The Really Easy Rider

The Really Easy Rider
By MICHELLE HIGGINS

The New York Times
August 5, 2005

Like pilgrims to some holy land, but tattooed and on two wheels,
thousands of motorcyclists will converge in Sturgis, S.D., next week to
be part of one of the country’s largest and longest-running gatherings
of bikers. Many will ride for days, enduring miles of blistering sun,
bouts of rain and the occasional mouthful of bugs before arriving in
a cloud of dust at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

Chevalier Kevorkian will be there, too, just as he has been about a
dozen times before. But his bike will roll into town another way –
in the back of a tractor trailer. For roughly $675, Mr. Kevorkian,
a 57-year-old screenwriter from Palm Springs, Calif., is having his
Harley shipped from his hometown to Sturgis and back. Instead of
taking three long days of riding just to get there, he’ll arrive
fresh off a flight and pick up his bike at a local hotel.

“I just don’t have the schedule to do it this year,” said
Mr. Kevorkian, who has ridden to Sturgis from Los Angeles in the
past. “At least I’ll be there and be on my own bike.”

In a major shift from tradition, a small but growing number of
enthusiasts, who like to ride but not to rough it, are shipping
instead of riding their bikes to motorcycle events. For the months
of May through August, the Federal Warehouse Company in East Peoria,
Ill., an affiliate of Allied Van Lines, expects to ship 3,000 bikes
for individuals and groups to various places this year, up from 2,800
as recently as 2003.

Taking notice of the niche, FedEx began marketing a vehicle shipping
service in January – a venture the company bought in 2000 and rebranded
last year. FedEx is marketing the service for groups. For example, it
will ship 12 motorcycles one-way from Los Angeles to Sturgis for $617
each. That’s $895 below the charge for shipping an individual bike.

Even more motorcycle enthusiasts are driving to events on four wheels,
pulling their bikes behind them in trailers. Lisa Weyer, director of
the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, estimates that the number of people who
ride to town has fallen to below half of all attendees. “Most people
trailer nowadays,” she said.

Not surprisingly, some hard-core bikers aren’t pleased with the trend.
At Sturgis and other big gatherings like Laconia Motorcycle Week in
New Hampshire some attendees wear T-shirts with a slogan that reads:
“I rode my bike to trailer week.”

Lee Bruns, 37, a machinist from Watertown, S.D., and his wife, Donna,
stopped going to the Sturgis rally several years ago. “The overwhelming
number of trailers have so overrun the event that we no longer wish
to attend,” he said. “The whole idea of motorcycle ownership is not,
nor has ever been, about the destination. It is and always will be
about the journey.”

THE popularity of custom motorcycles, sparked by shows like “American
Chopper” on the Discovery Channel, is contributing to the trend. Many
of these bikes, built for fashion rather than function, are just not
comfortable for long rides. And after paying thousands for a custom
paint job, most owners aren’t willing to risk the kind of damage many
miles of kicking up dirt and gravel could cause.

As a result, motorcycle trailer makers say their business has taken
off in recent years. Haulmark Industries in Bristol, Ind., said sales
of its motorcycle trailers are up about 25 percent in the last few
years. The company plans to introduce two new models at the Sturgis
rally this year that are priced from $25,000 to $35,000. The enclosed
trailers come equipped with air-conditioning, two fold-down beds,
a bathroom, maple cabinets and stainless steel appliances. There’s
also room for two motorcycles.

Some shippers cater specifically to bikers headed to events. “This
year, we’re turning lots of people away for Sturgis because we’re
simply full,” said Kristy Garcia, who runs Harley Haul in Pottstown,
Pa., with her husband, Rob. The business, which currently uses one
tractor-trailer, is doing so well they plan to add another next year.

Putting a bike on a truck doesn’t mean it’s safe from accidents. Last
month, Tommy Simmons, a pharmacist from Darlington, S.C., watched as
Federal Warehouse loaded his Harley onto a tractor-trailer headed
for Sturgis. But just days before his trip, Mr. Simmons got a call
telling him his bike had been badly damaged in transit. “It’s just
a disaster,” said Mr. Simmons, who had been planning the trip for a
year. “There’s nothing to do if you don’t have a bike.”

Such accidents are “very rare” said Jackie Taylor, manager of
motorcycle transportation at Federal Warehouse. About 3 percent of the
13,000 bikes it ships each year are damaged, according to Federal’s
Web site (), and the average claim is usually
around $500. Though the company won’t refund Mr. Simmons his money,
it has offered to ship out a spare bike he owns for free.

The new approach to getting to Sturgis is a big change from the days
when dust-encrusted biker gangs would take over the town and residents
would board up their homes and leave.

The demographic of motorcycle buyers has shifted in recent years. In
2003, the average motorcycle owner earned $55,850, up about 26
percent from $44,250 in 1998, according to the most recent data from
the Motorcycle Industry Council. On average, Harley-Davidson owners
earn more than $80,000 a year, according to the company.

For many of these riders, motorcycles are more a hobby than a
lifestyle. As a result, some motorcycle gatherings are losing their
rough edge. “People used to think Bandidos and Hell’s Angels,” said
Tom Griffith, a spokesman for the Sturgis rally. “Now, you’re just
as likely to see a bunch of lawyers driving, and for the first time
in 51 weeks they haven’t shaved.”

Of course, many bikers still ride to events. Last year, Steve Quarles,
48, president of an ad agency in Nashville, Tenn., traveled roughly
1,300 miles on his Harley Road Glide to get to Sturgis. This year he
plans to do it again. “It’s really a point of pride and distinction
for those of us who ride,” said Mr. Quarles, who has a sticker on
his helmet that says, “I rode mine to Sturgis 2004.”

For bikers who don’t ride, there can be consequences. “Everybody
rags on you a bit,” said Dan Dunham, owner of Kickstart, a motorcycle
shipping company in Lakeland, Fla., “but at least you’re there.”

Some riders simply fake it. Last year, Eric Fierst, who works for a
moving company in Landover, Md., that is affiliated with Allied, said
that he and his buddies got some flak for trailering their motorcycles.

“This year, nobody is really going to know, because we’re having our
bikes delivered to the house we’re renting,” Mr. Fierst said. Before
riding into town, he and his friends will take an extra precaution.

“We’ll wipe a little bit of dirt on our faces,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/automobiles/05sturgis.html
www.funtransport.com

The Museum of Snoring: snorers are worse than criminals

Pravda, Russia
Aug 4 2005

The Museum of Snoring: snorers are worse than criminals
08/04/2005 09:54
Composer Johannes Brahms could outdo the whole orchestra with his
snoring

It is an open secret that snoring is extremely annoying at night, but
it can also make some individuals lose their temper in the daytime.
The museum exposition in Alfeld, a small town in Lower Saxony, is
wholly devoted to the phenomenon of snoring and methods of fighting
with those who snore their heads off.

Poet Marina Novikova wrote a witty “Ode to Snoring”, where this
disorder was presented as a guarantee of immeasurable love: a woman
is ready to forgive her lover for snoring if only he will sleep
beside her.

About 20 percent of all adults snore on a frequent basis. The snoring
ones include women as well men (the latter especially). The British
Snoring and Sleep Apnoea Association conducted a survey which showed
that the majority of snorers (and those who sleep beside them) are
dreaming of getting rid of this problem. The most common after-effect
of snoring is connected with insufficient sleep and waking up tired
(81 percent). In many cases snoring causes headache, which can spoil
sex life and even lead to divorce. Women, whose partners snore in
their sleep, also complain that they do not get satisfaction from sex.

About 400 more or less effective snore remedies are displayed in
Alfeld, which is situated not far from Hildesheim (Lower Saxony).
Physician and researcher Joseph Alexander Wirth collected them on his
own initiative. Not only did he collect them but also exposed them to
the public in the local “Museum of Snoring” (“Schnarchmuseum Alfeld”).

One of the army jokes says: “How do you get rid of snoring? – “You
should sleep in a gas mask!”

In the museum there is an “anti-snoring mask” which is a hundred years
old and represents leather straps that were wrapped around the chin
so that the mouth would remain close.

“These are the real torture tools, – Mr. Wirth grins. – During the
Independence War in the US a cannonball was sewn down to the inner
side of the snoring soldiers’ uniforms so that they would not turn
over onto their backs and disturb fellow soldiers. A similar method
is applied even nowadays, although instead of heavy cannonball thick
foam plastic pillow is used or tennis-balls are sewn down to the back.”

Here one can see the so-called “ear suppository” which is paled into
the snorer’s ear so he would not turn over on his side. Another
object represents hollow tubule filled with essential oils, which
during the lighting-up get into respiratory tract prevent snoring.
Its inventor left on e question unanswered: how do you sleep with this
thing? Another case displays prosthetic devices for oral cavity,
which help to pull the upper jaw to the front by force. “Pins”
for nose, which stretch nostrils to the point when a sleeper gets
more oxygen. The devices, which are fastened on hands or legs and
start vibrating in the time of snoring. Or the cruelest of all –
electroshock.

Many of the odd items in the cabinet of curiosities were gifted to
55-year-old Wirth by his patients. “I kept them in the basement, but
then I thought why not to make a museum out of this?” the collector
of rarities tells.

He collected the rest of curiosities through the Internet and
finally opened “The Museum of Snoring” in 2000. Mr. Wirth was greatly
assisted by the local Schlafapnoe society. About thousand of people
visit a small house in the residential area of Alfeld every year.
The doctor thinks that “people must come to the museum smiling and
leave it having learnt something”.

The snorers may be comforted by the fact that many famous people
suffered from the same trouble: British PM Winston Churchill, for
instance. The lover of Armenian cognac “warbled” so much at night
that lady Churchill escaped from the bedroom in panic. After decades
of happy marriage she slept in the bedroom with special acoustic
insulation. They say that composer Johannes Brahms could outdo the
whole orchestra with his snoring. Some say that physicist Albert
Einstein and even the mighty Greek god of wine, Dionysus, were among
those who loved to snore.

There is a whole collection of stories and caricatures devoted to this
topic in the museum. In addition to books and pictures one can see
a variety of dolls and fabric animals, which can snore when squeezed.

Igor Bukker

Armenia’s draft constitution divides opposition

ARMENIA’S DRAFT CONSTITUTION DIVIDES OPPOSITION
Haroutiun Khachatrian 8/03/05

EurasiaNet Organization
Aug 3 2005

Strong support from the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission for
Armenia’s draft constitution promises to bolster President Robert
Kocharian in his ongoing feud with the country’s opposition. With a
draft document that meets many of their earlier concerns, opposition
leaders are now divided over what further course to take. Even while
the largest opposition faction has announced plans to continue its
boycott of parliament, most other opposition leaders now appear ready
for cooperation with the government.

The amendments, designed largely to curtail the president’s powers,
would provide a “good basis” for bringing Armenia in line with
“European standards” for human rights, democracy and rule of law, the
Commission, which advises the Council on constitutional law matters,
argued in an official statement on July 22. The draft promises to
“pave the way for [Armenia’s] further European integration,” the
Commission concluded.

With the Council of Europe now supporting the government’s proposed
amendments, the political ball has fallen into the opposition’s
court. The nine-party Ardarutiun (Justice) opposition bloc, the
country’s largest, which has boycotted parliament since early 2004,
had earlier pledged that it would work alongside the government to
secure support for the new constitution. Once parliament approves
the draft in a third reading on August 29, the amendments will be
submitted for approval in a nationwide referendum expected to be held
in November 2005.

Such an alliance would be unprecedented. But whether or not it will
ever materialize remains in doubt. Two parties within the Ardarutiun
bloc – Hanrapetitiun (Republic) and the National Democratic Alliance
– appear to be driving a split. On July 19, Hanrapetitiun released a
statement that characterized a refusal by the opposition to work with
the government as the best bet for ending President Robert Kocharian’s
rule. “Following the failure of the constitutional amendments in
2003, another failure will inevitably result in the inglorious end
of the anti-popular regime,” the statement read. By working with the
government, Hanrapetitiun has argued, the opposition will only help
Kocharin’s administration retain power. “These authorities have no more
resources for reforms,” Smbat Ayvazian, a Hanrapetitiun board member,
commented after a July 15 meeting of the Aradarutiun bloc. Arahsk
Sadoyan, leader of the National Democratic Alliance, went further,
terming one opposition member’s support for cooperation with the
authorities “betrayal.”

Meanwhile, the majority of Ardarutiun members appear to have
taken a more moderate position. A July 19 statement released by
the parliamentary faction Ardarutiun reflected these views. The
faction expressed willingness to participate “in the process of
constitutional reforms and to present its proposals for improving the
draft [constitution] given the full implementation of the principles
put forward by the faction.” The faction has listed implementation of
the Venice Commission’s January 2005 recommendations and measures to
ensure a fair vote in the November constitutional referendum, including
changes to the electoral code, punishment of those involved in vote
rigging during the 2003 parliamentary elections and unrestricted
broadcast coverage of the referendum, including reopening the private
A1+ television station, as among its pre-conditions for participation
in the constitutional reform process.

Some observers believe that these differences could lead to
Hanrapetutiun eventually leaving the Ardarutiun bloc, a situation that
would only worsen problems already known to exist between Ardarutiun
and the influential opposition National Unity Party. National Unity
Party Chairman Artashes Geghamian is generally believed to be more
inclined to cooperate with the Kocharian administration than the
leaders of Ardarutiun.

For now, though, opposition members maintain that a split is not yet
inevitable. In an interview with the Aravot daily on July 19, National
Unity Party Deputy Chairman Aleksan Kirakosian stressed that “[i]f
the Ardarutiun bloc is broken, this will benefit the authorities,
and for this reason any problems should be settled without noise
rather than on the pages of newspapers.”

At a July 19 press conference, Shavarsh Kocharian , an Aradarutiun
bloc leader, seconded the call for reconciliation, citing a lack of
information as one potential cause for Hanrapetutiun’s opposition to
the draft constitution. Further talks, he told reporters, may lead the
faction to change its position. “The goal of Artarutiun has always
been to change the rules of games in the country, and we will reach
this goal.”

Editor’s Note: Haroutiun Khachatrian is a Yerevan-based writer
specializing in economic and political affairs.

No Laughing Matter

Tiny Revolutions in Russia: Twentieth-Century Soviet and Russian
History in Anecdotes

By Bruce Adams
RoutledgeCurzon
173 Pages. $97

No Laughing Matter

The Soviet police state was probably one of the least funny regimes in
history, but the jokesters collected in Bruce Adams’ book didn’t see
things that way.

By Carl Schreck

Published: July 22, 2005

Educated as an engineer, Klava was working as a manicurist to pay the
bills while she waited for permission to leave Brezhnev’s Soviet
Union. She was tending to her customers’ fingernails one day when a
longtime client sauntered in and tried to move to the head of the
line. Klava explained that she would have to wait like everyone else,
and while she waited, Klava and her customers swapped political
wisecracks subverting popular Party slogans:

“When we say Lenin, we mean Party,” they said. “When we say Party, we
mean Lenin. And this is how we deal with everything. We say one thing,
we mean something else.”

After Klava had finished with her other customers, the unscheduled
client told a joke of her own: “There was a competition for the best
joke about Lenin. And the first prize is 10 years to where Lenin used
to go,” meaning jail or exile. The client, it turned out, was a KGB
agent. “If I did not value you as my manicurist, I would send you for
10 years to where Lenin used to go,” she said.

Klava was eventually allowed to emigrate, and the story appeared in an
article by anthropologist Elliott Oring last year. Still, the irony of
a KGB employee threatening the seditionist with a seditious joke
beautifully embodies not only the prevalence of political jokes in
Soviet society and the dangers associated with such humor, but the
cruel, arbitrary nature of the Soviet regime.

Jokes, or anekdoty, were indeed risky business in the Soviet Union,
Bruce Adams maintains in the introduction to “Tiny Revolutions in
Russia,” his light if thoroughly entertaining recap of Soviet history
told through a mix of amusing, tragicomic, baffling and plain unfunny
jokes that will strike a familiar chord with any foreigner who has
shared a couple bottles of vodka with a table full of Russians.

George Orwell was the first to dub jokes “tiny revolutions,” but it’s
an especially fitting title for Adams’ book, which reminds us that
humor can have very serious consequences when the joke is on a
totalitarian regime. The eight years Nobel laureate Alexander
Solzhenitsyn spent in prisons and labor camps came as punishment for
jokes he had made about Josef Stalin in his private correspondence,
Adams writes. “The anecdotes were necessarily underground humor shared
only with close friends.”

The meat of “Tiny Revolutions” is divided into six chapters devoted to
leaders from different eras. Vladimir Lenin, Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev
and Leonid Brezhnev each get their own chapter, while Yury Andropov
and Konstantin Chernenko, the infirm symbols of the crumbling Soviet
gerontocracy, are forced to share, as are Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris
Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. Embedded in Adams’ historical accounts of
each period, the jokes address the absurdities of Soviet life and take
down the vanguard of the world revolution a notch or two.

Viktor Bogorad

Soviet and Russian jokes have often been subversive, mocking elites
from Lenin and Stalin to the New Russians of the 1990s.

The Lenin years, Adams explains, marked the first appearance of
Rabinovich, a staple Jewish character who can never quite find his
place in Soviet society, despite the fact that anti-Semitism was
supposed to have disappeared on the road to communism:

“When no African delegates showed up at a Comintern Congress, Moscow
wired Odessa [a very cosmopolitan port city with a large Jewish
population]: ‘Send us a Negro immediately.’

“Odessa wired right back: ‘Rabinovich has been dyed. He’s drying.'”

Political jokes naturally continued in the Stalin era, lampooning
everything from shortages (especially of food), the First Five-Year
Plan and grandiose construction projects like the White Sea-Baltic
Canal, which saw hundreds of thousands of convicts dig 227 kilometers
of canal “with primitive tools in horrible conditions.” Jokesters
appear to have been included in the work force:

“‘Who built the White Sea-Baltic Canal?’

“‘On the right bank — those who told anecdotes, on the left bank —
those who heard them.'”

The funniest jokes in “Tiny Revolutions” are from the Khrushchev and
Brezhnev periods, not only because both leaders were ripe for mockery,
but also thanks to the political thaw that followed Stalin’s
death. Adams dubs the era “the golden age of the anecdote.”

The famously bald Khrushchev’s meddling with agriculture policy is
best summed up by one joke from the “Armenian Radio” genre, in which a
quick-witted radio operator from Yerevan sticks it to the bosses in
Moscow:

“‘What is Khrushchev’s hair-style called?’

“[Armenian Radio]: ‘The harvest of 1963.'”

Similarly, the Brezhnev-era jokes tend to ridicule the increasing
senility of His Eyebrowness:

“Brezhnev begins his official speech opening the 1980 Olympics: ‘O! O!
O!’

“His aide interrupts him with a whisper: ‘The speech starts below,
Leonid Ilich. That is the Olympic symbol.'”

But the Brezhnev chapter also includes a few gems about the rampant
paranoia of foreign spies and insidious Western propaganda:

“Because the BBC always seemed to know Soviet secrets so quickly, it
was decided to hold the next meeting of the Politburo behind closed
doors. No one was permitted in or out. Suddenly Kosygin grasped his
belly and asked permission to leave. Permission was denied. A few
minutes later there was a knock at the door. A janitress stood there
with a pail: ‘The BBC just reported that Aleksei Nikolayevich shit
himself.'”

In a sharp departure from the earlier chapters, the funniest jokes
from the Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin section are not political at
all, but instead aimed at gaudy and ruthless New Russians. Take, for
instance, the New Russian equivalent of “Why did the chicken cross the
road?”:

“Two new Russians meet on a Paris street. ‘Look at this,’ brags the
first, ‘I just bought this Pierre Cardin tie for $300.’

“‘Big deal,’ retorts the other, ‘I got the same tie yesterday for
$500.'”

The jokes in Tiny Revolutions are hit-or-miss throughout, but the
final chapter is somewhat anticlimactic. According to Adams, this is
because the political anecdote has essentially become obsolete due to
increased employment, a booming stock market and the declining rate of
poverty. It’s not a particularly convincing causal link, nor an easy
idea to explain in just three paragraphs, which is all he devotes to
this provocative subject.

“Tiny Revolutions” offers too cursory an account of 20th-century
Russia to be considered an authoritative work of history, and with
less than 800 jokes, it’s not exactly a comprehensive anthology. To
use basketball parlance, one might compare it to a “tweener” — a
player too small to play under the basket yet lacking some of the
requisite skills to be effective from the perimeter.

But the happy medium that Adams strikes is exactly why his book works
so well. Despite a standard-issue academic binding that threatens to
induce sleep faster than a handful of Imovanes, “Tiny Revolutions”
deserves a better fate than to be relegated to dust-collecting duties
in Eastern European Studies sections of university libraries.

Copyright © 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.

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Ukraine offers Iran alternative gas pipeline routes to Europe

Ukraine offers Iran alternative gas pipeline routes to Europe

Interfax-Ukraine news agency
25 Jul 05

Kiev, 25 July: Ukraine has offered Iran two alternative routes for
building a pipeline for delivering Iranian gas to Western Europe:
Iran-Armenia-Georgia-Ukraine-Europe and Iran-Armenia-Georgia-Black
Sea-Ukraine-Europe.

First Deputy Fuel and Energy Minister and [state oil and gas company]
Naftohaz Ukrayiny head Oleksiy Ivchenko made this proposal in talks
with Iran’s Deputy Oil Minister Mohammad Hadi Nezhad-Hoseynian in
Tehran on 24 July, Naftohaz Ukrayiny’s press service reported.

Following the meeting, the Ukrainian Fuel and Energy Ministry and the
Iranian Oil Ministry signed a memorandum on mutual understanding,
which foresees holding a five-party meeting by the end of September,
forming expert groups, exchanging information on implementation of the
project, and determining the powers of the companies that will take
part in implementing one of the versions for the construction of the
pipeline.

The sides also determined volumes of gas for delivery to Ukraine and
other European countries, the Naftohaz-Ukrayiny press-release says.

In addition, the Ukrainian side proposed starting preparations for
implementing one of the versions of the project in a bilateral format
at this stage with other countries getting involved later on.

Ivchenko said the construction of a transit gas pipeline from Iran to
Western Europe is the two countries’ most promising joint project. He
said that Ukraine “has all the necessary technical and economic
capacities for implementing large-scale oil and gas projects jointly
with Iran in the near future”.

Nezhad-Hoseynian gave a high assessment the capacities of the
Ukrainian side for exploring, extracting and transporting fuel and
supported Ivchenko’s proposal to start preparations for implementing
the project.

Ivchenko also had a meeting with Iranian Oil Minister Bizhan
Namdar-Zangeneh, during which the sides expressed satisfaction with
the development of cooperation between the two countries in the oil
and gas area and the result of the talks.

NKR: Let The `Virus’ of Karabakh Spread

LET THE `VIRUS’ OF KARABAKH SPREAD

Azat Artsakh – Nagorno Karabakh Republic [NKR]
25 July 05

The Karabakh war is unimaginable without the support of our friends.
Their number is great, the geography extended. If one ever decides to
make a listof those persons, the people of Karabakh will mention the
name of the vice speaker of the House of Lords, Baroness Caroline Cox
among the first. She was beside the people of Karabakh since the times
when Stepanakert was bombed. Among our foreign friends Caroline Cox is
perhaps in the first place by the number of her visits to Karabakh.
Recently she again visited Karabakh; it was her 59th visit. The 60th
visit will be in September. During the meeting with the president of
NKR Arkady Ghukassian he said that unfortunately the hotel being built
in the square will not be ready to host the Lady on a high level, and
she said she would agree to live in a tent, and the confession of the
Lady is frank.This February C. Cox delivered lectures at the School of
Theology of London, and as a result a large group of students decided
to visit Artsakh and see everything themselves. In her 59th visit to
Karabakh Lady Cox was accompanied by a group of young people, mainly
students of theology, political science and international relations
from Australia, France, the US, Turkey, Burma, and other countries,
studying in the United Kingdom. During the meeting with the students
the president of NKR said hopefully they will also catch the `virus’
of Karabakh like Lady Cox and spread it all over the world. Lady Cox
said her aim is to involve more and more people in this work, and
especially young people, in order for them to discover Karabakh as a
country where every year great changes take place in the economy and
building of democracy. For an unrecognized country that we are it is a
necessity to have friends abroad who become in a way our ambassadors.
It is nice to feel that we are not alone; the visits of young people
are especially encouraging. If each one of them tells their friends
what they saw in Karabakh, it will be a step towards the recognition
of our country; without being recognized we have no access to the
international tribunals; we have therefore to look for alternative
ways of spreading our truth. And the visits of foreigners favour
this. Each of the students had their individual interest. For
instance, there was a Turkish student of the School of Theology of
London who is Christian (he did not want to have his name published).
He had wished to see Mount Ararat from the other side of the border,
learn the truth and present it in his country. In answer to our
question if he was not afraid of persecutions in his country, he said
he is not alone for there are other Turks who have a different
attitude towards the Armenians. Another studentsfrom Burma named Baun
Thai San studying at Yerevan State Medical University told that there
is a state in Burma called Shan (and the people there are Chinese)
which fights for independence. They are Christians, who are only 3 per
centof the main Buddhist population of the country, and are repressed
by their rulers who destroy their culture. The Chinese student of
Burma had come to Karabakh to see how it managed to preserve its
identity, as he said, to learn from the people of Karabakh. They
formed an opinion about Karabakh not only through official meetings.
The students lived in host families where there were young people of
their age. This was a great advantage to come in touch with the people
directly. All the members of the group were delighted with the
hospitality of the Karabakh people. Caroline Cox had brought along
with her the two issues raised by her at the House of Lords. Several
days ago she spoke about Turkey’s membership to the European
Union. The question was if Turkey could enter the European Union
having closed its borders with Armenia and prompted that it is the
only closed border in Europe. It was mentioned that the border should
be opened in a way to sustain peace and economic growth in both
countries. Besides, Caroline Cox raised the issue of recognition of
the Armenian Genocide by the United Kingdom. However, she said, she
did not expect that they would reconsider their position; but she
pointed out that there are members of the House of Lords who speak
about the Armenian issue, and a reassuring answer was givenby the
British government.

SVETLANA KHACHATRIAN.
25-07-2005

BAKU: Armenia breaches ceasefire again, report says

Armenia breaches ceasefire again, report says

Assa-Irada, Azerbaijan
July 22 2005

Baku, July 21, AssA-Irada — Armenian military units, from their
positions in the occupied Talish village of Terter District,
northwest Azerbaijan, fired at Chayli village of the same district
and the positions of Azerbaijani troops located in this village with
submachine guns and machine guns from 01.00 until 01.30 on Thursday,
according to local TV reports. No casualties are reported.

The Ministry of Defense did not confirm the reports.*

Soccer: England are Frustrated: England 1 – Armenia 1

The Mirror, UK
July 21, 2005, Thursday

FOOTBALL: ENGLAND ARE FRUSTRATED;
ENGLAND 1 ARMENIA 1

STILL STANDING: The Northern Ireland wall block a free kick from
Serbia’s Marinkovic

ENGLAND’S bid to win the UEFA European Under-19 Championship for the
first time suffered a setback when they were held at the Ballymena
Showgrounds.

A semi-final spot may still be within the grasp of Martin Hunter’s
young guns but they have made life a lot more difficult for
themselves.

With France beating Norway 3-1, England know they must beat Norway on
Saturday to qualify.

After controlling the first half, Hunter’s side were left scratching
their heads as to how they had not taken a lead into the half-time
interval.

Dexter Blackstock and Mark Noble both had goals disallowed. Grant
Leadbitter then missed a penalty early in the second half, before
England finally got their reward with a goal from Southampton’s
Matthew Mills. However, Armenia had the final say, scoring a late
equaliser.

Int’l conference on IT to be held in Armenia

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES TO BE HELD IN ARMENIA

PanArmenian News Network
July 20 2005

20.07.2005 04:46

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ International Conference entitled “Information
Science and Information Technologies (CSIT 2005) will be held in
Yerevan September 19-23, member of the RA National Academy of Sciences
Mariam Harutyunian said in a conversation with “.am” PanARMENIAN.Net
reporter. The event was initiated by the RA NAS and the Institute
of Informatics and Automation Problems. In her words, scientists
from the U.S., France, Switzerland, India, Russia, Georgia, Canada,
Australia, Finland and Ukraine. The purpose of the conference is
the exchange of scientific and technological information between the
scientists engaged in information science and technology. The reports
will made on algorithms- automates and logic, discrete mathematics
and combinatory analysis, information theory and encoding theory,
artificial intelligence and management systems, database, scientific
calculations, telecommunication, computer network design, information
technologies and their application.

Europe Must Not Lose Sight of the Frozen Conflicts

Europe Must Not Lose Sight of the Frozen Conflicts
by VLADIMIR SOCOR

June 3-5, 2005

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE

The European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy is one of the
major casualties of the voter backlash against the EU’s constitutional
treaty. To be sure, some of the constitutional treaty’s leading
advocates — such as French President Jacques Chirac and German
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder — had themselves weakened the CFSP for
years by blocking key initiatives or working at cross purposes with
the policy and absurdly trying to distance the EU from NATO. But, in
the final analysis, it is up to the European Council and Commission to
offer voters an inspiring strategic vision on EU policy. This should
pursue together with NATO the common economic and security interests
in the new Euro-Atlantic neighborhood to the east.

At this stage, those interests converge on the greater Black Sea
region. From Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria to Georgia and on
to Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, this region functions as a vital
two-way corrridor of strategic access: For allied anti-terror forces
to operations areas in Central Asia, Afghanistan and the Middle East,
and for Caspian oil and gas to consumer countries in Europe. Thus, some
of the EU’s most pressing challenges and requirements — anti-terrorism
efforts, energy supply, institutional consolidation and enlargement —
are to be met in the Black Sea region.

Strategically for Europe, this area must be recognized as the new
pivot of history.

This region’s countries are Western-friendly. The European idea and
the EU itself continue to exert their magnetic force here. However,
the region suffers from Soviet-legacy problems, the most painful of
which are the unresolved separatist conflicts: Transnistria, a Russian
military exclave in Moldova and a thorn in the side to both Ukraine and
Romania; Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both carved out of Georgia; and
Karabakh at the heart of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Commonly referred to as “the frozen conflicts,” they are actually
smoldering, maintained in that form by Russia’s military presence and
its divide-and-rule policy. What is frozen is the political processes
and diplomatic formats that Moscow designed more than a decade ago
so as to maintain influence on all sides involved in these conflicts
and complicate the security situation of neighboring countries as well.

Broadly speaking, Western interests and those of the states and
peoples in the Black Sea region are facets of one and the same
set of interests: security, democratic development, Euro-Atlantic
integration as the path to prosperity. Settling the unresolved
conflicts in accordance with that set of interests must become the
starting premise of European and U.S. diplomacy in the region.

Along with establishing that premise, it is urgently necessary to
bring the entire region under the purview of international law. Ever
since the 1991 Soviet collapse, Russian policy has practically
abolished international law in parts of this region. Moscow and
its local proteges have shifted or erased borders, or erected new
borders de facto, in conflict areas; created unlawful armed forces;
turned hundreds of thousands of local residents into Russian citizens
so as to assert rights of protection over them; underwritten ethnic
cleansing and thwarted repatriation proposals; and kept Russian troops
and bases in the region, with or without host-country consent. Thus,
political settlement of the conflicts must begin with a recommitment
to upholding international law throughout the region.

Democracy is a sine qua non to conflict resolution, and there must be
no exemption tailored for Soviet-legacy authorities in secessionist
areas. Most of these have over the years become mini-scale
reproductions of a Russian model of governance, characterized
by a fusion of shadowy business networks with the administrative
apparatus and security services under authoritarian political leaders
appointed from Moscow. The ultimate status of these areas must not
be predetermined by negotiations with the incumbent secessionist
leaderships. This approach can lead to antidemocratic solutions and
a continuing “freeze.” Political settlements have to be preceded by a
transitional period of democratization and civil society building in
the secessionist enclaves, enabling the populations to make an informed
choice for a European future, instead of post-Soviet stagnation.

The secessionist enclaves are over-militarized. They host Russian and
local military forces and internal security troops, “peacekeping”
contingents without international mandates, and large arsenals of
arms and ammunition (notably, unaccounted-for heavy weaponry that
should have been eliminated under the Treaty on Conventional Forces in
Europe). These are out of bounds to international inspection. Before
a viable political settlement can be reached, these regions must
be demilitarized. Peacekeeping — a Russian monopoly for more than
a decade in this region — should be internationalized and largely
civilianized. In 2003, the EU briefly considered an international
peacekeeping operation for Transnistria, involving predominantly
civilian components, with a small military element.

Now is the time to return to that proposal.

The existing formats for conflict-settlement negotiations are stacked
to ensure Moscow’s control over the process and minimize or exclude
a Western say on the region’s security. Those negotiating formats
date back to the early 1990s, a truly distant past from today’s
perspective. Hardly anyone then would have predicted the EU’s and
NATO’s enlargement, the high importance of Caspian energy resources
to Europe, or the antiterrorism operations requiring direct access
from Europe eastward. By now, therefore, Euro-Atlantic interests
in this region have far outgrown those old negotiating formats. The
EU can take the lead in bypassing those discredited formats, using
its political appeal in the region, the incentive of post-conflict
reconstruction aid, and CFSP instruments for conflict-resolution and
regional stabilization.

Russia has acted in most cases as an initiator of, a participant in,
and at the same time as official mediator in these conflicts, openly
favoring the secessionist side. In sum, Russia is the problem, not
the solution, in most of these cases. To be sure, Moscow’s interests
should be taken into account insofar as they are consistent with
European democratic values. Russia must have a voice in the debate;
but should not have a veto on the outcome, let alone a double veto
through its local satraps.

Western interests in the region require stable, secure, reform-capable
partner states, free to exercise their Euro-Atlantic choice and to
focus on meeting the integration standards. Resolution of frozen
conflicts, and regional security generally from the Black Sea to the
Caspian, must be based on the vision of a Euro-Atlantic future, not
on bureaucratically-driven accomodation with the sequels and relics
of the Soviet past. Here is the EU’ s chance to validate the CFSP and
demonstrate strategic vision to increasingly disaffected publics in
the EU’s core countries.

Mr. Socor is a senior fellow of the Washington-based Jamestown
Foundation, publishers of the Eurasia Daily Monitor.