Author: Takmazian

NEW AMBASSADORS OF ARMENIA TO ROMANIA AND KUWAIT APPOINTED

Noyan Tapan
March 30, 2010

YEREVAN, MARCH 30, NOYAN TAPAN. On March 29, RA President Serzh
Sargsyan signed a decree on relieving Yeghishe Sargsian of the post
of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of RA to Romania
and appointing Hamlet Gasparian Ambassador Extraordinary and
Plenipotentiary of RA to that country (residence Bucharest).

According to RA President’s Press Office, by S. Sargsyan’s another
decrees of the same day Vahagn Melikian was relieved of the post
of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of RA to Kuwait
and Fadey Charchoghlian was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and
Plenipotentiary of RA to that country (residence El Kuwait).

RUSSIAN POLITICAL EXPERT: AZERBAIJAN’S OCCUPIED LANDS MUST BE LIBERATED AS A FIRST STEP

Today
5.html
March 29 2010
Azerbaijan

Day.Az interview with doctor of historical sciences, professor,
Chair of the Council for Mediterranean-Black Sea Problems at the
Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Europe Alla Iazikhova.

By what principles were members of the of U.S. Congress committee
guided while adopting resolution on the so-called Armenian "genocide"?

First and foremost, I want to remind that the Committee of the U.S.

Congress adopted the resolution with a margin of one vote – 23 to 22
which called the legitimacy of this decision into question. It was
immediately followed by a statement from Hillary Clinton, who said
that neither she nor President Barack Obama will force the further
discussions on this issue in Parliament.

Moreover, it seems to me that internal political situation in the U.S.

also plays a role in this regard because there in autumn there will
be re-election to the House of Representatives and local elections

Given this, as well as significance of the Armenian lobby in Congress,
I would say there was less than a vague step towards recognition of
"genocide". Now all the moves in this direction are suspended, and
the tension will continue until April 24 – Day of Remembrance for the
so-called "Armenian genocide". After that, interest in this topic,
as usually, will weaken.

The Armenian lobby in the States and Armenia itself are very actively
debating whether Barack Obama will pronounce the word "genocide"
in his speech on that day, he will call on Congress to recognize it
or all these will not happen at all?

Anyway, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama will recommend
the Congress to include the discussion on the so-called "Armenian
Genocide" into the agenda. In this case, the interest in this problem
will gradually descend to zero. There is no unequivocal reaction to
the move by the the Congress committee in Armenia itself. There are
some forces that do not consider it necessary to insist on adopting
the resolution, but offer to make a compromise to Ankara leaving
question of so-called "genocide" to historians.

I do not think that the U.S. will continue to discuss this issue.

Neither Washington nor Ankara, and even not everybody in Yerevan are
interested in this. Despite the fact that Kazbegi-Upper Lars checkpoint
between Georgia and Russia opened recently somehow connecting Armenia
with the outer world, mostly with Russia, opening the border with
Turkey, which links Armenia to Europe, is very important.

In your opinion, what was the reason behind Swedish parliament’s
move to recognize the "Armenian genocide"? Was it result of the
U.S pressure?

I think that there was no particular pressure from the U.S. Sweden is a
country which pays special attention to problems of national minorities
and human rights,. This move is of humanitarian nature than political.

Then why did it happen exactly now? Is this a coincidence?

Hard to say. Frankly, the decision of the Swedish Parliament astonished
me. In politics, such coincidences do not happen, but if this is true,
then this is definitely a serious puncture in the foreign policy
of Sweden.

In your view, how will the relations between the U.S. and Turkey
develop?

These relationships are very special issue. Over the last decade they
have evolved differently. And here it is appropriate to recall a time
when the war started in Iraq. Back then Turkey effectively blocked
passage of the U.S. military to Iraq through its territory. Turkey has
already made it clear that it intends to pursue an independent policy.

However, it is not just the fact that Ankara has its own interests
in the Middle East and Islamic world. Turkey has recently taken
a negative stance towards Israel. As a result, the U.S. does not
receive the necessary support from Turkey against Iran. All this
configuration is very contradictory and tense.

And how will the Armenian-Turkish relations develop?

I believe that a significant part of the Armenian leadership wants to
continue negotiations with Turkey. However, they understand that there
is much tied to the relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan. Turkey
cannot afford to go too far in its relations with Armenia to the
detriment of relations with Azerbaijan.

Last year, we witnessed intensive negotiations on settlement of
the the Karabakh conflict including at the highest level, Given the
recent developments in US-Turkish and Armenian-Turkish relations,
can we expect something similar this year?

I want to note that without some definite progress in resolving
the Karabakh conflict, Turkey will not take steps further steps to
normalize relations with Armenia. As for the Karabakh conflict, it is
important to gradually solve the problem. The most important thing
to begin with is to liberate occupied territories of Azerbaijan. It
should happen finally. .

In your opinion, how Russia will act given the relations between
Turkey and the U.S.?

Relations with the U.S are very important for Russia. So, it will make
no sharp moves in relations with Turkey. It is important to note that
Ankara and Moscow have moved much closer in recent times. As we know,
EU does not admit Turkey and Russia also has problem with Europe.

Positions of the countries are similar on certain issues icluding
the Black Sea, Iran and some economic issues.

Today’s Zaman,Turkey
March 27 2010

Socialist leader Schulz: package is a step closer to EU and her values

The leader of the Socialists in the European Parliament, Martin
Schulz, has said the latest proposal to amend the Turkish Constitution
is a step closer to the European Union and its values.

Speaking on the `European Desk’ broadcast on STVHaber, Schulz
supported the package, declaring it to be `clearly in the interest of
the modernization of Turkey and aiming to bring Turkey a step nearer
to the European Union and her values.’ Stressing that his first
feeling was that the package was a quite good proposal, Schulz
underlined that he would also listen carefully to the concerns of the
opposition.

`The content of the proposals, to make it more difficult to close the
political parties, to give more rights to women, etc., is clearly in
the interest of modernizing Turkey and bringing Turkey a step nearer
to European Union and her values. I will not comment on any
constitutional change in any country.

It is highly controversial in Turkey, and I need to say that it is up
to the political parties. But my first feeling is that it is a good
proposal. I will of course listen to the remarks of the opposition
carefully,’ he said. After discussing Turkey’s fight for
democratization, the socialist leader also commented on the ongoing
Ergenekon trial, where almost 200 defendants are standing trial for
various offenses including plotting to overthrow the democratically
elected government of the Turkish Republic.

`Ergenekon is a very specific internal issue for Turkey. It is now up
to the judiciary, and it is forbidden for me to comment a lot on this.
But I think a civil government and an independent judiciary have
always the right and even the duty to go ahead and try those who
attempt to undermine the constitutional reality of a democratic
country. If there are suspicions that generals, colonels and other
officers have created plans to bring down democracy, then it is the
duty of the government and the judiciary to go after that. If those
people are innocent, of course they should be released,’ he said.

`Nobody can explain what privileged partnership is to me’
Schulz, who leads the 184-strong Socialist group, which was renamed
the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats after the June
2009 elections, is expected to be the next president of the European
Parliament in 2012. Known as a supporter of Turkey’s bid to join the
EU, Schulz criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European
Union for the lack of honest approaches vis-a-vis Turkey. On the eve
of her first visit to Turkey in four years, he called on Merkel to be
clear on Turkey’s EU process.

`When I first heard about the `privileged partnership’, I thought it
is like living together without being married. Now I’ve learned that
nobody can explain to me what privileged partnership is. If Merkel
goes to Turkey and openly says that she is against Turkey and
justifies why and proposes alternatives, she will have my full
respect. But here in Brussels people speak differently behind closed
doors. The speeches behind closed doors are very different from the
ones made publicly. Publicly everyone says we are for the
negotiations, behind closed doors lots of European leaders say Turkey
will never join European Union,’ he said.

`Common history commission on Armenian killings a good step’
Schulz also commented on the recent tension over Armenian killings
during World War I. He said Turkey’s proposal to form a joint
commission of scholars to determine the reality of the past was a good
step forward. `The call by the Turkish government to form a common
commission of international scholars on history of 1915 was a very
good step forward. Why take a step now and go back before the
commission starts working? It is not meaningful. It would have been
better to wait for this commission’s findings. I never expected this
government would take such a huge step forward,’ he stated.

The Socialist leader also assessed the prospect of reunification for
the long-divided Cyprus. He said the then-leader of the Greek side,
the late Tassos Papadopoulos, was to blame for the failure of the
Annan plan in 2004. He also noted that the EU did not live up to its
words following the Turkish approval and Greek rejection of the plan.

`For sure the EU made mistakes on Cyprus, and not all the promises
were kept, but it is a complicated issue. Turkey should apply the
Ankara Protocol. To be honest with you, sometimes I am hopeless on
Cyprus. Günter Verheugen, a very close friend of mine, I remember very
well, told me when he came back from Cyprus as the then-enlargement
commissioner that everyone on the island agreed on the Annan plan. But
then Papadopoulos worked against the agreement. We have a word for
that in civil life, but I won’t use it. There is a certain
interpretation of what Mr. Papadopoulos did, but I will not use it
publicly. But it was an enormous damage to the credibility first and
foremost for Mr. Papadopoulos himself,’ he said.

27 March 2010, Saturday
SELÃ?UK GÃ`LTAÅ?LI BRUSSELS

Sargsyan laid a wreath

12:41 pm | March 25, 2010 | Official
erzh

Today marks the 3rd anniversary of the death of RA Prime Minister
Andranik Margaryan.

President Serzh Sargsyan was accompanied by the country’s highest
ranking officials to Komitas Pantheon where he laid a wreath at the
tomb of Andranik Margaryan.

Let us remind that RA Prime Minister Andranik Margaryan suffered from
a sudden heart attack, but doctors were not able to save his life. He
was 56 years old.

Harutyun Khachatryan’s Border awarded FIPRESCI prize

26.03.2010 16:48 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian director Harutyun Khachatryan’s Border was
awarded FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) prize at
XXIV Freiburg Film Festival held on March 13-20, 2010.

Last year, Montevideo, Moscow and Tbilisi hosted retrospective
screenings of Harutyun Khachatryan’s films. This year, the film will
be screened in Spain, Israel and US.

Harutyun Khachatryan’s Border, is a 82-minute full-length feature film
where the filmmaker uses the story of an animal that’s lost its way as
a metaphor for the strife and mistrust in Eastern Europe after the
fall of the Soviet Union in this fusion of documentary and drama. In
the wake of the Armenian-Azeri conflict of the 1990’s, a number of
refugees find themselves working together on a farm near the Armenian
border; they often find themselves suspicious of those who claim to be
able help them, as well as one another. One day, one of the farmers
finds a buffalo in a nearby ditch; the animal looks tired and ill-fed,
and he brings it back to the farm in hopes of nursing it back to
health. But the other farm animals don’t know what to make of the
buffalo, while the dogs are openly hostile to the new arrival and many
of the farmhands, wary after years of having their nerves shattered by
war, reject the presence of the creature. Border premiered at the 2009
Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Theme of Armenian Genocide is in the focus of international media

26.03.2010 20:48 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ On April 9 the famous German television channel ARD
will show 90-minute documentary about the Armenian Genocide "Calamity"
(Aghet).

The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic
destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during
and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and
deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to
lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths
reaching 1.5 million.

The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be
April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250
Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.
Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes
and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food
and water, to the desert of what is now Syria.

To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially
recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide
scholars and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has
been also recognized by influential media including The New York
Times, BBC, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.

The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the
Genocide survivors.

AN EROTIC THRILLER GETS THE EGOYAN TOUCH
By Michael Redd, Canwest News Service

Vancouver Sun, BC
-guide/erotic+thriller+gets+Egoyan+touch/2719837/s tory.html
March 24 2010
Canada

Despite woman-on-woman sex scene, director says latest film Chloe is
chiefly a study of a marriage

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

It erupts over coffee in Victoria, where the director is taking a
breather before resuming a press tour for Chloe, his new erotic drama
that opens nationwide on Friday.

Victoria-raised Egoyan, 49, laughs as he recalls a surreal experience
at the Guadalajara Film Festival. A showing 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 says, 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 antagonists, 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 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 B," he says. "It’s
just not in me."

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

"One of the arguments I made to Ivan was Toronto 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 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 says.

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

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," said 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 says 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.

INDISPOSED EXTRAORDINARY ELECTION

os17272.html
12:53:22 – 24/03/2010

The home political crisis does not show signs to lessen. This is
the opinion of the member of the Armenian National Congress David
Shahnazaryan. "The authorities’ efforts to hide the March 1 slaughter
did not give any result and now they accept they "still need to digest
it". They will not. Unnatural processes are also noticed inside the
government", says David Shahnazaryan.

According to him, the power started dwelling on extraordinary
elections more. Shahnazaryan says that considering the current
situation and possible developments, the power headed by Serge
Sargsyan had to realize the importance of overcoming the home crisis,
uniting the public to be able to resist foreign challenges. He says,
as a first step, they need to release the political prisoners but
David Shahnazaryan does not notice any such a wish of the power.

In answer to reporters’ observation that the government does not have
any inclination towards extraordinary election, David Shahnazaryan
says they will the same have to face them without any disposition.

Shahnazaryan noted that the government usually does not have
inclination towards regular elections either because each election
is a danger for it.

SPANISH FOREIGN MINISTER OPPOSES ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RESOLUTION

PanARMENIAN.Net
24.03.2010 12:54 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Spain’s government is working to torpedo efforts by
its legislature to pass a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide,
Spanish ABC newspaper said.

According to the report, Tuesday that Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel
Angel Moratinos contacted the leader of the Congress of Deputies,
Jose Bono, requesting to stonewall the resolution. The government
argued that Genocide recognition would provoke a negative response
from Ankara.

‘Sunchild’ eco-clubs to mark World Water Day

2010-03-20 16:22:00

ArmInfo.The "Sunchild" eco-clubs will mark the World Water Day.

The Foundation for Preservation of WIldlife and Cultural Assets told
ArmInfo that a number of events will be held in Yerevan, Gyumri and
Dilijan on March 22, particularly, photo exhibitions, films, round
tables, contests, open lessons covering the urgent issues related to
consumption of water.

Yerevan Djour company has prepared a gift for younger members of the
Yerevan eco-club – a visit to Katnaghbyur.