR

ITAR-TASS
March 12 2010
Russia

The process of international recognition of the Armenian Genocide
– particularly the resolution approved by the U.S. House of
Representatives Committee on Foreign Affair and the one approved
by Swedish Parliament on March 11 – impede the ratification of the
Armenian-Turkish protocols, Suat Kiniklioglu, Vice-Chairman of the
Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AK),
stated at the NATO-held 73rd Rose Roth seminar in Yerevan.

"Such decisions will only lead to a collapse of the Armenian-Turkish
process," he said. Kiniklioglu stressed that, should the process fail,
the Armenian-Turkish relations will be even worse than before it, and
the situation in the region will grow increasingly tense. Kiniklioglu
stated Turkey does not set the issue of the Armenian Genocide as
a precondition for normalizing the bilateral relations. However,
the issue, as well as the international recognition of the Armenian
Genocide, complicates the ratification of the protocols. Even if
Recep Erdogan gathered the Justice and Development faction and told
them to vote for the protocols, it would not happen because of the
political atmosphere, Kiniklioglu said. "I cannot understand the
reason for Armenia setting artificial terms – Yerevan used to state
the protocols were to be ratified before this January, but now they
are speaking of April. They used to say Armenia would withdraw its
signature unless Turkey ratified the protocols before this January,
but they never did that. Turkey will not have ratified the protocols
by the April either, and let us see what Yerevan does this time. The
Armenian-Turkish border has been closed for 17 years, and we can wait
for one year more," the Turkish MP said. He asked why Armenia does
not want the issue of the Genocide to be discussed by a subcommittee
of historians to be set up after the protocols have been ratified. "If
Armenians are so sure they are right, let them, together with Turkish
scholars, prove they are right. If they succeed, the decision will
be binding on Ankara," Kiniklioglu said.

The Azeri expert Ilgar Mamadov supported the Turkish MP by stating
that "it is unclear what Yerevan is giving in the Armenian-Turkish
process after the Armenian Constitutional Court returned its verdict
concerning the protocols." "Any talks are a bargain — each party gives
something in exchange. But, after the Constitution Court returned
its verdict, it is now unclear what Armenia is going to give," the
Azerbaijani delegate said with indignation. According to him, Armenia’s
readiness to renounce its claims on Turkish territories and, party,
its policy of international recognition of the Armenian Genocide –
"a conviction, rather than historical reality" — was clear before the
RA Constitutional Court returned its verdict. "But the Constitutional
Court’s verdict showed Armenia has no intention to renounce anything,"
Mamadov stated angrily.

Head of the Armenian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary
Assembly Karen Avagyan tried to calm down the Azerbaijani and
Turkish delegates. He stated that Armenia has never intended to
discuss the Armenian Genocide in any committee – the Genocide is
a historical fact. "Moreover, I cannot understand why Turkey hoped
the Armenian-Turkish talks would stop the process of international
recognition of the Armenian Genocide. On the contrary, the talks
stirred up the international community’s interest in Armenian-Turkish
problems, and the world began examining historical facts more closely,"
Avagyan said.

The seminar organizers brought documentaries telling about the
Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey in 1915-1923, as well as about
acts of vandalism against Armenian cultural heritage in Nakhchevan.

NAGORNO-KARABAKH SHOULD BECOME PART OF TALKS, ASHOT GULIAN SAYS

Aysor
March 12 2010
Armenia

"A settlement to the Karabakh conflict is possible if Stepanakert
participates in talks. Nagorno-Karabakh should be part of talks and
should raise issues by itself," told journalists Speaker of the NKR
Parliament Ashot Gulian, following the meeting with OSCE Parliamentary
Assembly President Joao Soares.

The European officials little by little started listening to the side
of Nagorno-Karabakh, pointed Speaker.

"I felt that Joao Soares wished for neutral and clear information
about the Karabakh conflict. Next meetings between Joao Soares and
Nagorno-Karabakh’s officials will be held in Stepanakert," said
Ashot Gulian.

Included in items for discussions at meeting between Ashot Gulian and
Joao Soares were domestic and foreign policies of Nagorno-Karabakh,
process of settlement to the Karabakh conflict, and Stepanakert’s
position over the issue.

THE DIRECTOR OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MUSEUM IN ARMENIA HAIK DEMOYAN WILL DELIVER A SPEECH IN NICOSIA

Noyan Tapan
March 11, 2010

NICOSIA, MARCH 11, NOYAN TAPAN-ARMENIANS TODAY. Haik Demoyian, The
Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum in Armenia, will deliver a
speech entitled "The Genocide Museum and the Armenia-Turkey Protocols"
at the Utudjian Hall of the Armenian Prelature on 13 March. According
to the event will be organised by the Kalaydjian
Foundation, under the auspices of His Eminence Archbishop Varoujan
Hergelian.

FRANCE HAS BEEN AND REMAINS A FRIEND OF ARMENIA
Nelly Danielyan

"Radiolur"
11.03.2010 11:13
Paris

The Presidents of Armenia and France Serzh Sargsyan and Nicolas
Sarkozy had a meeting in the Elysee Palace. Expressing gratitude to
President Sarkozy for the invitation, Serzh Sargsyan highly assessed
the current level of the political dialogue between the to countries
and noted that "France is a close friend for Diaspora Armenians and
a reliable partner and ally on the international arena, which gives
a special nature to the Armenian-French relations."

President Sarkozy assured that is country intended to develop relations
with Armenia in all directions and underlined that "France has been
and remains a friend of Armenia."

Presidents Sargsyan and Sarkozy discussed issues related to the
Karabakh conflict settlement. Reference was made to regional security,
the process of normalization of the Armenian-Turkish relations and
other issues of mutual interest.

President Sarkozy hailed the Armenian President’s efforts towards
establishment of peace and stability in the region. The Presidents
of Armenia and France exchanged views on the further deepening of
trade-economic relations between the two countries, the expansion of
cooperation in the humanitarian sphere, as well as issues related to
Armenia-EU cooperation.

At the end of the meeting the parties agreed to continue the high-level
bilateral contacts.

GEORGIA SPENDS $108 MILLION TO IMPROVE SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS OF JAVAKHETI

PanARMENIAN.Net
11.03.2010 17:13 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The Georgian authorities permit carrying Armenian
literature to Javakheti, Georgian Ambassador to Armenia Grigol
Tabatadze told a news conference in Yerevan, commenting on the
information that it is forbidden to carry Armenian literature to
Javakhk. "The Georgian government is funding 144 Armenian schools
in Georgia. Books and manuals, approved by the Georgian ministry
of education are translated into Armenian in Armenia and then sent
back to Georgia. Other Armenian textbooks, which are not approved by
the Georgian education ministry cannot cross the Armenian-Georgian
border," Tabatadze said. According to him, this year graduates of
national minorities’schools will pass one exam in their language.

"The Georgian authorities have spent some USD 108 million to improve
the socio-economic status of Javakhk,"Tabatadze said, adding that
several Armenian schools were restored, including school after
Vahan Teryan.

15MLN EUR FOR RECONSTRUCTION OF THE YEREVAN METRO
Hasmik Dilanyan

"Radiolur"
10.03.2010 17:45

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)
will provide 15mln EUR for reconstruction of the Yerevan Metro. A
corresponding agreement was signed in Armenian Ministry of Finance
today.

>From the total sum, 5mln EUR will be provided directly by EBRD, 5mln
EUR – from the European Investment Bank, and 5mln EUR – by the European
Union (as a grant). The loans are provided for the term of 15 years
with the grace period of 3 years at the interest rate of EUR LIBOR+1%.

According to Yerevan Mayor Gagik Beglaryan, "this is a very important
project for Yerevan residents, since it will allow increasing the
security of the Metro."

Under the program, the rolling stock will be updated, drainage work
will be carried out and electricity cables will be substituted by
new ones. This program will allow cutting down expenses for Metro
electricity by 50%.

Gagik Beglaryan also informed that Yerevan City Administration is
in process of negotiations with Asian Development Bank on financing
completion of "Achapnyak" metro station construction.

RIGHT NAME, WRONG MOVIE; MEXICAN MISTAKE GIVES EGOYAN CREDIT FOR BLOOD-SOAKED VIGILANTE YARN
by Michael D. Reid, Times Colonist

Times Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia)
March 9, 2010 Tuesday

For a guy reputed to be a "cerebral" filmmaker, Atom Egoyan has a
sense of humour some might find surprising.

It erupts over coffee at Demitasse, where the Victoria-raised director
is taking a breather before resuming a gruelling press tour for Chloe,
his new erotic drama that opens nationwide March 26.

Egoyan, who turns 50 in July, laughs as he recalls a surreal experience
at the Guadalajara Film Festival. A screening of Next of Kin, his 1984
drama about a troubled young man who impersonates an Armenian couple’s
long-lost son, was planned as part of a retrospective, but the 1989
vigilante action flick of the same name was featured by mistake.

"It seemed so incongruous. It said my first film was Next of Kin with
Patrick Swayze," he recalled, laughing. "They programmed that movie,
so anyone who saw it would have thought the rest of my career went
downhill from there."

Egoyan has grown accustomed to being misperceived, as when many assumed
his mournful 1993 drama Exotica was an exploitative sex flick because
much of its action was set in a Toronto strip club.

No wonder Egoyan is feeling some deja vu as Sony Pictures Classics
rolls out Chloe. His sleek, sexy and well-acted reinvention of
Anne Fontaine’s 2003 French film Nathalie focuses on the unsettling
relationship between Catherine (Julianne Moore), a wealthy middle-aged
gynecologist, and Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), the sexy young escort she
hires to seduce her husband (Liam Neeson) and test his fidelity.

Although Egoyan describes it as a drama about the erotic lives of
its needy protagonists, albeit with thriller ingredients, Chloe —
termed "a Sapphic Fatal Attraction" by London’s Daily Telegraph,
likely because of a sex scene between Catherine and Chloe — is being
marketed as an erotic thriller.

"It’s very difficult these days to market something as a drama," says
Egoyan, who was hired by Canadian producer Ivan Reitman. "There’s
the film and there’s the marketing of it, and what within the film
is a concession to how you have to sell it?"

Egoyan, who directed from a screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson,
says Chloe is chiefly a study of a marriage.

"It’s about what happens in relationships after a long period of time.

How do you keep an erotic fantasy with someone you know so well? How
do you reinvent that?" says Egoyan, noting it isn’t a script he could
have written himself.

"I cannot write a story that goes from point A to point B," he says
matter-of-factly. "It’s just not in me."

Still, he managed to incorporate his own style and persuaded Reitman
to let him shoot in Toronto instead of San Francisco.

"One of the arguments I made to Ivan was Toronto in fact kind of
whores itself," he says. "It plays a prostitute to all these different
cities it pretends to be but is not, like Chicago or New York. So
it’s interesting that it’s set in a place that in most people’s
imaginations is not even on the map."

It was the dynamics of the women’s relationship that sold him, he says.

"It’s this clash of two women with competing structures and ways of
creating a fantasy about each other," he explains.

"For Chloe, she sleeps with these men in these rooms and feels somewhat
diminished by that, and suddenly she gets to tell what happens in
these rooms to a respectable, gorgeous older woman who listens to these
stories and endows them with a certain power. And for Catherine, this
person is a surrogate youthful object she obviously can’t be anymore."

While Egoyan is aware some might view the woman-on-woman sex scene
as gratuitous, he insists it isn’t.

"It’s not just about sexual pleasure. There are a lot of other things
they’re trying to traverse," he says. "What I’m interested in is what’s
going on in these women’s minds as they’re colliding into each other."

He says it helped that he got to work with a top-shelf cast.

"Working with Amanda was great," recalls Egoyan, who cast Seyfried
before Mamma Mia made her a star. "There was absolute trust and she
was great with Julie. They were very compatible."

After shooting Adoration and Chloe back to back, he admits he’s ready
for a break.

"I know from experience after Exotica this could be a year of just
meeting people, spending time in L.A. and treading water," says Egoyan,
who is once again inundated with offers to direct Hollywood screenplays
and adapt novels.

Bad things happen when empires fall apart
Harking back to Armenia in 1915 will only drive modern Turkey into China’s arms
Norman Stone

The Times/UK
March 8, 2010

The best thing said about the Armenian tragedy was a sermon delivered
in the main church in Constantinople in 1894, more than 20 years
before it happened. Patriarch Ashikyan had this to say: `We have lived
with the Turks for a thousand years, have greatly flourished, are
nowhere in this empire in a majority of the population. If the
nationalists go on like this [they had started a terrorist campaign]
they will ruin the nation.’

That Patriarch was quite right, and the nationalists shot him (and
many other notables who were saying the same thing).

Now a US Congressional committee has had its say, by voting to
recognise as `genocide’ the mass killing of Armenians by Turkish
forces that began in 1915, during the First World War.

Is the committee right? When the First World War broke out there were
Armenian uprisings and the Patriarch’s fears were realised. The
population in much of the territory of today’s Turkey was deported in
cruel circumstances that led to much murder and pillage.

But genocide? No, if by that you mean the sort of thing Hitler did.
The Armenian leader was offered a job in the government in October
1914 to sort things out (he refused on the ground that his Turkish was
not up to it). The Turks themselves put 1,600 men on trial for what
had happened and executed a governor. The British had the run of the
Turkish archives for four years after 1918 and failed to find
incriminating documents. Armenians in the main cities were not
touched. Documents did indeed turn up in 1920, but they turned out to
be preposterous forgeries, written on the stationery of a French
school.

You cannot really describe this as genocide. Horrors, of course,
happened but these same horrors were visited upon millions of Muslims
(and Jews) as the Ottoman Empire receded in the Caucasus and the
Balkans. Half of its urban population came from those regions and, in
many cases, the disasters of their families occurred at Armenian
hands.

Diasporas jump up and down in the politics of the United States – as
an American friend says of them, when they cross the Atlantic, they do
not change country, they change planet.

Braveheart is, for the Scottish me, a dreadful embarrassment. I have
to explain to Kurdish taxi drivers that the whole film is wicked tosh
that just causes idiots in Edinburgh to paint their faces and to hate
the English, whereas there cannot be a single family in Scotland that
does not have cousins in England.

But what will be the effect of the resolution in Turkey? The answer is
that it will be entirely counterproductive. Yes, the end of the
Ottoman Empire was a terrible time, as the end of empires generally
are: take the Punjab in 1947, for instance.

Disease, starvation and massacre carried off a third of the population
of eastern Turkey, regardless of their origin. But of all the states
that succeeded the Ottoman Empire, Turkey is by far the most
successful; you just have to look at its vital statistics to see as
much, starting with male life expectancy which not so long ago was a
decade longer than Russia’s.

Turkey is in the unusual position of doing rather well. She has
survived the financial mess, her banks having had a drubbing some
years before, and exports are humming. The Turks are not quite used to
this, and this shows with the present Government, which (as the Prime
Minister’s unfortunate anti-Israeli outburst at Davos a year ago
showed) can on occasion be triumphalist.

This Government has been remarkably successful, not least in getting
rid of the preposterous currency inflation that made tourists laugh,
but it should not be allowed to forget the bases of Turkey’s
emergence: the strength of the Western connection, the link with the
IMF, the presence in the West of tens of thousands of Turkish
students, many of them very able.

However, every Turk knows that, during the First World War, horrible
things happened, and for Congress to single out the Armenians is
regarded in Turkey simply as an insult.

The Turkish media is full of tales about the resolution, and there has
been a great deal of dark muttering about it. There are Turks who
agree that the killings amounted to genocide, and there has been an
uncomfortable book, Fuat Dundar’s The Code of Modern Turkey, as some
of the government at the time did indeed think of ethnic homogeneity
(though not the killing of children).

But the dominant tone is more or less of contempt: who are these
people, to orate about events a century ago in a country that most of
them could not find on the map? It all joins with resentment at US
doings in Iraq, and in the popular mind gets confused with the Swiss
vote against minarets or Europe’s ridiculous admission of Greek Cyprus
to their Union.

In practice the Turks are being alienated, and will be encouraged to
think that the West is doing another version of the Crusades, that
`the only friend of the Turk is the Turk’, and other nationalist
nonsense of a similar sort. Nowadays Turkey does not need the Western
link as before: trade and investment have been switching towards
Russia and Central Asia; the Chinese are quite active in Ankara. Is
that what we want to achieve, in a country that is otherwise the best
advertisement for the West that anyone could have imagined back in
1950?

Norman Stone is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University
of Oxford and head of the Russian-Turkish Institute at Bilkent
University, Ankara

WorldBulletin.Net, Turkey
March 5 2010

Turkish Speaker expects US to correct Armenia mistake

Turkish Parliament Speaker Mehmet Ali Sahin said We also expect and
wish U.S. Parliament to correct this historical mistake soon.

Friday, 05 March 2010 11:24
Turkish Parliament Speaker Mehmet Ali Sahin said Thursday, "we see
that so-called Armenian allegations have corroded and lost
credibility," while commenting on approval of a resolution on Armenian
allegations by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign
Affairs.

Sahin, currently on a visit to Rome, said, "parliaments, particularly
contemporary parliaments make laws, they don’t write history.
Unfortunately, U.S. parliament attempted to make history, which is an
unacceptable mistake."

"I also think that world parliaments from now on should not make such
allegations, which lost credibility, be a topic. We also expect and
wish U.S. Parliament to correct this historical mistake soon," Sahin
said.

AA

OVERCOMING HEROICALLY

12:45:15 – 05/03/2010
hos17059.html

Adoption by the U.S. Congress House Committee on Foreign Relations of
Resolution 252 on the recognition of the genocide is success for us,
says ARF faction member, head of the NA Commission on Foreign
Relations Armen Rustamyan.

According to him, the number of voters for the bill was great in the
beginning, but the only reason because of which the number of voters
against it rose were the protocols the proof of which is that many
Congressmen in their speeches mentioned that the bill adoption will
harm the normalization process between Armenia and Turkey. The
protocols are now evident to be an obstacle for the international
recognition of the genocide. The genocide issue is not a matter of
commerce, and any country respecting human right must acknowledge it,
says Rustamyan.

According to him, for the first time, serious progress was recorded
against the background of the protocols.

`If the recognition of the genocide will bring about the failure of
the protocols, better for us. We are playing Turkey’s game waiting for
the latter to ratify the protocols. The international community came
out not to extort pressure on Turkey, but the contrary. Turkey added
its blackmail in relation to the Karabakh issue too. We created a
difficult situation for us and are heroically overcoming it’, said
Rustamyan.