Author: Topchian Jane

CBA PUTS INTO CIRCULATION GOLD COMMEMORATIVE COIN DEDICATED TO 10th ANNIVERSARY OF RA CASSATION COURT

Noyan Tapan

Au g 13, 2008

YEREVAN, AUGUST 13, NOYAN TAPAN. The Central Bank of Armenia (CBA)
has put into circulation a gold commemorative coin dedicated to the
10th anniversary of the Cassation Court of the Republic of Armenia.

According to the CBA PR Service, the coat of arms of the Republic of
Armenia is depicted on the obverse of the coin. Below the coat of arms,
the nominal value is inscribed in two lines: "10000" and "DRAMS". All
this is surrounded by a striped circle. There is an inscription
"REPUBLIC OF ARMENIA 2008" between the circle and the coin’s edge.

A statue of the goddess of justice is depicted in the middle of the
reverse, below which there is an insription in two lines: "10th" and
"ANNIVERSARY.

The picture and the insription are separated on their outer sides by
perpendicular lines from the two other sections of the reverse. In
the right section, "CASSATION" is inscribed in a semicircle, while
in the left side, "COURT" is inscribed in a semicircle.

The designer of the commemorative coin is Edward Kurghinian. The coin
was minted at the Mint of the Czech Republic. Its nominal vaue is
10,000 drams, it is made of gold (900 hallmark), its weight is 8.6
grams, diameter – 22 mm, the number of minted coins is 500.

0000779fd18c.html

Financial Times
Reproach for the west on its role in Georgia

By Anatol Lieven

Published: August 13 2008 03:48 | Last updated: August 13 2008 03:48

The bloody conflict over South Ossetia will have been good for
something at least if it teaches two lessons. The first is that
Georgia will never now get South Ossetia and Abkhazia back. The second
is for the west: it is not to make promises that it neither can, nor
will, fulfil when push comes to shove.

Georgia will not get its separatist provinces back unless Russia
collapses as a state, which is unlikely. The populations and
leaderships of these regions have repeatedly demonstrated their desire
to separate from Georgia; and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister,
made it clear again and again that Russia would defend these regions
if Georgian forces attacked them.

The Georgians, like the Serbs in the case of Kosovo, should recognise
reality and formally recognise the independence of these territories
in return for a limited partition and an agreement to join certain
Georgian-populated areas to Georgia. This would open the way either
for an internationally recognised independence from Georgia or, more
likely in the case of South Ossetia, joining North Ossetia as an
autonomous republic of the Russian Federation. For the Georgians, the
resolution of their territorial conflicts would make it more likely
that they could eventually join Nato and the European Union – though
after the behaviour of the Georgian administration, that cannot
possibly be considered for many years.

Western governments should exert pressure on Georgia to accept this
solution. They have a duty to do this because they, and most
especially the US, bear a considerable share of the responsibility for
the Georgian assault on South Ossetia and deserve the humiliation they
are now suffering. It is true that western governments, including the
US, always urged restraint on Tbilisi. Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s
president, was told firmly by the Bush administration that he must not
start a war.

On the other hand, the Bush administration armed, trained and financed
the Georgian military. It did this although the dangers of war were
obvious and after the Georgian government had told its own people that
these forces were intended for the recovery of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia.

The Bush administration, backed by Congress, the Republican
presidential candidate John McCain and most of the US media, also
adopted a highly uncritical attitude both to the undemocratic and the
chauvinist aspects of the Saakashvili administration, and its growing
resemblance to that of the crazed nationalist leader Zviad
Gamsakhurdia in the early 1990s.

Instead, according to European officials, the Bush administration even
put heavy pressure on international monitoring groups not to condemn
flagrant abuses by Saakashvili’s supporters during the last Georgian
elections. Ossete and Abkhaz concerns were ignored, and the origins of
the conflict were often wittingly or unwittingly falsified in line
with Georgian propaganda.

Finally, the US pushed strongly for a Nato Membership Action Plan for
Georgia at the last alliance summit and would have achieved this if
France and Germany had not resisted. Given all this, it was not wholly
unreasonable of Mr Saakashvili to assume that if he started a war with
Russia and was defeated, the US would come to his aid.

Yet all this time, Washington had not the slightest intention of
defending Georgia, and knew it. Quite apart from its lack of desire to
go to war with Russia over a place almost no American had heard of
until last week, with the war in Iraq it does not have an army to send
to the Caucasus.

The latest conflict is humiliating for the US, but it may have saved
us from a catastrophic future: namely an offer of Nato membership to
Georgia and Ukraine provoking conflicts with Russia in which the west
would be legally committed to come to their aid – and would yet again
fail to do so. There must be no question of this being allowed to
happen – above all because the expansion of Nato would make such
conflicts much more likely.

Instead, the west should show Moscow its real will and ability to
defend those east European countries that have already been admitted
into Nato, and to which it is therefore legally and morally committed
– notably the Baltic states. We should say this and mean it. Under no
circumstances should we extend such guarantees to more countries which
we do not intend to defend. To do so would be irresponsible, unethical
and above all contemptible.

The writer is a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s
College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation

MUSIC WITHOUT FRONTIERS
By Ed Emery

Le Monde Diplomatique
August 2008
France

A cross-culture celebration

For Londoners, Turkey is now no longer a mysterious presence at the
edge of Europe but almost a familiar cultural identity. An audience
at a Stoke Newington Green (north London) concert of the music
group Nihavend had a chance to listen to Turkish and Ottoman music
celebrating Istanbul one night when, outside in the streets of Stoke
Newington (home to a large Turkish community), there was tension. It
was resolved as the concertgoers emerged into a pandemonium of honking
car horns and waving Turkish flags: Turkey had just beaten the Czech
Republic in the Euro 2008 football tournament.

Down the road at the Arcola Theatre, the Orient Express festival was
under way, its aim to support the people of the Sulukule (Water Tower)
quarter of Istanbul, whose houses are about to be demolished to make
way for urban development along the shores of the Golden Horn. In 2010
Istanbul will be European Capital of Culture, and slum clearance –
at least in the tourist zones – is high on the agenda. But Sulukule
is home to a long-standing Roma community (1). Historically it has
been a focus of popular musical culture, where Istanbuliots like
to go for a good night out. So political and cultural activists are
organising to resist the clearance, and globalised diaspora politics
makes it unsurprising to find the campaigning to save Sulukule has
spread to north London.

Hybridisation, promiscuous influences and high-speed global transfers
are now marks of the international music trade. Music is one the prime
vehicles for the politics of cultural identity, which has exercised
the minds of ethnomusicologists during the past 20 years. The Arcola
Theatre festival included a concert of Greek and Turkish songs,
by the SOAS Rebetiko Band, a 45-strong Greek and Turkish ensemble
created out of ethnomusicology seminars at London University’s School
of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Rebetiko is an urban blues
built around the bouzouki. It developed in the 1920s and 1930s in
the port cities of mainland Greece, among Greek communities uprooted
from Turkey in the population exchanges after the Treaty of Lausanne
(1923). Its lyrics are about drugs, prison, death and unrequited love,
and its characteristic dances are the hasapiko and the zeibekiko.

I play baglama (2) in the band. When we started it four years ago we
were mainly Greeks or of Greek descent (Anglo-Greeks, Cypriots). Then
we were joined by a Turkish violinist, Cahit Baylav, and two woman
singers from Istanbul, Cigdem Aslan and Ivi Dermanci, all with an
interest in Greek music. The Greeks would launch into one of their
songs, and the Turks would say: "We know that song: it’s one of
ours!" Through research, we began to uncover a huge area of shared
musical culture, a music without frontiers in which Greeks and Turks
had a common interest. We now perform these songs (such as Apo xeno
topo (From a foreign land), Uskudar, and the prison/hashish song
Yedikule) in both Greek and Turkish versions (3).

Discovering a shared heritage An earlier generation, accustomed to
nationalism and the bitter memories of war, would have found these
celebrations of shared culture unsettling. But in Greece there are
now groups that perform Ottoman music alongside Byzantine music, and
in Turkey it is normal to hear rebetiko playing loudly from record
shops all along Istanbul’s Istiklal Caddesi. Many of the young from
both countries find it exhilarating to discover, share and celebrate
their common musical heritage.

Some would still oppose these musical sharings. In 1936 the Greek
dictator Metaxas banned rebetiko, which he thought degenerate and
tainted by Orientalism. Instead he imposed a culture of Hellenism
and western classical music. Rebetiko was also banned in Turkey, by
Ataturk, who thought it excessively Byzantine (even though Ataturk had
a record by Roza Eskenazi, the Istanbul-born icon of Greek rebetiko,
in his collection) (4). In the 1990s the battles over music continued,
with the Turkish government wrestling with the huge popularity
of its own orientalising music – Arabesk, a music associated with
migrants from Turkey’s East, with depressive lyrics, transvestite and
trans-sexual singers and Arab-style musical treatments. In February
2007 the post-Islamist AKP government banned access to YouTube, so
we haven’t been able to share the video of our concert with musical
colleagues in Turkey.

Golden view: looking across the Golden Horn from Persembe Pazar,through
the window of a holed ferryboat grounded on the foreshore © Ed Edmery
As a cross-culture celebration we have a plan to take our band to
Istanbul and Athens this October. Our repertoire includes music from
Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Jewish traditions, and we will perform
these with Greek and Turkish musicians, in the spirit of music without
frontiers. Five concerts are planned, as well as seminars in Istanbul,
Athens and Hydra in which Greek and Turkish researchers will explore
the shared cultural roots of the music.

In 2004 I made a personal pilgrimage to Istanbul. The Greek side of
my family once had tobacco factories in Moscow and Pontos, and my
uncle died here of typhus in the early 1920s after the Bolsheviks had
expropriated my tobacco merchant grandfather and the family fled to
Salonika. I was fascinated by the photographs of the ship chandlery
area of the city – Kalafat (caulking), otherwise known as Persembe
Pazar (Thursday market) – as I had seen it in the photographs of the
famous Turkish-Armenian photographer Ara Guler.

My idea was that this was a multicultural maritime community with a
history dating back to the origins of the city (Byzantines, Venetians,
Genoese and others). Here I would find amazing stories and characters,
and perhaps some interesting songs. It lies immediately below the
streets housing famous music shops where every instrument known to
Anatolia can be bought – drums, baglamadhes, cymbals, flutes, reed
clarions – and where the dervishes still whirl.

A maritime village Almost none of my Istanbul friends knew about this
place, although it sits right next to the Galata Bridge on the Golden
Horn and has one of the finest views of the cityscape. Any who did know
the place refused to go there, claiming that it was full of thieves
and junkies. What I found was an extraordinary community of merchants
and artisans, people of many cultural origins (Turks, Greeks, Kurds,
Armenians, Jews) who live and work together in harmony. A maritime
village right at the heart of the city, built around a small mosque,
for the trades necessary to maintain minor shipping.

My friends’ fear was unwarranted. I was able to interview and
photograph (5) a Turkish frogman on his diving boat; Captain Ali
Baba, owner of the ramshackle ferryboat that crosses from Karaköy
to Eminonu; a Greek purveyor of steel and brass rods; a Greek seller
of ships’ thermometers; a Turkish cay maker who serves tea out of a
cubby hole in the wall of the old Venetian prison. Cats stretch in
the sun, the call to prayer echoes from the mosques across the Horn,
merchants slumber in hammocks slung between the trees on the green,
men and women fish with rods from the shoreline and cook their catch
on small open fires, a sesame-bread seller calls his wares. They all
agree that this is a piece (indeed peace) of heaven on earth.

Within Persembe Pazar lies another treasure, the Rustem Pasha Han
(merchant caravan warehouse and inn). The encyclopaedic Strolling
Through Istanbul by Hillary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely devotes
a few lines to it. Designed by the famous architect Sinan for the
Grand Vezir Rustem Pasha c.1550, it is grand enough, though humble
compared with some of the greater caravanserais. It has been a prison
(with the sleeping quarters turned into cells) and a lead works. But
beyond the forbidding rusting iron door you find a peaceable working
world in an august architecture overhung with trailing vines. It,
too, houses a harmonious microcosmic community of metalworking and
engineering workshops – Turks, Greeks, Kurds and Armenians.

Rigas Hacisavas, an Istanbul Greek, was full of the stories of
Persembe Pazar. His mother was an engineer who introduced the first
motorised dustcart into Istanbul. He was devoted to gambling on the
Stock Exchange, and was the first man to introduce into Istanbul
the North Sea mackerel which has become the fish part of balık ekmek
(fish and bread) sold from barbecue boats at the waterside. As I filmed
him (6), Rigas told me that this area is about to be cleared as part
of the urban redevelopment and parkification of the Golden Horn. In
1958 (under the Menderes government) and in the 1980s (under Mayor
Dalan) swathes of it had been demolished. This clearance will be a
sad loss for Istanbul, and for the world. What will be lost is not
only the community but an amazing hardware market where you can buy
everything from a quarter-inch brass rod to a 6-foot propeller. Where
else could you see a man splicing a one-inch steel hawser? Or making
a steel spring on an antique machine that creaks and groans with the
effort? Or turning threaded brass spigots on a lathe?

There is no campaign to save Persembe Pazar, though we may mourn its
passing. When our Rebetiko Band travels in October, we will perform
a small multicultural lunchtime concert for the workers of Rustem
Pasha Han. Come and join us. The venue is unique (7).

–Boundary_(ID_XvI1jmPq2ynMKji+bqC1Lw)–

DEFENSE MINISTER SEYRAN OHANIAN MEETS GEORGIA’S AMBASSADOR TO ARMENIA

ARMENPRESS
Aug 12, 2008

YEREVAN, AUGUST 12, ARMENPRESS: Armenian Defense Minister Seyran
Ohanian met today with Georgia’s ambassador to Armenia, Revaz
Gachechiladze at the latter’s request. The ambassador was accompanied
by Colonel Murtaz Gujejiani, the new military attache of the embassy,
who was introduced to the Armenian minister.

A spokesman for the ministry, Seyran Shahsuvarian, told Armenpress
that the minister conveyed his deep condolences in connection with
death of civilians in the latest developments in Georgia.

The spokesman said the minister and his guests spoke about the 3rd and
4-th stages of the August 18-22 military games Rubezh-2008, to be held
in Armenia within the frameworks of the Collective Security Treaty
Organization, in which Georgia is to be represented as an observer.

The ambassador denied Azerbaijani and Georgian media reports claiming
that Georgia was bombed by a fighter that took off from the Russian
military base in Armenia. The minister for his part assured the
ambassador that Armenian territory will never be used as a base for
launching military actions against Georgia. He expressed hope that
ways will be found to settle the conflict in Georgia.

THE ARMENIAN EMBASSY IN GEORGIA GOES ON HELPING THE CITIZENS OF ARMENIAN TO RETURN TO THEIR MOTHERLAND

armradio.am
11.08.2008 18:04

The Press and Information department of RA Foreign Affairs Ministry
informs that the Armenian Embassy in Georgia and the Armenian General
Consulate in Batumy go on helping the citizens of Armenia to return
to their Motherland.

3500 citizens have already been replaced. Armenia has also supported
850 foreigners to move to Yerevan (45 buses from RA has left for Ajarya
to move another row of Armenians. A commandment was given to support
the border servings to make it easier. Many citizens phoned RA FAM
with the hot lines to be informed about the developing of the events.

Independent Online, South Africa
Aug 10 2008

Merkel calls for ceasefire in Georgia

August 10 2008 at 02:12PM

Berlin – German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday called for an
"immediate and unconditional ceasefire" in Georgia, in a telephone
call with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a spokesperson said.

She also urged the withdrawal of all military forces "to their
positions before the outbreak of hostilities" and said Russian air
attacks on Georgian territory must be stopped "without delay".

Merkel spoke to Sarkozy – whose nation holds the rotating European
Union presidency – ahead of an emergency meeting of EU foreign
ministers in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss the bloc’s response to
the conflict in the Caucasus.

"The chancellor expressed once again her great concern about the
further escalation of the situation in Georgia and the dramatic
consequences for the suffering civilian population," her deputy
spokesperson Thomas Steg said.

"She issued an urgent call for an immediate and unconditional
ceasefire."

Merkel said Georgia’s territorial integrity must be respected and
expressed support for the efforts of the French EU presidency to end
the conflict with a political solution."

"The chancellor and President Sarkozy agreed to continue closely
coordinating on the issue," Steg said.

Georgia declared what it called a "state of war" on Saturday as Russia
bombed the former Soviet republic and their armies battled for control
of the separatist, pro-Moscow region of South Ossetia.

Germany was a vocal opponent of Georgia’s bid – championed by the
United States – to obtain candidate status for NATO membership at a
summit of the transatlantic alliance last April in Bucharest, in large
part due to Georgia’s unresolved conflict with Russia.

Germany heads a loose alliance known as the UN Group of Friends of the
Secretary-General which has been trying to cool tensions between
Moscow and Tbilisi over Abkhazia, another breakaway Georgian republic.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited Georgia,
Abkhazia and Russia in July to present a three-step peace plan, but
received a cool reception.

On Sunday, Steinmeier urged all sides to step back from the brink,
warning that the fighting could spread "like wildfire" throughout the
Caucasus, in an interview in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Deputy Foreign Minister Gernot Erler accused Georgia on Saturday of
breaching a 1992 South Ossetia ceasefire agreement, monitored
essentially by Russian peacekeepers.

The foreign ministry on Sunday issued a travel warning for Georgia,
noting that there had been "bombing of strategic sites such as
railways, ports and military installations outside the conflict areas
proper".

It said on the ministry website that nationals currently in Georgia
may not be able to fly out as many flights have been cancelled. It
recommended taking the land route to Eriwan in Armenia for those now
in eastern Georgia.

Germans in this west of the country should travel to Sarpi on the
Turkish border, it said.

dlc/rom – AFP

The Post, Ireland
Aug 10 2008

Georgian leader chose his moment

10 August 2008

Seamus Martin examines the background to the conflict between Russia
and Georgia.

The volatile Caucasus region is strategically important as a transit
route for oil from the east. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili
is, without question, the region’s most volatile leader.

His decision to shell the South Ossetian city of Tshkinvali while most
world leaders were in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games has
threatened to cause the biggest crisis in Europe for almost two
decades. His action appears to have been a calculated gamble at a time
when world attention is focused elsewhere.

Saakashvili, who is ostensibly pro-western, gambled correctly that
Russia would respond in such away that it would leave itself open to
allegations of expansionism and invasion. In fact, Russia’s new
president, Dmitry Medvedev, had little option but to send in the
tanks. The bombing of the Georgian town of Gori, Stalin’s birthplace,
is less excusable.

Saakashvili has also gambled that the west will come to his aid
militarily in any conflict with Russia. He is likely to lose that
second bet. Concerted peace efforts by Europe, the US and the
international community, in general, appear to be the only hope of
avoiding catastrophic warfare in the area and the main catastrophe
could be on the Georgian side.

These efforts will, on the one hand, need to take the form of strong
pressure on Saakashvili, since he is the party in this conflict most
likely to be open to western influence. On the other hand, calm
requests to Russia to accept a negotiated ceasefire will need to be
made.

Saakashvili’s continuous and consistent tweaking of the Bear’s tail
has finally brought a serious response with Russian tanks rolling into
South Ossetia. In a technical sense, Russia can be seen as invading
Georgian territory, but South Ossetia has been independent of Georgia
on a de facto basis since the early 1990s.

Another and perhaps more serious situation could now arise in
Abkhazia, a second area that broke away from Georgia in 1993.

Known throughout Georgia simply as `Misha’, Saakashvili came to power
in the name of democracy during the Rose Revolution of 2003 that
ousted former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze from the
Georgian presidency.

His democratic credentials were damaged by ill-treatment of opposition
supporters, and media censorship then began to erode his support in
the west. His continuous and sometimes baseless allegations of Russian
aggression have not helped relations with Moscow, which has
traditionally been a major trading partner.

Georgia inherited two major ethnic problems from the dissolution of
the Soviet Union. To the north of the capital, Tbilisi, lay South
Ossetia an enclave of ethnic Ossetes, a group historically supportive
of Russia.

They wanted unity with their compatriots in the Russian area of North
Ossetia, the people whose children were later tome massacred by
Chechens in the school at Beslan.

To the west was the incredibly beautiful region of Abkhazia, where the
Caucasus Mountains reached the coast of the Black Sea. Early in the
Soviet era Abkhazia had become a Constituent Republic, a status that
would have automatically given it independence on the dissolution of
the USSR. But the area was later granted to Georgia by Stalin who was
a Georgian.

A fierce war raged in Abkhazia in 1993, during which the region’s
ethnic Georgians were driven off their land. Ethnic Greeks and
Armenians also fled the area leaving the Abkhaz people almost on their
own.

Although technically part of Georgia, the two regions, with Russian
help, gained de facto independence. The original ethnic reasons for
separatism added to by the near collapse of Georgia’s economy. As the
years passed, they settled into what has become known in international
affairs as `frozen conflicts’.

The shelling of Tskhinvali has ensured that the conflict in South
Ossetia is no longer frozen. While many former Soviet states, notably
Russia itself, improved their economies and the living standards of
their various peoples, Georgia descended into a tumult of clan and
inter-ethnic hostilities upon the dissolution of the USSR.

These conflicts, allied to serious corruption, militated against
economic development. Infrastructure crumbled, unemployment soared,
and energy sources dried up and the political jokes so prominent in
the Soviet era began to resurface.

One told of a typical Georgian apartment in which the macho husband
sat on the balcony drinking wine while his wife prepared to burn the
furniture in a stove in order to cook dinner. Suddenly there was a
flicker and the electric light came on. Then a hiss and the gas
returned. The wife ran to the balcony shouting: “I have very bad
news. I think the communists are back.’

Under Shevardnadze’s rule there was little progress towards settlement
of the two separatist issues and on the economic front he failed to
improve matters. Saakashvili and his supporters took to the streets
successfully to force Shevardnadze from power.

The Rose Revolution and its supporters were, paradoxically, allowed
virtually free rein on the streets of the country’s ancient and
beautiful capital, Tbilisi. They triumphed in the name of democracy,
and Saakashvili was elected president by an overwhelming majority of
the voters.

When, four years later, those opposed to Saakashvili’s presidency took
to the same streets they were met with a brutal response from special
police forces armed not only with conventional weaponry but also with
modern sonic devices designed to disorient them.

Opposition protests continued and Saakashvili called an early
presidential election in January of this year at which he was
re-elected with a massively reduced majority.

Europe’s main election watchdog, the Office for Democratic
Institutions and Human Rights, a section of the Organisation for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), while noting that the vote
was the first genuinely contested election since Georgian
independence, also verified allegations of intimidation on public
sector employees and opposition activists.

Its report also noted that “the distinction between state
activities” and the campaign of Saakashvili was “blurred”,
shorthand for the use of the state’s resources by Saakashvili in his
election campaign.

These election tactics and the earlier brutal treatment of opposition
protesters by the US-educated Saakashvili caused some western
governments to question the almost unqualified support they had given
the Georgian president. His major aim – to succeed in gaining
membership of Nato for Georgia – was believed to have been badly
damaged in the process.

Even his blatant sycophancy in naming the main road from Tbilisi
Airport to the city centre as George W Bush Avenue had begun to wear
thin in Washington political circles. He may not be able to count any
support greater than strongly worded statements, such as that issued
by US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who called on Russia to
respect Georgia’s territorial integrity.

Seamus Martin is a retired international editor and Moscow
correspondent of the Irish Times. His memoir, Good Times and Bad, was
published earlier this year

-qqqt=WORLD-qqqs=news-qqqid=35039-qqqx=1.asp

CONJOINED TWINS AT RVTH
by Hatab Fadera

WOW
08/8/8/conjoined-twins-at-rvth
Aug 8 2008
Gambia

For the first time in the history of childbirth in The Gambia,
one Ramatoulie Jallow, a resident of Serrekunda London Corner,
on Wednesday afternoon, went under the knife in a major caesarean
operation that led to the birth of conjoined female twins.

The caesarean birth was reported to have been successfully conducted
at the Gambia Family Planning Association (GFPA) Clinic in Kanifing
by Dr Ndabo Manneh-Camara, following a thorough examination. The
twins are joined at their stomachs. They were later referred to the
Neonatal Unit of the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital.

Dr Ndabo Manneh-Camara, a medical doctor of the GFPA Clinic, who
conducted the operation, said this development was the first of its
kind in the country and such a case is very rare in the world.

"I have been in the field [of medicine] for 21 years, but this is
the first time that I have came across such a case," Dr Camara said.

The insight

The GFPA’s medical doctor explained that the mother of the twins –
married with three children – came to her clinic at around 1:00 pm
on Wednesday with labour pain.

"When I checked her, I realised that her abdomen was very big and
that everything was not normal. The moment I realised that she was
not in active labour, I quickly suggested a scanning. The scanning
report revealed a multiple pregnancy and this suggested a delivery by
operation, which I had initially suggested," Dr Manneh-Camara said,
adding that "I wasted no time in going ahead with the operation".

According to Dr Manneh-Camara, during the course of the operation, she
realised that the twins were joined and could not be separated. She
disclosed that after the operation, she referred the twins to the
RVTH Paediatric Unit for further investigations.

However, Dr Manneh-Camara, who has undoubtedly earned fame for herself
as the first Gambian doctor to handle such a rare and major maternity
case, admitted that she was unsure of whether the twins share the
same organs, but noted that their mother’s condition is normal.

Asked about what is responsible for such a phenomenon, Dr Manneh-Camara
attributed it to genetic factors, which occur at the early stages
of pregnancy.

Specialist care

Noting that the operation for a possible separation of the conjoined
twins is not available in the country yet, the veteran doctor called
for urgent financial assistance to facilitate an overseas operation
in order to save the young lives.

"Their parents are not financially strong and only urgent intervention
from all stakeholders can complement their efforts to separate the
twins overseas," she added.

Dr Tamsir Mbowe, director of Health and Medical Services, who has
visited the conjoined twins at the Neonatal Unit, said the twins have a
"high chance" of survival.

"The good news is that the visceral organs of the twins are not
connected together according to the CT Scan conducted at the RVTH,"
he added.

Urgent assistance

Dr Mbowe, himself a well-known gynaecologist, said two hospitals
have been identified to conduct the operation in Europe at a cost of
D1.6 million. He then called on the public to assist in meeting the
financial cost of the special operation for the separation of the
twins in Europe.

Ramatoulie Jallow, the mother of the twins, who is currently admitted
at the GFPA Clinic, also appealed for assistance to save the lives
of her twins.

Yankuba Dibba, the executive director of GFPA, stressed that the twins
need urgent financial aid in a bid to also go under the knife overseas.

Willing individuals, organisations and institutions, who wish to
help can render assistance by contacting 991 4535/ 776 4535, or
[email protected].

Scientific evidence

Conjoined twins are extremely rare, occurring in as few as one in
every 200,000 births. The twins originate from a single fertilised egg,
so they are always identical and of the same sex.

The developing embryo starts to split into identical twins within the
first two weeks after conception. However, the process stops before
it is complete, leaving a partially separated egg which develops into
a conjoined foetus.

The birth of two connected babies can be extremely traumatic and
approximately 40-60% of these births are delivered stillborn with 35%
surviving just one day.

Historical records over the past 500 years detail about 600 surviving
sets of conjoined twins with more than 70% of those surviving pairs
resulting in female twins.

Historical records

The earliest known documented case of conjoined twins dates from the
year 945, when a pair of conjoined twin brothers from Armenia were
brought to Constantinople for medical evaluation. It was here that
they were determined to be acts of God and the birth of conjoined
twins was considered a proof that the male’s sexual prowess was truly
twice that of the average man.

However, the Moche culture of ancient Peru depicted conjoined twins in
their ceramics dating back to AD 300. The English twin sisters Mary
and Eliza Chulkhurst, who were conjoined at the back (pygopagus),
lived from 1100 to 1134 and were perhaps the best-known early example
of conjoined twins.

Other early conjoined twins to attain notice were the "Scottish
brothers", allegedly of the dicephalus type, essentially two
heads sharing the same body (1460-1488, although the dates vary);
the pygopagus Helen and Judith of Sz_ny, Hungary (1701-1723), who
enjoyed a brief career in music before being sent to live in a convent;
and Rita and Cristina of Parodi of Sardinia, born in 1829. Rita and
Cristina were dicephalus tetrabrachius (one body with four arms) twins
and although they died at only eight months of age, they gained much
attention as a curiosity when their parents exhibited them in Paris.

E. NALBANDYAN: "WE HOPE GUL WILL VISIT ARMENIA"

Panorama.am
21:18 30/07/2008

The authorities of Armenia will never take an initiative to contribute
to the denial of Armenian Genocide, said the Minister of Foreign
Affairs of Armenia Edward Nalbandyan in a press conference.

The Minister has once more mentioned the official position of Armenia
in the question of Armenian-Turksih relationship. He said that
diplomatic relationship should be established without any putting
preconditions.

"We hope that the President of Turkey Abdullah Gul will accept the
invitation of RA President Serzh Sargsyan to watch the football match
of our countries," said E. Nalbandyan.

E. Nalbandyan has evaluated S. Sargsyan’s visit to Crimea and the
meeting with President of Ukraine in a high level.

ISTANBUL ASKS: WHY GUNGOREN?
by Suzy Hansen

New York Observer
July 31, 2008

ISTANBUL, July 29-Two nights after devastating terrorist bombs exploded
on its popular pedestrian shopping block, the neighborhood of Gungoren
swarmed with people: old and young men repaired the shattered windows
of a clothing shop under the blank, watchful eyes of naked mannequins;
women in head scarves shared ice cream next to women in sundresses;
shop owners smoked beside their boxes of shoes for sale; a handful
of policemen clutched riot shields opposite tiny pink girls jumping
around in empty fountains.

Huge red Turkish flags hung from balconies where families drank tea;
one woman had stretched a flag across the frame from which the glass
of her window had been blown out by the bombs.

Gungoren is the kind of neighborhood I might take a foreigner to if
I wanted to say: This is Turkey. And it’s the kind of neighborhood
that would lead anyone to wonder, as one man who’d lived there for
40 years wondered to me: "Why Gungoren?"

Istanbul is such a diverse and geographically enormous city that when
news breaks of a terrorist bombing, the scramble to make sense of the
act requires everyone to marshal all of their resources to find out
exactly where it happened. Phone-calling, Googling, and then arguing
over what exactly the neighborhood is.

Turks reflexively know whether any neighborhood sits on the European
side or the Asian side; I imagine that’s a genetic adaptation in this
ancient border-sentinel city.

But then come the disagreements and confusions over borders: "It’s
out by the airport." "But is it near New Bosnia?" "Close, but not
too close." "By the sea, or not by the sea?"

Last month’s attack on the U.S. consulate, recently moved to a safer
location up the Bosphorus, invited a similar response-you probably
know someone who lives near the site, but that could be quite far
away from you.

When the news identified the neighborhood of this latest attack as
"Gungoren," there are a few things I knew immediately. The bombing
wasn’t in Sultanahmet, the Old City-the peninsula home of the Aya
Sofya, the Blue Mosque, the Golden Horn, and, once upon a time,
a thousand sex slaves locked up in a palace with a view. Everyone
knows those neighborhoods.

It also can’t be anywhere near Beyoglu, the old European city; the
deluxe dance clubs of the Bosphorus; or the modern skyscrapers of
Maslak. If someone were to bomb these Istanbul commons-as al Qaida
did in 2003-where security cameras line the streets but trash cans
do not, the news would take a more sensational tone than this one
had. It was a whole different kind of bold.

This is partly why Sunday’s attack was so chilling.

The terrorists targeted a pedestrian street in a middle-class
neighborhood of no unique political or religious character. There are
no Byzantine treasures or European corporate headquarters here. Just
a civilian cross section of working, living, breathing Istanbul,
shopping before bedtime.

Pedestrian boulevards are beloved in a hilly, trafficky city of
large families and lonely migrants. In Istanbul, a pleasant, flat
place to walk is also a communal sanctuary, especially in summer,
when nighttime is a blissful reprieve from days spent cursing the sun.

The bomb exploded out of a garbage bin after 10 p.m. And killed
17 people and injured 150, thanks to a tactic the Iraq war has made
cruelly familiar: set off one bomb, draw hundreds of concerned citizens
to the scene, then set off the other. One witness caught an image of
the second bomb exploding on his cell phone.

So, who wanted to bomb Gungoren? The bombs went off the night
before the first day of a massive trial: Turkey’s top prosecutor,
with high-level support from ultra-secularists, had been trying to
shut down the AKP, the Islamic conservative ruling party, and ban
the prime minister and president from politics for five years. The
highest court here can do that, even though the AKP won 47 percent
of the vote in a democratic election. (The verdict came late this
Wednesday: The so-called Islamist government will remain in power.)

Still, the timing of the bomb raised suspicions-but only that vague
suspiciousness that always attends coincidence. Turkey doesn’t have
a strong history of radical Islam, and the AKP’s supporters aren’t
radicals anyway.

"Who does everyone think did this?" I asked my young cab driver,
who’d lived in Istanbul his whole life, on the way to Gungoren.

"Maybe Al Qaida?"

The international terrorist fraternity had been accused of the brash
attack on the U.S. Consulate.

"Could be," he said.

"Not the PKK?"

On July 29, officials fingered the PKK, the militant Kurdish
organization that has engaged in terrorist tactics for 30 years. The
PKK doesn’t have an obvious connection to the AKP trial, but it has
been taking a beating from the Turkish military in recent weeks. So
far, the PKK, who often take responsibility for their terrorist acts,
have denied Gungoren, and offered their condolences to the victims.

"Could be," he replied again.

"This is the problem when something like this happens now," said one
Turkish intellectual. "You think: ‘It could be the PKK, it could be
DHKP/C, it could be Al Qaida, it could be the "Deep State"-it could
be anyone!’"

The Deep State-or Ergenekon-is another story, and a distinctly
Turkish one.

The word "Ergenekon" refers to a Central Asian myth about the origin
of the Turkish race, and involves caves and wolves and possibly world
domination, but what’s important to know today is that "Ergenekon"
was the name chosen by a murderous gang.

At least, in Turkish, they call it a "gang," but the word carries a
different meaning than it does in English. This isn’t the Crips and
the Bloods. It also isn’t the Italian Mafia, because Turkey’s mafias
run parking lots. Ergenekon, assuming it exists, is the most powerful
gang of all, the ubergang.

Turks have been living in a state of legitimized paranoia since
January, when over 80 members of the Ergenekon gang were arrested for
trying to create an atmosphere of instability that would result in
a coup against the ruling religious government. The accused make up
the ultranationalist upper crust-retired military generals, lawyers,
academics, journalists, a university president, the head of PR for
a church.

The 2,500-page indictment against Ergenekon, which was released
this past weekend, accuses the gang of engaging in demonic terrorist
tactics: bomb prominent targets, blame left-wing or minority groups,
and stir up chaos until the army is forced to step in, shut down the
government and wipe the slate clean. That’s why subscribers to this
theory might think Ergenekon had a hand in Gungoren: maximum chaos,
minimal sense.

That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Every morning, Turks wake up
to terrifying headlines, newspapers filled with incredible details
about Ergenekon. Among many other things, Ergenekon supposedly kept
a to-do list including plans to kill Prime Minister Tayyip Erodgan
and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk-and anyone else who threatens the
sanctity of the secular nation or the tenets of Turkish nationalism.

One of the arrested was the lawyer, Kemal Kerincsiz, who prosecutes
writers and other liberal folks for violating the infamous
anti-free-speech law Article 301. Some link Ergenekon to the 2007
assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the newspaper Agos and the
face of Istanbul’s Armenian community.

Could one group possibly be responsible for all these acts? It strains
credulity, and so some suspect that anti-secularist or religious
elements have engineered the Ergenekon investigation. That secularist
vs. Islamist war in Turkey you’ve been hearing about goes way beyond
head scarves.

But the point is that Turks have been living for years with the idea
that some secret force controls the fate of their nation. Here,
well before the Ergenekon case, when participating in any sort
of political conversation, it was common for Turks-all Turks, not
conspiracy theorists-to mention the "Deep State" as a legitimate
actor in the country’s problems.

For now, some Turks will be satisfied by the authorities’ prime
suspects: PKK for Gungoren, Al Qaida for the U.S. consulate. But in
this climate, the deeper Turkish response to the Gungoren tragedy
and others will remain, Who the hell knows anymore?

"Terror is terror," said one Gungoren native, sitting on a bench at
the bomb site, chain-smoking. And so living, working Istanbul learns
to live with its dangerous enemies, whoever they are.