Zaman, Turkey
June 16 2005

Germany to Approve ‘Armenian Genocide’ Resolution
By Suleyman Bag, Hakki Tas
Published: Thursday 16, 2005
zaman.com

Today the German federal parliament, The Bundestag, is expected to
approve a draft resolution on the alleged Armenian genocide prepared
by the German main opposition parties, Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU).

The draft acquired by Zaman does not itself determine the incidents
occurred during the Ottoman period as “genocide”, but emphasis is
made that many independent historians, parliaments and international
organizations determine the Armenian expulsion and murder as
“genocide”. All political parties in Bundestag agreed to approve the
final version of the draft without any discussion, according to German
newspaper Die Welt. Although the Armenian exchange policy is not termed
“genocide” in the main body of the draft, the justification section
states that many independent historians, parliament and international
organizations define the forceful expulsion of the Armenians and
their annihilation as genocide.

Opening the borders between Turkey and Armenia and launching diplomatic
relations would make positive contributions for developing bilateral
relations according to the draft. One key sentence saying, “The
incident is judged to have caused the total termination of almost
all Armenians in Anatolia” grab the attention. Diplomatic sources
told Zaman that the damage by such an approval on Turkish-German
relations was expressed to top-level German officials. Turkey’s unease
was conveyed to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder by the Turkish
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul
during the Chancellor’s visit to Turkey and the Turkish Ambassador
in Germany Mehmet Ali Irtemcelik has reiterated the discomfort as
well, a high level diplomatic source explained. Due to the internal
political balances, Ankara thinks that biased attitudes have been
adopted against Turkey and calls for a change in the draft.

Armenians’ Union in Russia marks 5th anniversary

ITAR-TASS, Russia
June 16 2005

MOSCOW, June 16 (Itar-Tass) – The Armenians’ Union in Russia observes
its fifth anniversary this Thursday. The union absorbed several hundred
small national organizations that exerted efforts to preserve national
Armenian culture in Russia.

Ara Abramyan, the president of the Armenians’ Union in Russia,
told a news conference at Itar-Tass, “A new stage set in in the
life of Armenians in Russia from the moment the All-Russian national
public organization of Armenians formed, the stage linked with the
consolidation of the age-old national traditions.”

Abramyan said, “The union faces a difficult task of promoting the
integration of hundreds of thousands of Armenians who came from
Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia into the linguistic, social, economic
and cultural medium of Russia.”

“We also aim for the further consolidation of relations between Russia
and Armenia,” Abramyan said.

The highlight of the celebration will be a concert of the Armenian
song and dance ensemble at the International House of Music in Moscow
on Thursday evening.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Armenian leader instructs officials to fight shadow economy

Mediamax news agency
16 Jun 05

Yerevan, 16 June: Armenian President Robert Kocharyan today instructed
the head of the newly created state inspection of labour, Arsen
Grigoryan, to speed up the work to eradicate the shadow economy
in Armenia.

The Armenian president received today the heads of the state inspection
of labour under the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and the
head of the ministry, Agvan Vardanyan, the president’s press service
told Mediamax news agency today.

Noting the importance of the inspection’s work, Korcharyan said
that protecting the rights of the workers and ensuring work safety
standards as well as timely payment of salaries are a priority.

Grigoryan presented Kocharyan with the main areas and tasks of
their work and their cooperation with similar bodies of Bulgaria
and Lithuania.

Erdogan: We Talked Syria into Withdrawing from Lebanon
By Fikri Turkel

Journal of Turkish Weekly, Turkey
June 16 2005

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said, it was Turkey
who talked Syria into pulling out from Lebanon.

On his way to the Lebanese capital Beirut to attend the Arab Economic
summit, Erdogan spoke of the Syria and Lebanon-related parts of his
visit to Washington last week. Turkey supports democracy and human
rights in the region and as part of this, Turkey also talked Syria
into pulling its military out of Lebanon, Erdogan said.

“I talked to Mr. Asad about troop withdrawal. He said, ‘I need time.’
Five months later, President [Ahmet Necdet Sezer] visited Damascus.
Mr. Sezer told me, ‘Asad will pullout his troops because I talked
him into it.’ A week later, he [Asad] started to withdraw the troops.”

As for commercial relations, Turkey is not at a point to evaluate
the trading potential in the Middle East the Prime Minister thinks;
however, he will search for possibilities to assess Middle Eastern
finance in Turkey during his visit.

Before Erdogan’s trip, radical Armenians held a protest in Beirut,
burning a Turkish flag and insulting Erdogan.

Armenian Korfball Gets Global Air Time
Thursday, 16 June 2005

International Korfball Federation, Belgium
June 16 2005

TV programme Good Morning Armenians, which has a world-wide audience
and is broadcasted by Armenian TV, aired on June 14th a special
interview with the chairman of the Korfball Federation of Armenia
(KFA) – Rob van Geenhuizen, KFA secretary – Arman Alaberkian and the
p.r. member Satenik Avetisian. The one hour programme was devoted
solely to korfball.

Topics discussed included the origin of korfball, unique playing
aspects of the sport, suitability to mixed gender participation, the
rules, World Championships, the global development of the sport as well
as its domestic growth within Armenia. Between question and answer
segments, highlights of international games involving the Armenian
national team, including some beautifully completed attacking plays,
were shown.

After the programme everybody was very satisfied and many Armenians
around the World will have learnt much about our sport. This
programme was the culminating point of the p.r. covering of Korfball
in Armenia. All the tournaments (youth and seniors) have been shown
on the sport news segments of Armenian television and two sports
newspapers have paid close attention to the sport. One newspaper went
so far as to publish a full page article with three photographs.

“We are waiting for the time when we could organise a big international
tournament. The final will definitely be broadcast worldwide and the
other games will be covered by television stations and newspapers”,
KFA President Rob van Geenhuizen was quoted as saying. The recent
publicity on the Good Morning Armenians programme has been followed
by many telephone calls from people who have only just seen korfball
for the first time in their lives as a result of the programme. Calls
came from as far afield as Washington D.C.

Armenia is a country with a global Diaspora and it is likely that
hundreds of thousand Armenians around the world will have seen the
feature introducing korfball.

Armenian religious leader visits Scottsdale
By Andrea Falkenhagen, Tribune

East Valley Tribune, AZ
June 16 2005

Whenever Hasmik Takoushian walked into a church in her native Armenia,
the scent of incense and burning candles inspired her soul.

“It’s like really you are walking into a spiritual place,” she said.
“I feel a connection with my ancestors.”

Soon, the Scottsdale resident and hundreds of other Armenians in
the Valley will have a much closer place to worship their brand of
Christianity, one of the oldest denominations in the world.

By early 2006, construction is expected to start in Scottsdale on
the first Armenian church in Arizona. The state is home to some 2,500
Armenians, most of whom live in the Valley.

The Armenian pope, Karekin II, will visit the congregation today to
bless the ground where the church will stand. The congregation has
raised two-thirds of the $1.5 million needed for the church, which
still requires city approval.

Church member and architect Arvin Knadjian designed the building in
the spirit of an ancient Armenian church, with a cross shape and a
large dome centered above the cross.

“Preserving the religion the way it was, and striving to build a
church in the same way of our ancestors in a foreign country – it’s
incredible,” said Takoushian, who moved to the United States eight
years ago.

The church will be built adjacent to the Armenian Church Cultural
Center near 90th and Cholla streets, where members have been holding
services since 1992.

“The church is very central to Armenian identity. In the United
States, a church really shows that the community has a presence,”
said Barlow Der Mugrdechian, a professor in the Armenian Studies
Program at California State University, Fresno.

Armenia, located between Turkey and Azerbaijan, is an ancient country
with religious customs dating back to 301, when it became the first
country to formally adopt Christianity.

Victoria Manoogian, an active church member, said it sometimes is
hard to explain her religion – Christian, but neither Roman Catholic
nor Protestant – to Americans unfamiliar with Eastern branches of
Christianity.

The Armenian Church belongs to the Orthodox churches, Der Mugrdechian
said. Though it has closer religious ties to the Roman Catholic
Church, it was created separate from Rome and has its own pontiff,
known as the Supreme Catholicos of All Armenians.

Today will be the second time Karekin II has visited the Valley, and
members of the church have been preparing for weeks for his arrival.

The backbone of the church, the members said, is the Ladies Society,
whose members were scrambling on Wednesday to prepare food for the
800 people they expected to attend today’s ceremony.

Several women ladled sauce into tubs of meatballs and cut pieces of
boureg, or meat and cheese turnovers.

Annie Avadisian was preparing strawberries, but when a FedEx truck
delivered an entire box of baklava melting in the Arizona heat,
she shifted into high gear to save the desserts.

The women hail from countries all over the world, including Armenia,
Iran and Iraq. There are roughly 7 million members of the Armenian
diaspora around the globe, while Armenia itself has a population of
about 3 million.

Between 800,000 and 1 million Armenians live in the United States,
with many calling Southern California home, said Der Mugrdechian.

The Valley Armenian community is vibrant, Takoushian said, offering
a play group for small children, a youth organization and Armenian
language classes.

When Armenia was under Soviet control from 1920 to 1991, religion
was discouraged within its borders.

“But here, it was preserved so well. It blows my mind,” Takoushian
said.

She said the strong community also serves to remember victims of the
Armenian genocide, a period when the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire killed
roughly 1 million Armenians during World War I.

The U.S. government has never officially recognized the genocide,
though Arizona is one of 37 states that have chosen to do so on
their own.

For deeply religious people like Manoogian, a church ties together
heritage and history, both good and bad.

“It’s like your soul and your history comes out. It starts living
and breathing in front of you when you walk into a church,” she said.

For Takoushian, it’s a symbol of survival.

“Wherever we go we bring our culture and religion. We’re going to
survive,” she said. “We just try to keep the Armenian heart beating.”

Russian budget will fix expenditures on withdrawal of military bases from Georgia
17:00

RIA Novosti, Russia
June 16 2005

MOSCOW, June 16 (RIA Novosti) – The Russian government must take into
consideration the expenditures, connected with the withdrawal of two
Russian military bases from Georgia in the draft three-year budget,
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said at the Thursday session
of the government.

“The withdrawal of the bases is the task of the state, and the
expenditures, undertaken by the state in this connection, must be
taken into consideration in the three-year budget,” Ivanov said. “It
is obvious that a great work will have to be done. This withdrawal
operation will be difficult from the point of view of both its amount
and financing. We shall have to purchase, for example, a great amount
of fuel to transport the military equipment on ships and trailers.”

As a result of the negotiations in Moscow on May 30, the Foreign
Ministers of Russia and Georgia signed a joint statement under which
Russia must complete the withdrawal of its military bases from Georgia
in the course of 2008.

“The withdrawal of Russian military bases from Georgia will
be completed in the course of 2008,” Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov told reporters later, summing up the results of the
negotiations.

“The joint statement says that the withdrawal will go on stage by
stage: first of all heavy equipment will be withdrawn, then the
personnel, after that the Russian military installations will be
transferred to Georgia,” the minister specified.

Russia and Georgia were conducting negotiations about the time of
the withdrawal of the bases since 2001. At first Moscow proposed a
14-year period for their withdrawal, than 11 and 9 years; Tbilisi
insisted on 3 – 4 years, then on 2 – 3.

On March 10, 2005 the Georgian parliament passed a resolution that
in case agreements will not be reached before May 15, 2005, it was
proposed to demand that Russia should withdraw its bases before January
1, 2006. However, at their negotiations in Moscow on May 30 the Foreign
Ministers of the Russian Federation and Georgia achieved agreements.

According to the joint statement, signed by Lavrov and Zurabishvili,
the withdrawal of Russian military bases from Georgia must be completed
in the course of 2008. The main part of the arms from the Russian
bases will be transported to the Russian Federation and a certain
part to Armenia, to the Russian military base in Gyumri.

Georgian Orthodox Church Calls on Religious Groups to Cooperate

Civil Georgia, Georgia
June 16 2005

Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church Ilia II met with the leaders
of the religious communities in Georgia on June 15 and offered them
to set up a cooperation council of religious groups.

Spokesman for the Georgian Orthodox Church Zurab Tskhovrebadze said the
council, which will unite representatives from the Armenian Apostolic
Church, as well as from the Baptist-Evangelist, Catholic, Muslim,
Judaic and Pentecostal groups, will cooperate in tackling different
social problems which Georgia faces.

Kremlin-linked analyst says EU constitution rejections bode well for Russia

PRAVDA, Russia
June 16 2005

16:50 2005-06-16

A Russian political commentator with close links to the Kremlin
assailed the European constitution as a plan for a bureaucratic
super-state, saying Thursday that its rejection by French and Dutch
voters boded well for both Europeans and Russia.

Gleb Pavlovsky, political commentator and consultant, said the European
constitution would have suppressed national sovereignty and put the
European Union on a dangerous path leading to new conflicts.

He said that its rejection will help temper ambitions of the EU
bureaucracy and improve relations between Russia and Europe.

“There was a split between the elites’ game of a unified Europe as
a superpower playing geopolitics, and the Europeans’ desire to live
in a normal, sovereign environment,” Pavlovsky said.

Valery Fadeyev, the editor of Expert, a leading business affairs
magazine, also criticized the European constitution as a bureaucratic
product infringing on sovereignty.

“The unification is dangerous, because it binds people and limits
their freedom,” he said. “It obliges nations to live according to
bureaucrats’ whim.”

Russia has been wary about the eastward expansion of the EU, which
took in the former Soviet Baltic republics last year. The possibility
that other ex-Soviet nations such as Ukraine will eventually join
has fueled its concerns.

Pavlovsky, who was involved in Ukraine’s presidential election last
fall in which pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko defeated a Kremlin-backed
opponent, bristled at what he described as the EU’s ill-considered
interference in ex-Soviet spaces.

“Europe’s intention to unfreeze conflicts in the Black Sea basin,
solve problems of the Trans-Dniester, Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia
.. has led to confusion and new difficulties,” Pavlovsky said. .

Russia has played mediator in the post-Soviet conflicts, deploying
peacekeepers to Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia and to Moldova’s separatist Trans-Dniester region. The Kremlin
views the EU’s increasing interest in these regions as an encroachment
on its traditional sphere of influence.

Russia will benefit from the constitutional crisis because it would
slow down the EU’s expansion drive and make its foreign policy more
rational, Pavlovsky said.

“The discussion in Europe about perspectives of the EU’s development
is good for Russia,” he said. “Russia can’t remain indifferent to
the dogma of a unified Europe, because it’s dangerous. The victory
of that ideology would lead to potential conflicts.”

World Peace Herald, DC
June 16 2005

Turkish PM: Middle East needs reforms
By UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Published June 16, 2005

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said
during a short visit to Lebanon that all Middle Eastern countries
need political and economic reforms.

Speaking at a banquet in his honor Wednesday evening, Erdogan said,
“Our world today has entered the age of globalization and become more
democratic, which necessitates reforms in the Middle East.”

Erdogan stressed that achieving “comprehensive, just and lasting
peace in the Middle East is a priority of Turkey’s foreign policy.”

Erdogan’s 20-hour visit, which started Wednesday, was met with protests
by Lebanese Armenians who accuse Turkey of perpetrating genocide on
Armenians from 1915 to 1923.

Armenian youth burned tires and the Turkish flag Wednesday to protest
the prime minister’s visit, demanding that Ankara acknowledge the
massacres, in which more than 1 million Armenians died.