25 Volunteers from Akhalkalaki Participate in Military Training

25 VOLUNTEERS FROM AKHALKALAKI REGION PARTICIPATE IN MILITARY TRAINING
OF RESERVE TROOPS

AKHALKALAKI, December 13 (Noyan Tapan). 25 volunteers from the
Akhalkalaki region, mainly teachers and the sacrebulo employees,
articipated in the military training of the reserve troops in Osiauri
and Gori on December 6-24.

According to the “A-Info” Agency, about 400 people from
Samtskhe-Javakheti participate in the military training, and the
regional detachment of the voluntary reserve troops will be formeed of
it.

It is expected that the second stage of the military training will be
held next February.

Arakel Movsisian wins parliament seat in by-election

ArmenPress
Dec 13 2004

ARAKEL MOVSISIAN WINS PARLIAMENT SEAT IN BY-ELECTION

ARMAVIR, DECEMBER 13, ARMENPRESS: Armenia’s Central Election
Commission (CEC) said today that Arakel Movsisian, the sole candidate
for a vacant parliamentary seat in by-election, received 27,032 votes
of all 27,474 people who went to the polls on Sunday.
The seat, contested under majoritarian election system became
vacant after Arakel Movsisian’s brother, Mushegh, died in autumn
following a heavy road accident.

The Cooking Club Holiday Cookbook Reviews December 2004

Holiday Cookbook Reviews, December 2004

Simply Armenian

Naturally Healthy Ethnic Cooking Made Easy

By Barbara Ghazarian

Reviewed by Liz Waters
The Cooking Club

More and more I find that authentically ethnic recipes are naturally healthy,
regardless of the culture. It is when we monkey around with the traditional
foods that they become unhealthy. The American palate has become dangerously
unhealthy with hidden sweetners at every crook in the road. As Barbara Ghazarian
proves amply in the pages of “Simply Armenian”, hidden additives are not
necessary for an excellent dining experience.

For instance, there is not a better appetizer than Ghazarian’s Zesty White
Bean Dip with toasted squares of her Savory Dill Bread..It should be on the
table at one of your holiday parties for sure! Also, her classic Parsley Salad
(tabouli) is perfect with pita, as well as beautiful on a serving table. There
are lamb recipes galore in this book as well, as lamb is traditional Armenian
fare. However, don’t get so hung up in main courses that you miss the wonderful
breads and desserts in this book. Hats off to Barbara Ghazarian for bringing
this wonderful cuisine to my attention. You can pick up a copy of this book
online with this link: Simply Armenian

www.cookinclub.com

CoE supports launch of Forum for Local Govt Bodies

Local democracy in Georgia: Council of Europe supports launch of national
forum for local government bodies

Strasbourg, 13.12.2004 – The Council of Europe is supporting the launch of a
forum that will defend the interests of local government bodies in Georgia,
and seek to build a culture of partnership between local and national
authorities. The National Association of Local Self-Government Units of
Georgia will be established on Friday 17 December, when delegates from all
parts of the country will meet in the capital, Tbilisi, to choose a
President for the new organisation. The Association will then be represented
in the Georgian delegation to the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities
of the Council of Europe.

The event, which is taking place at the Griboedov Theatre on Rustaveli
Avenue, will begin with speeches from the Minister for Foreign Affairs of
Georgia, Salomé Zourabichvili and the Deputy Chair of the Parliamentary
Committee for Regional Policy, Local Self-Government and High Mountainous
Regions, Vano Khukhunaishvili.

Other speakers will include the President of the Congress of Local and
Regional Authorities of Europe, Giovanni Di Stasi, the First Counsellor of
the European Commission Delegation to Georgia and Armenia, Jacques Vantomme
and the President of the Norwegian Association of Local and Regional
Authorities, Halvdan Skard.

Following the opening ceremony, the three presidential contenders will make
brief presentations before delegates vote for the candidate of their choice.

A press conference will take place at 5 pm at the Griboedov Theatre.

For more information please contact:
Olivier Terrien, Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council
of Europe
Tel: + 33 3 88 41 22 47 ; Mobile: + 33 6 61 14 89 00 ; Fax: + 33 3 88 41 27
51/37 47 ;
E-mail: [email protected]

Varlam Tchkuaseli, Steering Group on the National Association of Local
Self-Government Units of Georgia ; Tel: + 995 32 223635 ; Mobile: + 995 99
212713 ; Fax: + 995 32 223635 ;
E-mail: [email protected]

ED086b04

Parliamentary Opinions Vary on Dispatch of Armenia Army to Iraq

OPINIONS OF ARMENIAN PARLIAMENTARY FORCES ON DISPATCH OF ARMENIAN
PEACE-MAKERS TO IRAQ DIFFER

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 9. ARMINFO. Party Orinats Yerkir attaches special
importance to participation of Armenia in peace-making actions in
Iraq. Vice Chairman of the party, Head of the Parliamentary Commission
for Defense, National Security and Internal Affairs, Mher Shahgeldyan,
made this statement at a briefing at the Armenian Parliament,
Thursday.

He says that Armenia’s participation in the peace-making actions will
contribute to the country’s integration into international
processes. He informs that only volunteers will be included into the
peace-making contingent, who will receive $1,000 monthly salary. In
his turn, Representative of the United Labor Party Grigor Gonjeyan
states that if such super power as the USA asks Armenia to participate
in any joint action, official Yerevan cannot refuse from it, the more
so as these actions are aimed a combatting terrorism.

In his turn, Secretary of the Justice opposition bloc Victor Dallakyan
states that the bloc is against dispatch of the Armenian contingent to
Iraq, as it may endanger the safety of the local Armenian
community. He did not rule out the Justice bloc’s participation in
parliamentary discussions on this issue and voting against its
adoption. Justice bloc’s position is shared by the opposition party
National Unity. Meanwhile, RPA and ARF Dashnaktsutyun representatives
promised to determine their position at relevant parliamentary
discussions. It should be noted that the Constitutional Court of
Armenia recognized the provisions of the Memorandum on Dislocation of
a Multi-National Division, including Armenian peace-makers, in Iraq in
conformity with the country’s Basic Law.

Azerbaijan cuts off rail to rival Armenia

Agence France Presse — English
December 9, 2004 Thursday 1:34 PM GMT

Azerbaijan cuts off rail to rival Armenia

BAKU

Azerbaijan shut down its cargo rail traffic to other Caucasus
republics Thursday because it feared that some of the goods were
being delivered to its arch-foe Armenia, officials said.

Azerbaijan’s rail ministry said the traffic was cut off to
neighboring Georgia, whose rail line leads to Armenia, because “we
have received information that part of the cargo sent to Azerbaijan
from Russia is meant for Armenia,” Moscow’s regional ally.

The Azeri rail ministry told AFP that 1,500 rail cars holding oil and
grain were intercepted at the Azeri-Georgian border.

The rail ministry official said that Moscow and Baku had signed a
1998 agreement that goods from Russia headed for Armenia could not be
transferred by Azerbaijan.

“That is why we have every right to do this,” rail ministry spokesman
Nazyr Azmamedov said.

Neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenia are still technically at war over
control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a sparsely populated range of mountains
with a mainly ethnic Armenian population that is formally part of
Azerbaijan.

A five-year war between the two countries ended with Armenia taking
control of the enclave in 1994. An estimated 35,000 people were
killed in the fighting and one million people fled their homes.

Georgia sits on the northern side of the two countries’ border,
providing another rail link between the two feuding states.

Los Angeles Times List of Best Fiction Books of 2004

THE BEST BOOKS OF 2004
Fiction

Los Angeles Times
12/5/2004

Birds Without Wings
A Novel
Louis de Bernières

Alfred A. Knopf: 560 pp., $25.95

Louis de Bernières is an angry man, and the
destructive manifestations of nationalism, above all
in pointless warfare, make him seethe with fury and
contempt. Only those with the strongest of stomachs
will be able to read his horrifyingly brilliant
account of trench warfare during the Gallipoli
campaign without flinching: All five senses are
exploited to the fullest. He agonizes over what he
calls the conspiracy to forget the Armenian genocide.
He shows, in detail and for his individual characters,
just what mass uprooting and exile mean in human
terms. “Birds Without Wings” is a quite astonishing,
and compulsively readable, tour de force.

— Peter Green

Conspirators
A Novel
Michael André Bernstein

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 506 pp., $25

Pick up any of the Viennese journals, one of the
characters says in Michael AndrĂ© Bernstein’s
“Conspirators,” “and you will see right away that in
our politics, in our dreams … and certainly in our
fashionable plays and novellas, all we talk about is
murder.” This strange, hypnotic first novel takes us
into the murky, perplexed heart of Mitteleuropa on the
eve of World War I. It is a world well known from the
writings of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Bruno Schulz,
Joseph Roth and Thomas Mann — a world of literary
cafes, decadent art, military parades, psychoanalysis,
secret police, poverty and catastrophic premonitions.
Bernstein’s beautifully written, intricate and
entrancing novel seems to prove that to show true love
of the past, or true love of life, a writer must
resist the urge to treat the past as prologue.

— Jaroslaw Anders

Cruisers
A Novel
Craig Nova

Shaye Areheart Books: 306 pp., $24

Let it quickly be said that “Cruisers,” though rich in
symbols and glittering with images, is a tense and
fast-paced chronicle, told in prose as nimble and
shiny as a pellet of mercury. Russell Boyd is, after
all, a policeman, and “Cruisers” is, among other
things, an oblique police-procedural novel, in which
trooper Boyd from time to time seeks clues to a
roadside killing “like a blind man … who kept going
around a room with no door.” In the effective way the
author mixes vivid prose, existential riddles and
violent incident, Nova bears comparison to such
contemporaries as Robert Stone, Pete Dexter, Thomas
Berger and Jim Harrison.

— Tom Nolan

The Daydreaming Boy
A Novel
Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Riverhead Books: 214 pp., $23.95

“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, which details
in stark terms the psychic aftermath of the Armenian
genocide. Having written compellingly about the
1915-18 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
in the life of one man. “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.

— Bernadette Murphy

The Egyptologist
A Novel
Arthur Phillips

Random House: 386 pp., $24.95

Arthur Phillips’ second novel, “The Egyptologist,”
reads like a love child of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask
of Amontillado” and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,”
with Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury from “The Importance of
Being Earnest” as godparent. Phillips proved himself a
writer to watch with his first novel, “Prague” (2002),
his cynical, caustic, frolicsome and moving view of a
new lost generation seeking to make its mark in
Communist-pocked Central Europe. “The Egyptologist”
shifts to sandier turf, a murder mystery in the
Egyptian desert told by some of the most amusingly
unreliable narrators you’ll find in literature. “The
Egyptologist” is about taking that most creative and
desperate of urges, the desire to secure one’s legacy
and immortality, to the most outlandish extremes
imaginable. It offers a king’s bounty of lively,
sparkling conceptions and misconceptions.

— Heller McAlpin

Graceland
A Novel
Chris Abani

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 324 pp., $24

“Graceland” opens in 1983, in the teeming city of
Lagos, Nigeria, where 16-year-old Elvis Oke, who hopes
to become a dancer, is trying to earn money performing
in the street, doing impersonations of the more famous
American Elvis. As evoked in this novel by Nigerian
writer and poet Chris Abani, Lagos is a city of
startling contrasts. “Graceland” amply demonstrates
that Abani has the energy, ambition and compassion to
create a novel that delineates and illuminates a
complicated, dynamic, deeply fractured society.

— Merle Rubin

The Green Lantern
A Romance of Stalinist Russia
Jerome Charyn

Thunder’s Mouth Press: 358 pp., $22

Jerome Charyn’s dream life must be exceptionally rich.
Author of nearly 40 books — from knowledgeable police
novels to picaresque tales of the Bronx, nymphomaniacs
and Pinocchio; nonfiction books documenting his
fascination with the movies, Broadway and pingpong;
memoirs of his immigrant Jewish family; and
distinguished short fiction and essays — he now
rewards his readers with “The Green Lantern,”
subtitled “A Romance of Stalinist Russia.” In this
novel, the ’60s tradition of black humor evolves into
what could be named Red humor. Of course, this is not
new in the Russian experience; Gogol, Bulgakov and an
exile like Nabokov created despairing absurdities that
apply to the world, not just Russia. Like them, Charyn
also knows that “the old love game went on and on and
on,” a simple statement in a book of rococo and
burlesque that can pierce the heart of a reader. One
of the ways to live with the memory of tragic times is
to laugh if you can. Charyn can.

— Herbert Gold

A Hole in the Universe
A Novel
Mary McGarry Morris

Viking: 376 pp., $24.95

There are few contemporary American writers whose work
can absorb readers so fully and with such immediacy
that the line between character and reader begins to
seem dangerously thin. Among these few is the
brilliant Mary McGarry Morris, who has written several
exceptionally fine books, all of them so dense with
dread and complexity that you are hard-pressed not to
keep reading until her battered characters’ troubles
have been resolved. “A Hole in the Universe” is the
superbly drawn story of Gordon Loomis, a man just
released from prison after serving a 25-year sentence
for the murder of a young pregnant woman. “A Hole in
the Universe” is not exactly a mystery, but it has the
tautness and suspense of one — the sense, threaded
through its pages, that something is genuinely at
stake: Gordon’s redemption and acceptance by society,
perhaps, and by proxy an assurance to readers that
clemency wins out over chaos in the end.

— Francie Lin

Honored Guest
Stories
Joy Williams

Alfred A. Knopf: 214 pp., $23

“It sounds as though you had a very fortunate
childhood until you didn’t,” says Francine to her
gardener, Dennis, who seems to have an obsessive crush
on her. He’s been telling Francine about his childhood
nanny, Darla, of whom Francine reminds him, and her
response in many ways sums up Joy Williams’
penetrating and thoughtful collection of stories,
“Honored Guest.” In these tales, Williams, an
incomparable novelist and short-story and essay
writer, gives us characters who have good lives until
they don’t — people who revel in fortunate experiences
until fortune gets tired of them. In wonderful, stark
relief, Williams gives us a glimpse into the
pliability of the human heart, its marvelous ability
to withstand adversity and accommodate whatever comes
next.

Bernadette Murphy

The Inner Circle
A Novel
T.C. Boyle

Viking: 418 pp., $25.95

The 10th novel by T.C. Boyle, “The Inner Circle,” is
the story of John Milk, a fictional cohort in the
otherwise nominally real team of researchers employed
by Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. The two volumes that
issued from their work, “Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,”
transformed the way people everywhere thought about
sex; in America, at least, this was not a universally
welcomed change. “The Inner Circle” covers a great
deal of literal and psychic geography, and its
supporting cast is large. The story paints an
effective picture of America’s clammy, stultifying,
erotically punitive atmosphere in the early and
mid-1940s. It has impressive momentum and formal
reach, and a fair amount to impart about wrong turns,
anger, dependency and disillusion.

— Gary Indiana

It’s All True
A Novel of Hollywood
David Freeman

Simon & Schuster: 274 pp., $23

David Freeman’s “It’s All True” is a wry, observant
and forgiving Hollywood novel. I’m not certain that it
is, in the full sense of the word, a novel at all. It
is more like a collection of loosely interrelated
short stories about an intelligent, literate man
trying to survive in a town where intelligence and
literacy are not as highly valued as, say, the lettuce
assorte salad the studio exec orders just before
hearing Henry’s pitch for a movie in which aliens
intervene, to good effect, in the life of a Midwestern
counterfeiter.

What we have here is neither Nathanael West nor Jackie
Collins. It lacks the bleak hysteria of the former and
the latter’s breathless desire to put a glaze of
glamour on trashy, preposterous behavior. “It’s All
True” is more radical than that. It is a book about
normal people engaged in an admittedly abnormal, even
exotic, business yet trapped in their ordinariness,
their variously expressed needs to make their livings
in a place that rewards them only grudgingly with just
enough success to keep them in its game. In this
epitaph for a small winner there is wit, poignancy and
seductive grace.

— Richard Schickel

Last Lullaby
A Novel
Denise Hamilton

Scribner: 358 pp., $25

Eve Diamond is a romantic whose job as a Los Angeles
Times reporter requires her to be a cynic. This
conflict gives ex-Times reporter Denise Hamilton’s
third Diamond mystery novel, “Last Lullaby,” much of
its interest and unpredictability. One of Hamilton’s
strengths is her grasp of the Southland’s shifting
ethnic landscape. “Last Lullaby” leads us through
seedy Chinatown hotels, a trendy Asian fusion
restaurant, a backyard barbecue for her lover Silvio
Aguilar’s abuelita (grandmother) and a cyber-cafe that
might as well be an opium den, so oblivious are its
denizens to the outside world. Hamilton’s narrative
prose can recall potboilers past, but it can also
display so much freshness and sass (“I climbed up
spongy wooden stairs that creaked under my weight as
the termites held hands and moaned.”) that comparisons
with Raymond Chandler aren’t too far out of line.

— Michael Harris

The Lemon Table
Stories
Julian Barnes

Alfred A. Knopf: 244 pp., $22.95

Julian Barnes takes up the theme of aging
unflinchingly in “The Lemon Table,” his second
collection of stories. Erotic yearning, missed
opportunities, regret and other somber chords
predominate in this collection, although nearly always
with wry wit.

Barnes’ novels rely upon pyrotechnics, lexicographer’s
puns and postmodernist devices; these new stories are
filled with emotional resonance and hard-won wisdom.
“The Lemon Table” is a virtuoso performance of
remarkable clarity and insight.

— Jane Ciabattari

Little Black Book of Stories
A.S. Byatt
Alfred A. Knopf: 244 pp., $21

Although A.S. Byatt is best known for the Booker
Award-winning 1990 scholarly romance “Possession” and
four overstuffed Frederica Potter novels of ideas set
in the 1950s and 1960s (“The Virgin in the Garden,”
“Still Life,” “Babel Tower” and “A Whistling Woman”),
she also has written her own fabulist’s tales over the
years.

In “Little Black Book of Stories,” Byatt continues her
reinvention of the fairy tale, focusing on the darker
mysteries of madness, violence, grief and
transformation and using the uncanny power of language
to reach deep into the imagination, thrilling and
terrifying in equal measure. These bewitching stories
are immensely readable, fiercely intelligent and
studded with astonishing, refracting images.

“Little Black Book of Stories” is a virtuoso
performance by a master storyteller; Byatt spins pure
gold from the darkest elements in our nature.

— Jane Ciabattari

Little Scarlet
A Novel
Walter Mosley

Little, Brown: 310 pp., $24.95

In his continuing portrait of black and white life in
Los Angeles, Walter Mosley has dipped his pen into the
nightmare of the Watts riots and come up with his most
searing and unforgettable account of America to date.
Indignation, ferocity, excoriation scorch the pages of
“Little Scarlet” like a fiery sermon, powerful for its
nuance, poignant for its humanity and all the more
compassionate for coming from the heart and mind of
Easy Rawlins. “Little Scarlet” is a novel about who we
really are and who we all can become. Argue it.
Question it. You cannot read this story without
recognizing the poison we feed one another. Mosley
makes it clear that the real nightmare of the Watts
riots had less to do with that hot summer evening in
1965 than with everything that preceded it.

— Thomas Curwen

The Master
A Novel
Colm TĂłibĂ­n

Scribner: 342 pp., $25

The biographer is bound by fact, but the historical
novelist need only be plausible. His characters may
bear the names of those who once actually lived, but
he enjoys a liberty that the biographer does not. Even
the most amply documented of lives contained moments
in which important words went unsaid, scenes
determined by a level, all-knowing stare or the way
one pair of eyes avoided another. That’s the kind of
unspoken communication in which the fiction of Henry
James delights, and no biographer can possibly treat
James’ inner experience with the kind of freedom he
brought to his characters. That is precisely what the
Irish writer Colm TĂłibĂ­n has achieved in his deeply
engrossing novel “The Master,” which follows James
through what have been called the most treacherous
years of his life. It begins in 1895, when his bid for
popular success as a playwright had failed, and ends
in 1899, with his purchase of a house in the English
coastal town of Rye.

TĂłibĂ­n gives us an infinitely patient intelligence and
an entirely convincing portrait of a writer at work:
the glimmer of an idea with which a new story first
comes, the way a tale is produced by the lamination of
moments widely separated in time and space. He shows
us that fiction never provides a transcript of
experience but instead offers a variation upon it, a
sense of how things might have gone if only they had
been different.

— Michael Gorra

Natasha and Other Stories
David Bezmozgis
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 150 pp., $18

“Natasha and Other Stories” chronicles, in seven tales
spread over 23 years, the fate of the Berman family,
Latvian Jews who fled the Soviet Union in 1980 for
Toronto. Mark Berman, the only child of Roman and
Bella, narrates the stories, and through him we learn,
as if for the first time, what it means to remake a
life in a new country and language. Like Philip Roth,
and Isaac Babel before him, David Bezmozgis is
fascinated with the varieties of ethical
responsibilities demanded by Jewish family and
culture, and the limitless ways of transgressing them.
Bezmozgis makes his characters, and the state of
marginality itself, uniquely his. This hysterical,
merciless yet open-hearted excavation of a Jewish
family in the process of assimilating gives his
literary predecessors a run for their money.

— Daniel Schifrin

Nothing Lost
A Novel
John Gregory Dunne

Alfred A. Knopf: 338 pp., $24.95

John Gregory Dunne, who died last December, was the
most modern of American novelists — that is, he was as
much a reporter as a fabulist. This gave his fiction
the weight and gravity of truth. His great subjects
were American institutions and enterprises: the
courts, prisons, the media, the Catholic Church and
Hollywood. “Nothing Lost,” his final novel, is a
sprawling story of murder, corruption and mistakes.
This book is often gripping and cuts deep. In time, I
think — with “Playland” and its predecessor, “The Red
White and Blue,” in which Jack Broderick is introduced
— “Nothing Lost” will come to be seen as part three of
Dunne’s American trilogy. America was his great
subject, and he pursued it, depicting it, trying to
contain it, allowing himself to be dazzled (though
ever surprised) by its malicious heart. He reveled in
chicanery and human folly; it gave him his voice. John
Gregory Dunne was our great connoisseur of venality.

— David Freeman

The Persistence of
Memory
A Novel

Tony Eprile

W.W. Norton: 300 pp., $24.95

Charged with a shining imagination, “The Persistence
of Memory” is reflective of everything it meets up
with, at once capacious and finely honed. Think
Laurence Sterne meets Proust meets the antic,
dissembling spirit of Stanley Elkin. It’s part
bricolage, part lyric paean to the passage of
childhood, part bitter yet nonmoralistic indictment of
a country — South Africa — steeped in horror and
exploitation yet also a country like any other, with
suburbs where wealthy housewives trade recipes for
lamb curry with their black housekeepers. This is an
unforgettable book.

— Daphne Merkin

The Plot Against America
A Novel
Philip Roth

Houghton Mifflin: 392 pp., $26

“The Plot Against America” may join Sinclair Lewis’
1935 “It Can’t Happen Here” and Philip K. Dick’s “The
Man in the High Castle,” a 1962 novel set in an
America defeated in World War II (the big holiday is
Capitulation Day) and partitioned between Japan and
Germany. Describing the rise to power of Charles
Lindbergh, it may be plumbed in years to come as a
cautionary tale about the fragility of the democratic
spirit in America or as a metaphorical rendering of
the United States and its president today.

“The Plot Against America” is written with the sense
that at any moment the lives of a small boy, his
family and his country can spin out of control, that
every assumption underlying the orderly progress of
ordinary life may be contradicted, countermanded and
reversed. It leaves you breathless, right up to the
point when the cavalry comes riding over the hill and
the great train of American history is switched back
onto the right track, and we emerge from the book as
if nothing had happened at all. Effortlessly, it
seems, Philip Roth has led us to suspend disbelief;
then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief
and finally removes it. The result is that the present
seems already in the past. Anything can happen; it is
happening now.

— Greil Marcus

Pushkin and the Queen of Spades
A Novel
Alice Randall

Houghton Mifflin: 282 pp., $24

The novels of Alice Randall are deliberate
reinterpretations of classics refracted through a
Negro-centric lens. Her first novel, “The Wind Done
Gone,” was a strident rebuttal to “Gone With the Wind”
told from the point of view of Tara’s former slaves,
who, in contrast to Margaret Mitchell’s simple-minded
“darkies,” outwit their weak white masters at every
turn. “The Wind Done Gone” is a little ditty compared
with “Pushkin and the Queen of Spades,” Randall’s
operatic, far more audacious and accomplished second
novel. In the guise of a mother’s rant against her
son’s choice of bride, her new novel is an impassioned
aria on the ferocity and consummate importance of
parental love. It is also a complex manifesto on why
and how race and roots matter, especially “in the face
of love.” This is a stunningly gutsy, literate and
original novel.

— Heller McAlpin

Soldiers of Salamis
A Novel
Javier Cercas

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Bloomsbury USA: 224 pp., $23.95

It is difficult to give “Soldiers of Salamis” the
serious attention it deserves without making the novel
sound ponderous and unappealing. This is a shame. The
book is funny and gripping and a tear-jerker in the
best sense of the word. I laughed and cried while
reading it, even though I didn’t quite fall in love.
The key to the novel’s charm is that it works on so
many levels. On one level it is the story of a man
without direction who finds meaning in his life; at
the same time it is the history of a curious incident
in the Spanish Civil War; it is also a meditation
about what makes someone a hero, or a decent human
being; finally, it is a story about how and why we
remember the past. It has sold more than 500,000
copies in Spanish and been made into an equally
well-received movie. The novel’s success in France,
Germany and England suggests that it strikes a chord
in any country or individual with ghosts to face.

— Rebecca Pawel

The Stone That the Builder Refused
A Novel
Madison Smartt Bell

Pantheon: 750 pp., $29.95

In any bin marked “historical novels,” one is likely
to find two diametrically different kinds of reading.
The first bulging pile consists of collages of
good-to-middling research and stagy period drama. A
second, much smaller stack glows with unquenchable
life. These are the true time machines, books that
completely transport, that seem not so much to have
sprung from a writer’s imagination as to have taken
possession. It’s here one would find, say, Robert
Graves’ “I, Claudius,” Gore Vidal’s “Burr” or Yukio
Mishima’s “Spring Snow.” Now the stack is a little
taller with the addition of the final volume of
Madison Smartt Bell’s sweeping trilogy of the life of
Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of
the only slave colony to throw off its own shackles.
The great beauty of this work is its language, the
authoritative formal lilt of English and French, the
weaving in of Creole as spoken then. Just as
characters in “The Stone” are possessed by the lwa —
spirits who guide souls — so too has Bell opened to
the spirits of his characters, imagined and real.

— Kai Maristed

Sweet Land Stories
E.L. Doctorow
Random House: 150 pp., $22.95

In this age of skepticism, when a writer uses the word
“sweet” in a title, our irony detector shifts to high
alert. We know not to expect saccharine
sentimentality. A wistful aura of disappointment
pervades Doris Lessing’s “The Sweetest Dream,” Russell
Banks’ “The Sweet Hereafter,” Reginald Gibbons’
“Sweetbitter” and Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of
Youth.” What is sweet in the land of the free and the
home of the brave for the misfits in E.L. Doctorow’s
new book, “Sweet Land Stories,” is mainly the freedom
to nurture their personal delusions. In the tradition
of the best American fiction, “Sweet Land Stories”
prods the beached whale of the American dream in order
to examine its underbelly. Less complex and tangled
than his recent novels, these are deceptively simple
but subtle morality tales that showcase Doctorow’s
deftness as a storyteller.

— Heller McAlpin

True North
A Novel
Jim Harrison

Grove Press: 390 pp., $24

Jim Harrison may well have started out to write a book
about greed, sex and religion, but what he has given
us is a story about love and forgiveness and the
trials they entail. For all the hype about this
writer’s machismo, Harrison consistently commands our
attention for his humanity and tenderness. That he can
create such tension in the process — a tension not
released until the last page — and in the end forge
such violence shows his skill as a storyteller and
makes “True North” a great achievement. When the book
was still a work in progress, Harrison described the
plot as a “tight little knot” combining greed, sex and
religion. The task of untying that knot has fallen to
the novel’s narrator, scion of a family of timber
barons.

Is the past ever really past? In “True North” this
question is played for all it’s worth. Here lies the
great paradox of American life: In a country created
on the premise of escape and reinvention, there is no
real freedom, and the dreams of one generation are
often a curse for the next. Such is the peril of being
an American: The more we understand the past, the more
we are haunted by what can never be. Our lives are
gripped by forces we only dimly understand. The real
effort, Harrison implies, is to act in spite of those
forces, correct for deviance and find our own true
north.

— Thomas Curwen

–Boundary_(ID_uAxdVQMRof47nMYPwgAwFQ)–

ARKA News Agency – 12/07/2004

ARKA News Agency
Dec 7 2004

In near future conference dedicated to condition of Armenians in
Javahkh to take place in that region

Nagorno Karabakh commemorates 16th anniversary of Spitak earthquake

RA President visits Gyumri to participate in event dedicated to
commemoration of 1988 earthquake victims

The third edition of a bulletin of information Office of the Council
of Europe in Armenia was issued

*********************************************************************

IN NEAR FUTURE CONFERENCE DEDICATED TO CONDITION OF ARMENIANS IN
JAVAHKH TO TAKE PLACE IN THAT REGION

YEREVAN, December 7. /ARKA/. In near future conference dedicated to
condition of Armenians in Javahkh (Georgia) will take place in that
region, RA NA Vice Speaker Vahan Hovannesian stated today. According
to him, the slogan of the activity is “Integration, Not
Assimilation”. He also said that these issues were discussed at the
recent meeting of ARF Dashnaktsutyun Party member Grant Margarian
with the deputies of Georgian Parliament of Armenian origin. L.D.
–0–

*********************************************************************

NAGORNO KARABAKH COMMEMORATES 16TH ANNIVERSARY OF SPITAK EARTHQUAKE

STEPANAKERT, December 7. /ARKA/. Nagorno Karabakh commemorated 16th
anniversary of Spitak earthquake. Representatives of NKR
administration headed with the President Arkady Gukasian, members of
the Parliament and the Government, representative of the army, and
other officials visited Memorial Complex of Stepanakert and laid
flowers to the monument of earthquake victims.
On Dec 7, 1988 devastating earthquake took place in the north of
Armenia in Spitak. More than 25 thousand people became victims of the
earthquake. L.D. –0–

*********************************************************************

RA PRESIDENT VISITS GYUMRI TO PARTICIPATE IN EVENT DEDICATED TO
COMMEMORATION OF 1988 EARTHQUAKE VICTIMS

YEREVAN, December 7. /ARKA/. The RA President Robert Kocharian
visited today Gyumri city to participate in event on commemoration of
victims of 1988 Spitak earthquake. According to the Press Service of
RA President, Kocharian laid a wreath to the earthquake victims
Memorial and took part in the requiem mass.
Note, Spitak earthquake of December 7, 1988 claimed lives of more
than 25 thou people, making about 140 thou people disabled and
leaving homeless about half a million people. The earthquake utterly
destroyed two cities in the north of Armenia – Spitak and Leninakan
(now – Gyumri), over a hundred villages. Several cities were
partially ruined. L.V.–0

*********************************************************************

THE THIRD EDITION OF A BULLETIN OF INFORMATION OFFICE OF THE COUNCIL
OF EUROPE IN ARMENIA WAS ISSUED

YEREVAN, December 7. /ARKA/. The third edition of a bulletin of
Information Office of the Council of Europe (CE) in Armenia was
issued. The bulletin contains an article of the representative of
Secretary General of the CE in Armenia Natalia Voutova about
important developments in CE related to Armenia; the review of an
international conference devoted to improvement of status of women
held on October 22 in Yerevan; the results of the visit of Deputy
Secretary General of CE to Armenia; information about the Armenian
Ombudsman Larisa Alaverdyan; about the European heritage in Armenia
“from Development of Characters to Electronic Culture”; youth seminar
-course “Caucasus in Europe”. The bulletin also contains information
about the strategy of national re-training for local self-governing
institutions, about the mission and the activity of the School of
Human Rights in Armenia.
The first edition of the bulletin was issued in December 2003. The
bulletin is issued twice a year – in autumn and spring with the aim
of introducing Armenian in the context of the CE and covering
programs implemented by the CE in Armenia. Since 2004 the bulletin
has been published on the site of the Office at A.H. –0—

*********************************************************************

–Boundary_(ID_m1aH0QSzO/PU0csRn+MCrw)–

www.coe.am.

Russie-Ukraine : La =?UNKNOWN?Q?d=E9pendance_post-sovi=E9tique?=remi

La Tribune / Le Monde, France
mardi 7 DĂ©cembre 2004

La dépendance post-soviétique remise en cause

Russie-Ukraine : la périphérie contre le centre ?

Dans le sillage de la désintégration de l’URSS, le Rada (Conseil)
suprĂŞme du pays adopta, le 16 juillet 1990, la DĂ©claration sur la
souveraineté nationale de l’Ukraine. Souveraineté confirmée par un
référendum national le 1er décembre de la même année. Dès lors,
l’Ukraine bascule comme une horloge vacillant, de façon irrégulière
cependant, entre l’Est et l’Ouest. Membre essentiel de la CEI
(Communauté des Etats indépendants), elle n’oublie pas que son destin
peut difficilement contredire son histoire liée à la Russie depuis le
XVIIème siècle. Une Russie avec laquelle elle garde aussi bien des
liens structurels que des rapports d’intérêts. D’un autre côté,
l’Ukraine est à la croisée des corridors de transport (principalement
énergétiques) qui relient l’Est à l’Ouest. Elle est également un
acteur important des politiques régionales de coopération économique
et militaire dans la zone s’étalant de la mer Baltique à la mer
Noire. C’est pourquoi, elle est membre du conseil de l’Europe, membre
du Partenariat pour la paix et acteur actif dans les opérations
menées par l’OTAN. Politique multivectorielle, dit-on officiellement.
L’équilibre n’est pas réalisé pour autant et ce tiraillement se
répercute au niveau interne de façon dangereuse

Mardi 7 décembre 2004

Par Louisa AĂŻt Hamadouche

Depuis l’élection présidentielle du 21 novembre, l’Ukraine est en
proie à une grave crise politique. Le pays est divisé en deux avec
d’un côté l’opposition, dirigée par le candidat Viktor Iouchtchenko,
de l’autre le candidat Viktor Ianoukovitch. Le premier conteste les
résultats du scrutin, remporté par le second selon la commission
électorale. Tout le monde n’est pas de cet avis. Depuis la tenue du
scrutin, des centaines de milliers d’Ukrainiens manifestent pour
dénoncer des fraudes électorales. Au niveau international, de
nombreux pays, dont les Etats-Unis et le Canada, refusent de
reconnaître les résultats du scrutin.

Une crise internationalisée

Pourquoi l’Ukraine intéresse-t-elle tant ? Ce pays a l’un des plus
faibles PIB par habitant de toute l’Europe de l’Est, malgré le haut
niveau d’éducation et d’instruction de sa population. A ce propos,
estime Ralph Sueppel, directeur de la recherche sur les marchés
européens émergents chez Merrill Lynch, l’Ukraine dispose d’un
potentiel de développement considérable. «Avant les élections,
l’économie était sur un rythme de croissance de 13%. Elle a fortement
augmenté ces dernières années ses réserves de devises et a amélioré
sa situation économique générale.» Résultat, elle est destinée à
devenir, avec la Roumanie, un pays d’accueil pour les industries
délocalisées de l’Ouest.L’opposition entre les deux candidats n’est
pas seulement une lutte de pouvoir car elle reflète une opposition de
fond. L’Ukraine est divisée en quatre sous-ensembles distincts. Grâce
aux ressources minérales (charbon, fer et métaux rares) dont elle
dispose en abondance, la partie orientale est -en dehors de la
capitale- la plus riche du pays. Dominée par l’industrie houillère et
métallurgique, elle fournit plus de 58% de la production industrielle
du pays en englobant les deux tiers de la population. Le destin du
Sud est de plus en plus lié à celui de ses ports de la mer Noire, car
l’industrie est essentiellement centrée sur les chantiers navals et
le raffinage du pétrole. Ces deux premières régions sont résolument
tournées vers l’Est, vers la Russie. Avec la capitale en prime, la
partie centrale capte l’essentiel des investissements étrangers.
Ceux-ci tentent de casser la forte spécialisation de cette région
dans la filière agroalimentaire. L’Ouest, enfin, regroupe les régions
les plus défavorisées du pays. L’essentiel des revenus provient de
l’agriculture mais ne constitue pourtant que 20% de la production
agricole totale. Ces déséquilibres se sont ostensiblement aggravés au
point que seules sept régions sur vingt-quatre contribuent à former
la moitié du PIB national. La partie occidentale de l’Ukraine est
braquée sur l’Europe dans laquelle elle voit une solution de
développement et une distanciation vis-à-vis de Moscou.

Intérêts mutuels à préserver

Cela dit, Kiev et Moscou ont un certain nombre d’intérêts en commun
auxquels ni l’un ni l’autre ne veut (et ne peut) renoncer. Rappelons
qu’un grand nombre d’industries militaires russes, y compris celles
produisant la dernière génération d’avions de combat et de
porte-avions, ont besoin de la coopération de l’Ukraine. L’Ukraine
est une base importante pour la Russie pour contrôler l’accès à la
mer Noire. De plus, 96% du gaz naturel et d’importantes quantités de
pétrole transportés de Russie vers l’Europe centrale et orientale
empruntent les pipelines qui se trouvent sur le territoire ukrainien.
De son côté, l’Ukraine a, elle aussi, des intérêts vitaux à défendre
avec la Russie. Ce pays souffre d’un manque de ressources
énergétiques et compte sur son voisin dans ce domaine. Plus
précisément, la Russie fournit 90% du pétrole et 84% du gaz naturel
consommé en Ukraine. En moyenne, cela représente 50 milliards de
mètres cubes de gaz naturel et 30 millions de tonnes de pétrole par
an. Dans un futur prévisible, l’Ukraine continuera de dépendre de la
Russie pour son énergie. L’élection de Vladimir Poutine et la
réélection de Leonid Kuchma ont permis des améliorations notables.
Ainsi les deux pays sont-ils parvenus Ă  trouver un accord sur le
règlement de la dette, prévoyant le remboursement par la Russie de la
dette due à l’Ukraine par la flotte russe de la mer Noire. Par
ailleurs, les deux pays ont institué un système de partage des
ressources en énergie et trouvé une solution à la question du gaz
naturel. L’Ukraine s’est engagée à verser 1,9 milliard de dollars à
la Russie. Une déclaration commune a également été signée concernant
le renforcement de la coopération dans la lutte contre le trafic
d’armes, de drogue, l’immigration clandestine dans la région de la
mer Noire.Sur le plan de la coopération militaire, le gouvernement
ukrainien a promulgué de nouveaux règlements afin de simplifier les
procédures à suivre par les forces armées russes (navales, aériennes
ou autres), lorsqu’elles pénètrent le territoire ukrainien. En tout,
sept accords ont été conclus, certains concernant la participation de
la Russie au développement d’un port militaire en Ukraine,
l’environnement socioéconomique du stationnement de la flotte russe
en Ukraine et l’utilisation des fréquences radio et des champs de
manœuvres en Ukraine par cette même flotte.

Histoire ukrainienne dans la périphérie russe

Dans une très large mesure, l’Ukraine (Ukraïna en ukrainien) est ce
que sa géographie a voulu qu’elle soit. Trois des premiers éléments
géographiques d’une influence considérable sont la Biélorussie, au
nord, la Russie présente au nord et à l’est et la côte constituée par
la mer Noire et la mer d’Azov au sud. La Pologne, située à l’ouest,
est la «fenêtre» sur l’Occident. Après la Russie (17 millions km²),
et avant la Pologne, l’Ukraine est le second plus grand pays d’Europe
de l’Est par sa superficie de 603 700 km². La géographie a façonné
l’histoire et l’histoire a créé des connexions imbriquées les unes
dans les autres. Il en ressort que quelque 12 millions de Russes
vivent en Ukraine, soit 22% de la population. Habitant dans l’est de
l’Ukraine, ils sont plutôt partisans d’une consolidation des
relations avec la «mère partie», un centre d’attraction remontant
loin dans l’histoire. Avant le début de la longue période soviétique,
l’Ukraine avait déjà été occupée par la Russie, comme elle l’avait
été par la Pologne, la Lituanie, la Crimée, la Hongrie et l’Empire
ottoman. Ainsi, à la suite du traité d’Androussovo conclu en 1667,
l’Ukraine a-t-elle en partie été cédée à la Russie. Quant au reste de
l’Ukraine, la partie rattachée à l’Empire austro-hongrois de 1772 à
1919 a été annexée par l’Empire russe après le second partage de la
Pologne en 1793. Cette période marque la russification massive de
l’Ukraine. Durant deux siècles d’occupation, les décrets (oukazy) se
succédèrent pour limiter, voire interdire l’usage de la langue
ukrainienne. Il faudra attendre 1905 pour que les publications en
ukrainien et les associations culturelles ukrainiennes soient Ă 
nouveau autorisées, sous l’impulsion des premiers mouvements
révolutionnaires. Les structures culturelles ont été redynamisées
afin de relever le niveau de culture et d’instruction des Ukrainiens,
dont seulement 13% étaient alphabétisés en 1897.L’histoire
tumultueuse de l’Ukraine avec la Russie soviétique commence avec la
Révolution bolchevique, période durant laquelle l’Ukraine proclame
son indépendance. Au même moment, les Ukrainiens sous domination
autrichienne (en Galicie, en Bucovine et en Ukraine carpatique),
s’affranchissent et fondent, en 1918, leur propre république en
Galicie orientale. Celle-ci rejoindra l’Ukraine russe pour former une
fédération. Proclamée en novembre 1917, la République autonome
ukrainienne fera face à la République soviétique d’Ukraine soutenue
par les Bolcheviques qui créent la République fédérée d’Ukraine en
1922. A cette période, les besoins des minorités nationales de
l’Ukraine deviennent un enjeu dans les politiques nationales. Enjeux
pris Ă  bras-le-corps par plusieurs organismes nationaux et locaux,
notamment des organismes juifs, polonais et russes. La répression
recommencera après les années vingt, contre les Ukrainiens et les
membres des minorités nationales.

Identité entremêlée

Des Ukrainiens, des Polonais et plusieurs membres des autres
minorités ethniques seront déportés. Ainsi au cours de la Seconde
Guerre mondiale, le régime stalinien a-t-il déporté près de 400 000
Allemands d’Ukraine en ex-URSS, puis 180 000 Tatars de Crimée, ainsi
que des Grecs, des Bulgares et des Arméniens. Les données
démolinguistiques montrent que si la majorité des habitants sont des
Ukrainiens d’«origine», la langue maternelle, l’ukrainien, est une
langue slave de la famille indo-européenne, étroitement apparentée au
russe et au biélorusse. En fait, ces trois langues ne constituaient
par le passé qu’une seule. Celles-ci n’ont commencé à se fragmenter
que vers le XIIème siècle, au point que, avant la soviétisation de
l’Ukraine, on ne comptait pas beaucoup d’emprunts au russe (comme
bilshovnyk issu de bolchevnyk). En revanche, à partir des années
trente, les mots russes sont entrés massivement dans la langue
ukrainienne et, dans beaucoup de cas, affirment les observateurs,
cette introduction n’était pas nécessaire. Cette introduction massive
de mots russes dans le vocabulaire ukrainien fut l’un des résultats
de la politique de russification menée par le Parti communiste de
l’ex-URSS. A l’instar du russe (du biélorusse, du serbe, du bulgare
et du macédonien), la langue ukrainienne s’écrit avec l’alphabet
cyrillique. Actuellement, l’ukrainien et le russe demeurent des
langues distinctes. Cependant, bien que leurs grammaires respectives
présentent beaucoup de similitudes, elles coïncident dans une
proportion d’environ 70%. Sur le plan constitutionnel, la
Constitution de 1996 institue l’ukrainien comme seule langue
officielle, mais reconnaît explicitement aux minorités nationales le
droit de promouvoir leur langue. Aussi l’Etat autorise-t-il
différents types d’établissements scolaires, divisés en trois
catégories :
1- écoles dont la langue d’enseignement est une langue minoritaire;
2- Ă©coles bilingues : ukrainien-russe, ukrainien-roumain,
ukrainien-hongrois, ukrainien-slovaque…;
3- écoles dont le programme d’enseignement inclut l’étude de la
langue, de la littérature, de la culture et des traditions populaires
des minorités nationales.
Selon les données fournies par la Commission nationale des
statistiques, l’instruction de tous les citoyens ukrainiens était
assurée en 1998-1999 par un réseau national dont 75% (4,4 millions
d’élèves) utilisaient l’ukrainien comme langue d’enseignement. Les
établissements dont le russe est la langue d’enseignement
constituaient 12% du réseau (2,3 millions d’élèves). Pour le
professeur Mickailo Kirsenko (Académie de Mohila, à Kiev),
«l’indépendance de l’Ukraine est primordiale pour la raison suivante
: si l’Ukraine réussit à rester indépendante, les Russes seront
obligés de repenser leur identité». Une identité liée depuis toujours
à la nécessité d’avoir accès à la mer Noire. Or, si l’Ukraine coupait
les ponts avec la Russie, elle pourrait lui bloquer la route de la
mer Noire. Confirmant cette idée, Stefan Wilkanowicz, intellectuel
polonais, estime que les Russes se greffent sur l’héritage ukrainien.
Dans le passé, cette greffe s’est doublée d’oppression exercée par
l’ex-URSS. Aujourd’hui, une partie des Ukrainiens perçoivent la même
oppression Ă  travers les pressions Ă©conomiques. Cette connexion entre
les deux Etats remonte à la pluralité de la culture ukrainienne. Ce
pays est une forme de synthèse entre l’Orient et l’Occident et
chancelle entre l’un et l’autre au gré des rapports de force. Par sa
proximité avec l’UE, l’Autriche et la Pologne, l’Ukraine revendique
une prédisposition naturelle et historique au libéralisme politique.
La présence de minorités est, elle aussi, un facteur de rapprochement
avec l’Occident. La minorité hongroise, qui forme 13% de la région
frontalière, fait davantage que de regarder vers l’Ouest. Habitant un
pays qui se développe économiquement lentement, elle compare et
observe «la mère patrie» s’aligner sur l’Union européenne. Résultat,
des milliers d’Ukrainiens d’origine hongroise prennent, chaque année,
le chemin d’un retour inattendu.

La Crimée : le cadeau piégé

La russification s’est également développée à travers la Crimée,
république de Russie rattachée en 1954 à l’Ukraine par le président
de l’URSS, Nikita Khrouchtchev. Ce cadeau «empoisonné» placera
l’Ukraine sur une route parallèle à celle de Moscou. Pendant l’Union
soviétique, elle sera la carte permettant la poursuite de la
russification de l’Ukraine. Après l’indépendance, elle demeurera un
atout d’influence directe. Rappelons par exemple que peu après
l’indépendance, un mouvement sécessionniste dirigé par des Russes se
forma en Crimée. Il proclama même une indépendance, abrogée en mai
1992. Pour contrer cette abrogation, le Parlement de la Fédération de
Russie déclara nul et caduc le transfert de 1954 qui rattachait la
Crimée à l’Ukraine le même mois, avant de se raviser et de
reconnaître le statu quo. Dans l’état actuel des choses, la
République de Crimée est une entité autonome, mais faisant partie
«intégrante et inséparable» de l’Ukraine; elle est peuplée de Russes
orthodoxes,d’Ukrainiens, de Tatars musulmans et de quelques minorités
grecques, bulgares et juives karaĂŻtes. Plusieurs dispositions de la
Constitution ukrainienne de 1996 (les articles 134 Ă  139) sont
consacrées à la République autonome de Crimée qui, par ailleurs, est
dotée de sa propre Constitution selon laquelle elle exerce le pouvoir
dans la préservation de la culture notamment. Selon Liu Zhihai, de
fait, 80% des Russes vivant en Crimée souhaitent retourner en Russie,
faisant ainsi planer des menaces sur l’indépendance et l’unité de
l’Ukraine. Un moyen supplémentaire de faire pression.

L. A. H.

–Boundary_(ID_aEj22tJlLI/3mM99wv6j8w)–

BAKU: Azeri PM says Tbilisi refuses to give Baku necessary cargodocu

Azeri PM says Tbilisi refuses to give Baku necessary cargo documents

ANS TV, Baku
4 Dec 04

Official Baku has evidence that some goods transported to Georgia
via Azerbaijan are redirected to Armenia, Azerbaijan’s Prime Minister
Artur Rasizada has said.

Rasizada said that Azerbaijan possesses hard information that some
goods, especially fuel cargo, transported from Baku to Georgia are
redirected to Armenia. Mr Rasizada said that several Azerbaijani
bodies are currently investigating the case.

Regrettably the Georgian side does not give us the necessary documents,
end quote.

The prime minister also said that fuel prices will be raised again
in Azerbaijan in the future. The government has no way out. Prices
have to be increased, he said.