From: Aramazd Ghalamkaryan <[email protected]>
Subject: UNDP Armenia press release

United Nations Development Programme Country Office in Armenia

14, Petros Adamyan Street, Yerevan 0010, Armenia
Contact: Aramazd Ghalamkaryan
Tel: (374 10) 56 60 73, ext. 121
Fax: (374 10) 54 38 11
E-mail: [email protected]
Web:

UNDP COUNTRY OFFICE IN ARMENIA
May 4, 2006

Helping Communities Help Themselves

UNDP’s new project starts with an honest discussion of local problems
with the heads of fifteen villages in Armavir province

Baghramyan village, Armenia – Today, two project teams of United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) visited Armavir province in
Southwestern Armenia to meet with heads of fifteen villages – future
stakeholders of the projects – and to present the initiative. UNDP
Armenia’s projects on Community Development and Performance Budgeting
joined their minds and funds to achieve a breakthrough in the district
of Baghramyan.

What the projects aim to achieve is to meet the immediate social needs
in communities, resolving certain long-term economic issues, such as
lack of employment and incomes, sharing goals for their communities and
the district as a whole.

The project teams were recently strengthened by well-known local experts
working in the field of community development. Through application of
new methods of budgeting (results-based), involvement of the local
self-governance bodies and the local citizens in the discussion and
prioritization of needs, decision making, elaboration of village
development plans, joint implementation, as well as joint monitoring of
all the processes, a new and advanced level of community development, of
citizens being engaged in their own development will be achieved.

Mr. Vrej Jijian, UNDP project manager, addressed the participants of the
meeting: “Your voice is and will be vital for us and for this
initiative: we will base the projects’ ideas on this. Every step forward
will need not only your consent but active participation and shared
responsibility.”

“How can we bring about a sense of consolidation? What are your own
long-term visions of your respective villages? All in all, renovation of
buildings is far less important than change in the people’s attitudes
and behaviours: this is what we ultimately aim for,” – noted Ms.
Hripsime Manukyan, project expert.

The gap between the capital city Yerevan and provinces of Armenia, in
terms of access to social and health care services, education, economic
conditions and benefits of the high economic growth, has widened during
the recent five years. The level of participation of citizens at the
local level is also very weak. While the economy grows rapidly, the
challenge for the country is to distribute this wealth in an equitable
way, especially outside Yerevan, and achieve a balanced situation in the
country for all the communities to benefit from the growth, in line with
the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

In 2000, leaders of 191 countries, including Armenia, signed the
Millennium Declaration, thus pledging to reach the eight Millennium
Development Goals by 2015. The goals cover poverty, HIV/AIDS and other
diseases, maternal and child health, environment, education, women’s
empowerment and global partnership.

Since 2004, UNDP Armenia has successfully implemented a community
development programme in Karakert village in the same Baghramyan
district. Based on this experience UNDP has launched a new phase of
community development projects in 2006.

* * *

UNDP is the UN’s global development network. It advocates for change
and connects countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help
people build a better life. We operate in 166 countries, working with
them on their own solutions to global and national development
challenges. As they develop local capacity, they draw on the people of
UNDP and our wide range of partners.

* * *

For additional information, please contact Mr. Aramazd Ghalamkaryan,
tel.: +374 10 56 60 73, ext. 121, +374 91 436 312, e-mail:
[email protected].

Armenpress

DEFECTION BEGINS FROM ORINATS YERKIR

YEREVAN, MAY 6, ARMENPRESS: The second largest
parliamentary faction of parliament chairman Arthur
Baghdasarian suffered yesterday an anticipated setback
after two of its members announced their pullout.
Arshak Mkhitarian and Melik Manukian, two
businessmen-lawmakers, refused to explain their
decision. One of these two, Arshak Mkhitarian, was
elected on the party’s slate and according to the law
on elections Orinats Yerkir will replace him by the
next on its slate.
The second lawmaker, Melik Manukian, was elected
from a majoritarian constituency. The faction had 22
members before the defection.

Hürriyet, Turkey
May 8 2006

French historian group protests Armenian genocide bill

A group of French historians, who last month put together a letter of
protest against a proposed “Armenian genocide law,” have now come
together again to publish a declaration against the draft of the new
law, which mandates prison sentences for those who deny the genocide.

The bill, which was put together by the opposition Socialist Party in
France, and which will come before the French Parliament on May 18
for debate, has elicited protest from French historians on the
grounds that it carries stiff penalities for those denying the
Armenian claims, and in this sense infringes on freedom of expression
in France. The declaration from the group of historians against the
bill, who have expressed that they are “in a state of deep shock”
about it, notes, among other things, that “history teachers in French
schools will be taken hostage by this law.”

Among the historians signing off on this new declaration of protest
are well-known French academics such as Jean-Pierre Azema, Elisabeth
Badinter, Marc Ferro, Jacques Julliard, Pierre Nora, Mona Ozouf,
Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet.

Vision Montreal picks new leadersTo replace outgoing Pierre Bourque; As
expected, Noushig Eloyan to lead at city hall while Francois Purcell takes
reins of party

The Gazette
Published: Monday, May 08, 2006

The two politicians charged with leading Vision Montreal in the post-Pierre
Bourque era say the party is in fine health and sound financial shape.

As expected, Francois Purcell was named the party’s new leader and Noushig
Eloyan the official opposition leader at the party’s general council
yesterday.

Both are Vision Montreal city councillors.

“Are you worried for our future?” Purcell asked during his closing speech in
the small auditorium at College Maisonneuve. Several people in the audience
called out “no” and “not at all.”

“You answered the same thing as me,” Purcell said to applause.

Bourque, a former mayor of Montreal, resigned on Friday as leader of the
municipal party he founded 12 years ago.

After yesterday’s gathering, Eloyan noted that party leaders often leave the
day after an electoral defeat, leaving the troops in a difficult position.
But she praised Bourque for taking time to put things in order before
deciding to step down.

“For the past six months he made sure that the party was in good financial
health,” Eloyan said. “There is no debt at all. There is still money for the
party to move on.”

Vision Montreal currently has 3,000 members and it plans to launch a
recruitment campaign, she said.

Bourque said Vision Montreal is in good hands.

“The party will change, it will evolve, but I think the inspiration, the
values will remain the same,” Bourque said.

Eloyan said the party will continue to defend Montrealers and act as
watchdogs to ensure that Mayor Gerald Tremblay’s administration doesn’t
deviate too much from its promises.

Purcell conceded last week that a full leadership race will be held closer
to the 2009 municipal election. But yesterday neither he nor Eloyan seemed
eager to discuss their political future in that regard.

“The big challenge is to unite our strengths, to be a good opposition, to
put pressure on the administration, (and) especially to win over voters in
general,” Eloyan said.

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2006

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
May 8, 2006 Monday 01:21 PM EST

A-320 tragedy victims’ relatives to lay wreaths at crash scene

SOCHI

The relatives of the passengers who died in the Armenian Airbus-320
plane crash off Sochi last week will lay wreaths at the scene of the
accident on May 9.

Of 113 crash victims, 51 bodies have been found so far. On the fifth
day after the crash, specialists say chances that the others will be
found are quite small.

The Airbus A-320 of the Armenian airline Armavia plunged into the
Black Sea as it was making a landing manoeuvre in the early hours of
May 3.

Meanwhile, the search for the flight recorders from the plane is
continuing despite rough seas.

“Specialists will be examining the bottom at the place where the
plane crashed with the help of sonar till night. French specialists
will sail off into the sea tomorrow morning, at 7 a.m. Moscow time.
They have already arrived in Sochi with equipment for a more precise
search,” an official at the search operation headquarters told
Itar-Tass on Monday.

The specialists plan to examine the seabed at a death of 450-800
metres where a large number of the plane’s fragments and the “black
boxes” are lying.

The area where the debris are scattered is quite big and the French
equipment will help to distinguish between the plane’s fragments and
personal belongings of the passengers.

Earlier, a deep-water apparatus, Kalmar, traced four unidentified
objects at the crash scene at the depth of 450 meters.

“Four objects have been traced at the depth of 450 meters. They are
being identified. The objects were found by a hydro-radar system of
the Kalmar apparatus operated from the Zaliv towboat,” Sergei
Biryukov, Executive Director of the company Tetis Pro that designed
the apparatus, told Itar-Tass.

Flight recorders used on aircraft of the Airbus-320 type withstand
the depth of up to 6,000 meters for 30 days, experts from the French
air crash investigation bureau said on Sunday.

They said that flight recorders’ radio beacons keep working during
the 30-day period.

One of the flight recorders registers flight parameters, including
the speed, height and direction of the flight and the autopilot
operation, each second. The other gadget records conversations in the
cockpit.

Each flight recorder weighs 10 kilograms, including a seven-kilogram
armoured casing for the gadget. The casing can withstand water
pressure at a depth of 6,000 meters, the temperature of 1,100 degrees
Celsius, and the compression of 2.2 tonnes.

The French experts think that flight recorders from the Armenian
Airbus-320 are lying at a depth of 680 meters.

The bureau retrieved flight recorders from the depth of over 1,000
meters in the Red Sea in January 2004, when an Egyptian plane crashed
near the Sharm-el-Sheikh resort. The rescuers were using a Scorpio
deep-water apparatus.

A technical commission investigating the Sochi air crash, which is
led by the CIS Interstate Aviation Committee, has asked French
experts to help find A-320 flight recorders.

Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin said, “The Frenchmen have
appropriate equipment and they are ready to quickly bring it to the
crash scene.”

Ukraine Interested in Building Iran-Armenia Gas Pipeline

EASTBUSINESS.ORG
May 5, 2006 Friday 8:51 AM (Central European Time)

Ukraine is interested in participation in construction of the
Iran-Armenia gas pipeline, Ukrainian Ambassador to Armenia Alexander
Bozhko told a news conference. According to him, it is important for
Ukraine to have alternative sources of electric power; that is why
Ukraine s interest in the project was shown from the start.

However, for implementing its plans in this sphere Ukraine needs
billions: without financing by European banks participation of our
country in construction of the pipeline is impossible, stressed
the diplomat.

Talking on the issue of gas tariffs, Bozhko noted that the gas issue
is of serious concern both in Armenia and Ukraine. However, I cannot
understand the logic of determining tariffs for Ukraine and Moldova,
which is much farther from Russia than our country is, noted Bozhko.
According to him, decision of the Armenian government on transferring
the fifth energy unit of the Hrazdan TPP was a forced measure, and
the government should be held accountable for it, reports Panorama.am.

The International Herald Tribune
May 5, 2006 Friday

Civility vs. free speech: A democratic quandary;
Europa

by Richard Bernstein

Some years ago there were a number of unsuccessful efforts at
American universities to enact hate-speech codes that would have
punished students and faculty for expressing opinions or hurling
epithets that would have insulted others because of their race, sex,
sexual orientation or handicap.

Most of these efforts failed, in part because they presented too
sharp a contradiction with the right of free speech. And indeed,
despite the United States’ sad history of slavery and racism, the
American value of free speech, even deeply offensive free speech, has
generally taken priority over the value of protecting the feelings of
minorities.

There have been a few reminders lately that this is not the case in
Europe, with its even sadder history of genocide I say sadder
because, however bad American racism has been, it never involved a
systematic effort actually to wipe out a people. David Irving, the
renegade British historian, has actually been sentenced to a term in
prison in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial.

There is no doubt that Irving denied the Holocaust for years.
Moreover, the law is the law and to fail to enforce it on the
possible grounds that, however objectionable Irving’s views may have
been, it seems excessive to toss somebody in prison for them would
sap the law in general of its dignity.

But there have been other signs recently in some European countries
that the effort to protect people from insult has taken priority over
the value of free expression of uncivil views, and these instances
make one wonder whether Europe has made the right choice.

There is, for example, the case in Poland of Kaziemira Szczuka, a
well-known television personality, who, a few weeks ago, mimicked the
high-pitched voice of a severely disabled 18-year-old who frequently
reads prayers on a far-right Roman Catholic radio station, Radio
Maryja. The station that aired Szczuka’s little satire was fined the
equivalent of ¤125,000, or $157,000, by Poland’s National
Broadcasting Council, which found the satire an unacceptable insult
to a disabled person and to religious belief, even though Szczuka
said she didn’t know the young prayer reader was disabled.

One could certainly argue that civil behavior does not allow ridicule
of anybody’s religious belief viz: that small Danish newspaper and
its satirical cartoons on the Prophet Muhammad. But mockery, even if
it is in bad taste, cannot be made a criminal offense in a democratic
society.

This is especially true if the mockery is of Radio Maryja, which is
estimated to have four million to six million listeners a day and
does not hesitate to take part in Poland’s political battle,
entreating its listeners to vote for President Lech Kaczynski’s Law
and Justice party and against Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform in
elections last autumn.

The radio’s emphasis on piety, exemplified in the broadcast prayers
of the young handicapped woman, provide a kind of support for its
political urgings.

There are other problems with the Szczuka case. A few weeks after her
television station was punished because of her remarks, the Polish
authorities conspicuously did not punish Radio Maryja itself after
one of its regular guests made some remarks that Poland’s
professional journalists’ association and many others found to be
blatantly anti-Semitic. This unevenness of enforcement suggests that
hate-speech codes can be politically interpreted and politically
enforced.

Several European countries, committed to a sort of absolute civility,
enforce laws against hate speech almost routinely. In March, the
German government banned a group of Turkish nationalists who wanted
to march in support of their tasteless and erroneous idea that the
genocidal massacres of Armenians in Turkey during World War I never
took place.

And there is an ongoing trial in Mannheim of Ernst Zundel, an
Internet purveyor of primitive anti-Semitism and of the notion that
the Holocaust is a Jewish myth created to exact tribute from a
gullibly guilty world. Zundel, who committed his acts of Holocaust
denial while living in Canada and the United States, is a challenge
to free-speech absolutists. Look up ”Zundelsite” on the Internet
and you will see what I mean.

You will also find on the Web that Zundel is viewed as a sort of cult
hero by an undeterminable number of people who have come to support
his 25-year career of Holocaust denial and who see him, now that he
is on trial for his views, as a martyr to a suppressed truth.

The trial itself has been a circus, well described in the German
press. At one point, Zundel’s lawyer was barred from the court after
making what the journalistic observers saw as neo-Nazi speeches, even
finishing up one peroration with the phrase, ”Heil Hitler!” She
played successfully to a courtroom audience made up of 80 to 100
Zundel supporters who have raised their arms in what appeared to be
the Nazi salute.

The trial itself, in other words, has at least to some extent become
a platform for the propagation of the very ideas whose expression
brought about the trial in the first place. Equally perverse, in
prosecuting Zundel, the state has helped to create a thrilling sense
of illicit community and radical solidarity among those interested in
rebellion against the established moral order.

In Germany, of course, it is not difficult to understand the yearning
to enforce the rules of civility. The victims of the Holocaust are
certainly morally entitled to protection from the vicious calumnies
of people like Zundel.

The question is: Should they also be legally entitled to that
protection? Perhaps, sadly and although this flies in the face of a
near European consensus they shouldn’t be.

During the uproar over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, Muslims
attacked the Holocaust denial laws in several European countries as
rank hypocrisy because those same countries permitted insults to
Muslims, and, as the American legal scholar Ronald Dworkin observed
recently in The New York Review of Books, they had a point. But,
Dworkin continued, the response should not be to broaden the coverage
of the laws against insult to religion but to strike them down.

Free speech, he argues, is an indispensable requirement of a
democratic society, not something that can be bargained away to
mollify this or that offended group.

And so, as an American in Europe and a Jew mightily offended by
Holocaust denial, I nonetheless come down on the side of free speech
rather than on the prohibition of offensive speech. One of the
cultural differences between America and Europe in this regard is
that in America this issue is debated. In Europe it is not.

–Boundary_(ID_WaltCu64u4F1SZUgkZmOtg)–

AZERBAIJAN: FOUR PEOPLE MORE ARE JUDGED FOR BETRAYAL OF MOTHERLAND

Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
May 3, 2006 Wednesday

In the grave crimes Court under the chairmanship of Gadim Babaev
private session of the court on the case of four military people
accused on the basis of Article 274 (Motherland betrayal) and 338.1
(infringement of action post rules) has taken place. All the four
military are accused of giving Armenia secret information. Soldiers
of military service for a regular term Binali Mamedaliev (arrested in
October 2005), Shakhriar Ismailov, Shamkhal Agadzhamaliev and Parviz
Khabibov (arrested in 2006) served in Fizulinskiy region. During
their service time they were hooked by Armenians and worked for them.
The hearing of the case will take place on May, 4. As there it concerns
secret information, the case will be closed, and no information
is given about any mentioned facts. It is not the first case when
Azerbaijan soldiers are judged for cooperation with Armenians. Armed
Forces command has not yet given any explanation to the facts.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
May 3, 2006 Wednesday

COMMITTEE ON ARMENIA NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY PROJECT DEVELOPMENT
HAD A SESSION IN YEREVAN

The 4th session of Interagency committee on Armenia National Security
Strategy project development too place today in Yerevan. Armenia
Defense Department Press-secretary Colonel Seyran Shakhsuvaryan
stated that the session was conducted under the chairmanship of
Armenia President Serzh Sarkisyan. The members of the 4th session
chose from 250 offers and included in the agenda the ones concerning
the following topics: Armenia outer security strategy, All-Armenian
integration strategy. After exchanging opinions, amendments have been
made and the offers accepted. The Committee secretariat is
responsible for editing the new topics.

Turkey warns France ties could be hit by Armenian genocide bill

Agence France Presse — English
May 3, 2006 Wednesday 11:08 AM GMT

Turkey warned France Wednesday that bilateral ties could suffer if
the French parliament adopts a bill that would criminalize any denial
that Armenians massacred during World War I were victims of genocide.

“In our meetings (with French officials), we stress that adoption
of the bill could lead to irreparable damage in long-standing
Turkish-French ties and that this should not be allowed,” foreign
ministry spokesman Namik Tan told a press conference here.

Tan said Ankara is doing everything it can to block the bill, adding
that the French government is doing the same.

The bill, expected to be voted later this month, provides for one
year’s imprisonment and a 45,000 euro (57,000 dollar) fine for denying
that Armenians were victims of genocide, according to Turkish press
reports.

If adopted, it will follow a 2001 French decision that infuriated
Turkey by acknowledging that the mass killings in the dying days of
the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide.

Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in
orchestrated killings between 1915 and 1917 by Turks, as the Ottoman
Empire, modern Turkey’s predecessor, was falling apart.

Turkey categorically rejects the claims, saying 300,000 Armenians and
at least as many Turks died in civil strife when the Armenians took
up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with Russian
troops invading Ottoman soil.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress