Lincolnshire Echo, UK
January 25, 2005

Six holocausts of the modern age

The Holocaust is not an isolated event in history. Throughout the
20th century millions of people were killed in the name of religion
and ideology.

In 1915 1.5 million Armenians were killed under the orders of Turkish
ministers Enver and Talat Pasha.

>From 1929 to 1953, Stalin executed 42.7 million Soviet people.

Under the rule of Chairman Mao from 1923 to 1976, 37.8 million
Chinese perished.

Hitler ordered the death of 20.9 million Jews and other peoples from
1933 to 1945.

>From 1975 to 1979, 2.4 million Cambodians died under Pol Pot.

In 1994, 0.8 million Rwandan Tutsis were massacred under Jean
Kambada.

IRNA, Iran
January 26, 2005 Wednesday 3:45 PM EST

Death symphony in search of justice staged

Tehran, January 26

On the sixth day of the 23rd International Fajr Theater Festival,
Wednesday, Antigone from the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles was
staged at Tehran Vahdat Hall.

The play was directed by Hacoup Ghazanchian from Armenia and was one
of the selected plays of the international section.

Antigone, the third part of the trilogy about Oedipus the King is the
story of the Greek monarch and the horrible destiny his family is
doomed to face.

The first part of the trilogy deals with the tenure of Oedipus, the
second one is about the ominous destiny awaiting him and the final
one relates the incidents his family are destined to face.

Besides `Oedipus at Colonus` and `Oedipus the King`, Antigone is
considered as one of the world most charming classical tragedies.

Some 2,500 years after it was created, the play still attracts the
attention of art lovers.

This time, however, the version of Antigone staged by the Armenian
theater group displays a death symphony in search of justice in a
vehemently oppressed land.

Here Antigone, gets involved in an uprising against a hypocrite
bloodthirsty monarch seated on the throne and ruling the people.

However, his efforts to seek justice in a spellbound land are in vain
and he fails to attract any assistance to the effect.

A young man in love is the only one supporting him.

But the monarch who is against modern thoughts gets into conflict
with him and eventually hangs Antigone for his quest of justice.

Finding himself single-handed, the young man puts an end to his life,
in the hope of meeting his beloved in the other world.

Given his good know-how on the basic principles of theater, the
director of Antigone has succeeded to establish a reasonable relation
with the Iranian spectators.

Making use of technical and theatrical gestures at the beginning and
end of the play marks the director`s good expertise in the field.

The play script provides the director with the opportunity to present
a successful performance played by professional actors, despite the
fact that some of the acts are quite out of rhythm and irritate the
viewers.

In spite of the minor flaws, Antigone was quite appealing to the
Iranian spectators attending Vahdat Hall on the sixth day of the 23rd
International Fajr Theater Festival.

The Independent
January 27, 2005

AUSCHWITZ REMEMBERED: THE SHADOW OF AUSCHWITZ

by John Lichfield

The turn-off is just past a BP petrol station, close to a Leclerc
supermarket. You leave a roundabout and cross a concrete flyover. You
could be on the edge of any town in early 21st-century Europe.

Ahead, through the swirling snow, looms a single railway line,
disappearing through a tower in a long, red-brick building – the
terminus of a short branch line to Auschwitz-Birkenau built in the
spring of 1944. Beyond are three long railway sidings, tall
barbed-wire enclosures, wooden watch- towers, and dark huts in neat
lines. Some huts are ruined. Others stand pristine in freshly fallen
snow, as if enchanted by a curse and frozen for all time.

All is symmetrical and orderly, the product of rational, intelligent
minds – modern, Western minds.

If you stroll to the end of the railway tracks, you find the rubble

of two buildings strewn in front of a small birch wood (Birke means
birch tree.) Two other ruins stand a little way over to the right.
The remains of two cruder buildings can be seen in the distance.

Inside, or just outside, these six buildings at least one million
people, almost all of them Jews, were gassed and cremated during
1942, 1943 and 1944. Birkenau, only part of the Auschwitz complex,
was, among other things, a factory, a purpose-built human abattoir,
an assembly line of death.

The factory’s raw materials were men, women and children, whose only
crime was to be Jewish or Gypsy. The Jews came initially from other
parts of Poland and nearby Slovakia. Later, they were transported for
hundreds of miles across Europe, from Greece, from Hungary, from
France, from Belgium, from the Netherlands, to be reduced to ashes,
their gold teeth, hair, clothes, false limbs recycled into raw
materials for the Nazi war effort. These, however, were merely
by-products. The chief purpose of Auschwitz- Birkenau was to destroy
a race and to obliterate the 800-year-old Jewish- European
civilisation. (In this second task, the Nazis succeeded.)

Auschwitz was not, in itself, the Holocaust. There were five other
Nazi death camps in Poland, some of whose names are still scarcely
known to the general public (Belzec, where 550,000 Jews are thought
to have died; Sobibor, where 200,000 died).

Auschwitz has, nonetheless, become the prime symbol of the
bureaucratically organised, orderly frenzy of killing in which at
least five million European Jews were murdered by the Nazis (maybe as
many as six million) between 1939 and 1945.

Many other victims were also deemed unfit to live by the perverted
Darwinism of Nazi, racial ideology: not just Gypsies but also
homosexuals and the handicapped. Pre-planned Nazi mass murders were
also carried out – it is sometimes forgotten in the West – of
hundreds of thousands of Russians and at least 1,500,000 Polish
officers, intellectuals, students, priests and randomly seized
civilians. The Poles were slaughtered to reduce their country to a
slave state, permanently colonised by Germans.

On a first visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the mind revolts against the
proximity of roundabouts and barbed wire, of supermarkets and gas
chambers; against the juxtaposition of the death camp and the
pleasant Polish town of Oswiecim, now as much part of the European
Union as Dorking or Macclesfield. In truth, this is no anachronism,
but a useful reminder. The Holocaust began three years after Walt
Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; 20 years before The
Beatles and Swinging London. Auschwitz is part of Modern Times.

Today, politicians from 40 countries will travel to the Birkenau camp
to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the discovery of Auschwitz by
Soviet troops in January 1945. Up to 400 survivors – the remaining,
fit survivors of the maybe 60,000 survivors in 1945 – are expected to
be there.

The Queen will attend a ceremony to mark Holocaust Day at Westminster
Hall in London with other survivors.

Among those at the Birkenau commemoration will be Raphael Esrail, 80,
who was taken to Auschwitz from France in February 1944, at the age
of 19, and is now secretary general of the French association of
Auschwitz victims. “There have been other anniversaries and there
will be others still to come,” he said, “but this is maybe the most
important. First, because it will be the last big anniversary to have
so many living eyewitnesses. Most of us are already in our eighties.”

“But it is crucial also for another reason. The world has changed.
And not in the way we had hoped. After the war, we comforted
ourselves that this terrible experience might finally teach mankind
to love mankind, but what do we see now? We see again the rise of
anti-Semitism and we see a world torn apart by fanatical hatreds and
by absolute certainties.”

In other words, the most important, single lesson that we can learn
from today’s commemorations is that Auschwitz is not just part of our
history. It is part of our present. This is a lesson that seems to
have escaped the 45 per cent of Britons – according to a recent poll
– who have not heard of Auschwitz.

In truth, the story of the Holocaust is imperfectly understood, even
by many of us who think we know what happened. (I was astonished by
my own ignorance when I visited Auschwitz, even though my father was
Jewish, even though some of my distant, Slovakian-Jewish relatives
almost certainly died there.)

The details are imperfectly known, even to honest, specialist
historians, because so much of the evidence was destroyed by the
Nazis themselves in 1943-44. The story was further muddied by the
Soviet domination of Poland up to 1990 – years when Auschwitz was
turned into an “anti-fascist” shrine and the suffering of the Jews
was pushed into the background.

Did 5,000,000 Jews die in the Holocaust or 6,000,000? Even now,
honest historians disagree. The generally accepted figure of
1,100,000 dead in Auschwitz alone (including 960,000 Jews, 75,000
Poles and 21,000 gypsies) is a “conservative estimate”, according to
the head archivist of the Polish state museum on the site, Piotr
Setkiewicz. “It was almost certainly more than that. These are just
the people that we can say with absolute certainty died here.”

One of the perverted oddities of the Final Solution is the mixture of
brazen pride and shame with which it was implemented. Intelligent,
educated men believed that they had a right to destroy millions of
fellow human beings. At the same time, they felt it was necessary to
lie about, and cover up, what they were doing. The same twin impulses
– denial on the one hand, and pride in the Holocaust on the other –
persist among Nazi apologists to this day.

The 60th anniversary has brought an abundance of new studies,
including the excellent BBC television series on Auschwitz, and the
accompanying book by Laurence Rees. All the same, confusions remain
in many educated and unprejudiced minds: confusions which are often
exploited by Holocaust- deniers and relativisers. There is,
especially, an abiding confusion about the different kinds of camps
which existed in the Nazi archipelago of evil.

Broadly speaking, there were labour camps, concentration camps and
death camps. Life in the labour and concentration camps, such as
Belsen, south of Hamburg, and Dachau, north of Munich, was barbaric.
Life expectancy was short. These camps had tens of thousands of
political prisoners, and resistance activists, from Germany and from
occupied countries – and some high-profile Jews.

Much of the confusion, in the West, arises because these camps, in
the western part of Germany, were liberated by the British and the
Americans. They provided the images which were first seared onto the
world’s memory and conscience: images of walking skeletons in striped
uniforms and heaps of emaciated bodies being cleared by bulldozers.

But these were not the death camps. There were no planned mass
killings – no gas chambers or crematoria – in Belsen or Dachau or
Ravensbruck or Mauthausen or anywhere within Germany’s pre-war
borders.

The Holocaust happened further east, in Poland, notably at Auschwitz
but also in five other camps, some of which were no larger than three
or four football pitches: Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and
Majdanek.

The unfamiliarity of these names – apart from Treblinka –

is significant, and deliberate. They were dismantled, and the ground
ploughed over and planted with trees, by the SS at the end of 1943.
By that time, it is estimated that 1,700,000 people had been murdered
there, mostly Polish Jews, mostly killed by carbon-monoxide poisoning
(Zyklon- B gas was an Auschwitz speciality.)

Mr Setkiewicz says: “We have very, very little direct information on
what happened in these places. There are few records, few eyewitness
accounts, no survivors. We know only that transports took Jews out of
the ghettos established by the Nazis in Warsaw and other cities and
they took them to these camps, which were set up as extermination
centres. There was no room for people to live or work in these
places. No one came back.”

Auschwitz was unique. It was the only site which contained both an
extermination camp and a labour camp (in fact 40 different camps,
spread over an area covering 40 square kilometres, the Auschwitz
“zone of interest”).

Because both kinds of camp existed side by side, there are survivors,
Jewish survivors and Polish survivors, to tell us what happened in
Auschwitz. But the existence of both kinds of camp on one site, or at
one complex of sites, is also fertile ground for the negationists.

Look, they say, Auschwitz had a swimming pool; it had a brothel for
inmates, an orchestra, a sauna. How bad could it have been? Yes,
Auschwitz had an orchestra but most of the 1,100,000 people who died
there never heard it play.

The complex has two main camps: the original Polish army barracks
taken over by the Nazis in 1940, and the much larger Birkenau camp,
three kilometres away, built by slave labour from October 1941.

The original Auschwitz camp – which looks like a pleasant army base
or a university campus – has its own horrific tale to tell. It was
here that the first mass killings of Poles and Russian prisoners of
war took place. It was here that the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoss,
devised methods of mass slaughter with Zyklon-B in the first of the
Auschwitz gas chambers (built at the end of the garden where his
children played).

It was here that the SS doctor Josef Mengele conducted medical
experiments on twins and pregnant women. It was here that the
orchestra, comprised of musically talented inmates, played merry
dance tunes and waltzes as the half-starved work groups – kommandos –
struggled in and out of the gate marked Arbeit macht frei (work makes
you free).

The swimming pool and brothel also existed – but only for the kapos
or inmates promoted to be overseers.

Tens of thousands of people died in the original camp but the greater
slaughter happened down the road at Birkenau, conceived originally as
a labour camp but then developed into an industrial killing-machine.

Another grim distinction needs to be made. The Belsen-generated image
of the Holocaust – emaciated people in striped uniforms being herded
into gas chambers – is largely false. Most of those who died at
Auschwitz never wore camp uniforms. They never received a number
tattooed on their forearm (another Auschwitz speciality which did not
occur elsewhere). Most were led, or taken in trucks, directly from
the trains to the chambers. They died, not as dehumanised skeletons,
but as people looking and feeling like citizens of the mid-20th
century.

When a train arrived (from Hungary or Holland or France), the
prisoners – 1,200 to 1,500 on each train – were divided into columns
of men and columns of women and children. The SS doctors and guards,
often behaving with extreme politeness, selected maybe 200 young men
and women from each train to be admitted to the camp as slaves for
the Nazi war machine. The remainder were taken to the far end of the
site – to the place where tomorrow’s ceremony will take place. They
were made to undress and told they had to take a shower. They were
led into the gas chambers and murdered as they huddled in family
groups.

Their bodies were removed by the members of the sonderkommando – the
Jews and other prisoners forced to do the most horrific work to
protect the minds of the SS guards. Gold teeth, rings and hair were
cut from the bodies before they were burnt. (The hair was made into,
among other things, socks for submariners.)

It is estimated that Birkenau, when functioning at its most
efficient, could murder and burn 20,000 people in a day.

How do we know all this? The Holocaust deniers say we don’t know;
that it is largely made up or exaggerated; that no evidence exists
that the gas chambers – destroyed by the SS in January 1945 – were
gas chambers. (On surviving plans they are described as “morgues”.)

In truth, the amount of direct and circumstantial evidence of what
happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau is huge. Twenty-five photographs were
taken by an unknown SS guard, discovered in an album when the camp
was liberated, showing the process of “selection” of trainloads of
Hungarian Jews in 1944. Eyewitness accounts have been given by SS men
and by survivors, including members of the sonderkommando, the few
who survived and others who buried their testimony in the earth of
the camp.

Plans show the “morgues” were designed to be gas-tight and have a
high ambient temperature – counter-productive for a morgue but
necessary to activate pellets of Zyklon-B. (One plan also exists
which labels the gas chamber not as as a morgue, but as a “gas
chamber”).

Mr Setkiewicz says: “Do we have one piece of evidence which proves
beyond all doubt that the Holocaust happened? No. We have a
thousand.”

The museum at the original Auschwitz camp presents this evidence in
crushing, disturbing mass. Human hair is piled behind a glass window
and covers the area of two tennis courts. Similar picture-windows
display heaps of shoes, spectacles, suitcases, false legs and arms,
crutches and clothes found when the camp was liberated six decades
ago.

A newer exhibition has also been opened in the “sauna” at Birkenau.
This was, in fact, the building where the few selected to work and
suffer, rather than to die instantly, were stripped, shaved and
tattooed. This display speaks of the individual ordinariness of
thousands of obliterated lives. It shows hundreds of photographs,
mysteriously found in a suitcase at the site – all of them pre-war
family snaps taken by Jews living in the town of Bedzin: snaps of
weddings and walking trips, grinning young men acting the fool,
brothers arm in arm, happy picnics and shopping expeditions.

In the next room is a display of objects, confiscated from Jews as
they arrived at the camp: banal objects, precious objects, objects
which suggest that many of those who arrived here had no conception
of the fate awaiting them. There are cigarette lighters and
cheese-graters, picnic baskets and kettles, razors and chess sets,
hairbrushes and cameras.

Once again, you are reminded that the Holocaust happened in a time
like the present, to people like you and me. Visiting Auschwitz, and
seeing sights like these, you wrestle with an impossible question.
What makes Auschwitz and the Holocaust different? Are they different?

Massacres and genocides have been carried out throughout history,
from Genghis Khan to the Crusades, from the American Plains to
Turkish Armenia,

Lebanon, Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Even the numbers killed in the
Holocaust are not unique. Stalin killed more, for reasons of
expediency and terror, than Hitler killed for reasons of race and
ideology. Studies in comparative evil are barren and pointless: all
of these crimes are monstrous.

And yet there is something about the Holocaust which sets it apart,
in its essence, if not its enormity. Here was a genocide willed and
planned by a modern industrial state, using all the paraphernalia of
modernity, from trains to toxic gases. Here was a genocide, willed
not just because a people were occupying space coveted by another
people but because of a self-induced, obsessive, racial fear and
hatred.

In no other genocide, before or since, have hundreds of thousands of
people been sought out and shipped hundreds of miles, at great
expense, to their instant murder. In no other genocide have bodies
been treated as industrial raw materials, coldly denying the humanity
of the victims even in death.

It took a very modern and advanced state to conceive and organise
such an elaborate, bureaucratic genocide. It took all the resources
of modern politics and mass media to brain-wash an entire people so
that they were complicit in murder on an industrial scale.

What is the way to Auschwitz? The road does not just start beside a
roundabout and a BP petrol station.

Teresa Swiebocka, the senior curator at the Auschwitz museum, who
also teaches on the meaning of the Holocaust, said: “The Holocaust
did not begin in 1939 or 1941. It began many years earlier. It began
with an obsession that one nation, one race, had absolute wisdom and
absolute rights, superior to those of other races or religions.

“The question people should ask when they come here, or watch the
anniversary ceremonies, is how can civilised people in a modern state
be brought so far and so low? How does it begin? At what point do you
take a turning which leads you eventually on to a road marked
Auschwitz?”

The Independent
January 27, 2005

UNIQUE REMINDER OF INHUMANITY THAT SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN

THE SIXTIETH anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz today has a
special sense of dignity. As with the D-Day anniversary last year,
there is inevitably a sense of a passing of the generation who
remembered and were part of it, a thinning of the cord that connects
the past with new generations who must learn about it afresh.

This is reason perhaps to feel a particular solemnity this year, to
stand in sorrow at the loss of so many lives and in appalled
knowledge of what man is capable of doing to man. Only those who
survived, those who witnessed the death camps or who had relations
who died there, can know the full extent of grief that the Holocaust
brought. But it remains in its scale and its full bureaucratic
ruthlessness a crime that had, and must continue to have,
reverberations through all humanity.

Auschwitz itself was not only an extermination camp for Jews, of
course. Tens of thousands of Poles, Russians, gypsies, homosexuals
and others whom the Nazis defined as subhuman, also died there. But
it has come to have a special meaning in the Holocaust, accounting
for up to 1 million of the 6 million Jews who died as victims of the
world’s most horrendous genocide.

Was the Holocaust then a unique event, an “exceptional” act of mass
murder that can only be understood in Jewish historical terms, or was
it part of a wider pattern of brutality, a peculiarly brutal part to
be sure, but one with implications for us all?

The answer must be that it was – and is – both. The anti-Semitism
that encouraged the persecution of Jews throughout Europe in the
Middle Ages and beyond and allowed the Nazis to define them as a
sub-species of mankind to be wiped off their lands has not
disappeared. It did not start with the rise to power of Hitler and it
did not end with his fall. Given that history, Jews have a special
reason for feeling that the Holocaust should be invoked as a constant
rallying cry to stamp out even the most isolated signs of a
resurgence in anti-Semitic propaganda and assault.

But the Holocaust was not alone as an act of genocide in a century
filled with massacres of civilians and ethnic violence. Armenians,
Tutsi, Chechens, Aborigines, Marsh Arabs, Nubian tribesmen – the list
of victims of race or colour is endless, not to mention the millions
of their own countrymen killed or starved by Stalin, Mao Zedong and
Pol Pot. In that sense the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
cannot be just an occasion to remember a uniquely horrifying episode
in history. Within five years millions of Hindus and Muslims were
being killed for their religion in the break-up of India. Half a
century later, Rwanda proved that virtually an entire people could be
slaughtered – and the world would let it happen.

There is reason for optimism as well as gloom. The reaction to the
horrors of Nazism and the World War it unleashed led to the creation
of both the United Nations and then the European Common Market. It is
now impossible to conceive of any resurgence of the national conflict
in Europe that brought with it two world wars. The collapse of the
Soviet Union has also brought with it an opportunity for countries
such as Poland, Hungary and Romania to face up to their past, and
particularly the Holocaust.

But faced with the ethnic violence and civilian massacres in Darfur,
no one could say that the lessons of the last century have been
learnt, or that the international community has yet found a way of
preventing them. Nor, listening to the debate about immigration, can
anyone say that all people have learnt generosity towards their
fellow men. Fear of the foreigner, suspicion of the outsider, lies
close to the surface of every society, ready to break out in calls
for action when pressures seem threatening. One man’s concern about
security all too easily becomes a crowd’s call to imprison or reject
a whole group. We will need to remember Auschwitz long after its last
survivor has gone.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ARKA News Agency, Armenia
Jan 26 2005

Report of David Atkinson will not have special influence on Karabakh
negotiations – RA MFA

RA and NKR presidents discuss Karabakh conflict settlement process

“NATO CMX-2005 exercises started today

Azerbaijan transfers the discussions around the Karabakh conflict
issue into the course of public parliamentary discussions

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

REPORT OF DAVID ATKINSON WILL NOT HAVE SPECIAL INFLUENCE ON KARABAKH
NEGOTIATIONS – RA MFA

YEREVAN, January 26. /ARKA/. Report of David Atkinson will not have
special influence on Karabakh negotiations, RA MFA Press Secretary
Hamlet Gasparian told ARKA. According to him, passed resolution does
not have obligatory legal character, it is declarative and of
recommendation. Gasparian noted that report of Atkinson along with
positive sides is in the whole imperfect because considers
consequences of Karabakh conflict and does not go deep in its
reasons. He also noted that the process of implementation of changes
to the report was not objective.
According to Gasparian, RA MFA welcomes the principles again
strengthened the report according to which namely `independence of
territory and its separation can be achieved only by peaceful process
based on support of the population of the territory» and `the issue
cannot have military settlement. Future of the population and its
status should be determined by the population itself’. The change
made by Armenian delegation which reminds Armenian commitment to CE
on use of influence on Karabakh Armenians for achievement of
conflict’s settlement is also important. `Thus it is accepted that
Karabakh conflict is the conflict between Nagorno Karabakh and
Azerbaijan’, Gasparian said.
Resolution on report of D.Atkinson was passed on Jan 26 by majority
of votes – 123 voted for and only 7 deputies against. The document
will be soon discussed in Ministers Committee. L.D. -0 –

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

RA AND NKR PRESIDENTS DISCUSS KARABAKH CONFLICT SETTLEMENT PROCESS

YEREVAN, January 26. /ARKA/. RA and NKR presidents discussed Karabakh
conflict settlement process, RA President’s press office told ARKA.
The parties discussed socio-economic situation in Nagorno Karabakh
and realization of cooperation programs between Armenia and NKR for
2005. L.D. -0 –

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

NATO CMX-2005 EXERCISES STARTED TODAY

YEREVAN, January 26. /ARKA/. NATO CMX-2005 exercises started today,
RA Ministry of Defense Press Secretary Seiran Shakhsuvarian told
ARKA. The goal of the exercises is practical training of procedures
of crisis management, including cooperation of civil and military
bodies, for support and increase of readiness of NATO to work in
crisis conditions. The scenario of exercises will have hypothetical
character and include conduction of operation on settlement of crisis
between two fictitios states outside NATO region in the frames of UN
mandate. Servicemen and civilian representatives of 26
country-members and of 7 country-partners – Austria, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Croatia, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and
Macedonia – will take part in the exercises. Representatives of UN,
EU and OSCE invited as an observers.
Exercises will be coordinated from NATO base in Brussels, last 7 days
and end on Feb 1.
NATO group of experts on crisis management visited Yerevan for the
first time on Nov 23-25, 2004. L.D. -0

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

AZERBAIJAN TRANSFERS THE DISCUSSIONS AROUND THE KARABAKH CONFLICT
ISSUE INTO THE COURSE OF PUBLIC PARLIAMENTARY DISCUSSIONS

YEREVAN, January 26. /ARKA/. For the recently period Azerbaijan
transfers the discussions around the Karabakh conflict issue from the
specialized expert groups into the course of public parliamentary
discussions, as the Vice-Speaker of RA NA Vahan Hovhannisyan told
ARKA. According to him, it’s to the best advantage to Azerbaijan,
since expert groups like OSCE Minsk Group, probe into the issue and
the cause-effect relations deeply, and their conclusions often are
closer to the reality. As a result, according to Hovhannisyan, the
conclusions cause irritation and abrupt reaction on the part of
Azerbaijan, because the conclusions being close to the objective
reality mostly reflect the point of view of the Armenian side that is
close to human values. According to him, this explains the desire of
Azerbaijan to take the discussions to the spheres and organizations
possessing not enough information and being guided by political
conjuncture and by what moments and situations demand. `Mainly, those
are parliamentary organizations having even no technical possibility
to make use of the accumulated experience of the expert groups’, RA
NA Vice-Speaker noted. A.H. –0 –
******************************

Voice of America
Jan 26 2005

Armenians, Life Insurance Company Settle on 1915 Policies

By Barbara Schoetzau
New York

Five New York area Armenian charities are splitting $3 million with
four Armenian groups in Los Angeles as a result of a $20 million
settlement between the New York Life Insurance Company and
descendants of Armenians killed in the Turkish Ottoman Empire 90
years ago.

Each of the charities received $333.333. The rest of the money will
be split among potential heirs and beneficiaries of the 2,300 life
insurance policies New York Life sold to Armenians living in the
Ottoman Empire prior to 1915.

Armenians say more than 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the
waning days of the Ottoman Empire from 1915 until 1919. They call it
a genocide, but Turkey rejects the claim saying the numbers have been
exaggerated.

Three lawyers of Armenian background filed the class action lawsuit
in 1999, contending that New York Life never compensated the families
of those who bought policies. New York Life researched the issue and
found 2,300 unpaid policies. Lawyer Brian Kabateck, says the
particular charities were chosen because of their efforts to help
Armenians who fled to the United States from the Ottoman Empire in
1915.

“The reason $3 million is being distributed immediately to charities
is that a number of organizations that involve helping Armenians were
selected because a number of families completely perished in the
genocide and left no survivors,” he said. “As a result of that, the
money that is being distributed today is symbolic of money for
charities and for charitable organizations.”

The charities must use the money for educational and cultural
purposes or to help needy Armenians in the United States and abroad.
Descendants of survivors have until March 16 to file claims. They can
find information on the website armenian insurance settlement.com.
Mr.Kabateck says many of the beneficiaries do not live in the United
States.

“We have taken a substantial effort to publicize in other centers of
the world where Armenians have large populations: Russia, of course,
Armenia. We have had people in Armenia giving press conferences and
talking to people over there and making lists available in rural
parts of Armenia. [In] Argentina, there is a very large Armenian
population. France, in Marseilles there is a large population,” he
added.

Mr. Kabateck says the lawyers are now trying to reach a settlement
with two other insurance companies, but he would not divulge their
names.

ASBAREZ ONLINE
TOP STORIES
01/26/2005
TO ACCESS PREVIOUS ASBAREZ ONLINE EDITIONS PLEASE VISIT OUR
WEBSITE AT <;HTTP://

1) Armenia Reacts to PACE Resolution
2) Reference of Genocide to be Included in Turkish Textbooks
3) Armenian Caucus Co-chairs Call on Bush Administration to Renounce
Accusations by State Department Official on Karabagh
4) Melkonian Trust Monitoring Group Meets with Patriarch in Support of Legal
Action
5) Turkish Army Warns Iraqi Kurds, US over Kirkuk
6) European Court of Justice Demands Turkey to Pay up for Inhumane Treatment

1) Armenia Reacts to PACE Resolution

Foreign Ministry emphasizes Minsk Group’s role in negotiations, non-binding
nature of resolution

YEREVAN (RFE/RL)–Armenia’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamlet Gasparian
criticized, on Wednesday, a Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
(PACE) resolution that addresses the Armenian occupation of Azeri territories
around Mountainous Karabagh.
Adopted on Tuesday, the resolution states that “the occupation of foreign
territory by a member state constitutes a grave violation of that state’s
obligations as a member of the Council of Europe.” It also notes that the
Karabagh war has led to the creation of “mono-ethnic areas which resemble the
terrible concept of ethnic cleansing.”
Gasparian called the document flawed, saying that it “addresses consequences
of the conflict without looking into its root causes.”
“Nonetheless, the resolution is not legally binding. It is only advisory and
declarative,” he said in a statement.
The Foreign Ministry’s statement emphasizes that the Karabagh peace
process is
spearheaded by the OSCE’s Minsk Group and the Council of Europe. “We believe
that the positive and negative sides of the resolution will not have much
of an
impact on negotiations.”
Levon Mkrtchian of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, a member of the
government coalition, warned of pitfalls lying ahead. “I don’t think that the
document will have a direct influence on the Minsk Group process,” he said.
“But it could complicate the situation in a different way. It could create an
illusion among Azerbaijan’s leaders that they can toughen their position and
exert pressure on Armenia with such methods.”

2) Reference of Genocide to be Included in Turkish Textbooks

ANKARA–The Republic of Turkey’s Education Ministry recently announced that
elementary-level history textbooks will, for the first time, include reference
to the genocide committed against the Ottoman-Armenians. The textbooks,
however, will include both, what Turkey refers to, the “Armenian version” of
the genocide, and an “official” government sanctioned version of the events.
The chairman of the Education Ministry’s committee on textbooks, Moustafa
Safran, explained that the inclusion of the genocide arose from the fact that
Armenians have insisted that the events that occurred between 1915-1923
qualify
as “genocide.” In order to address the issue, Safran said, the committee
decided to include both the Armenian and Turkish perspectives–a move allowing
students the information necessary to form an educated opinion–according to
the committee.
Safran noted his committee realizes that it is impossible nowadays to shield
Turkish school children from “Armenian claims,” and that it is their intention
to bolster the government’s position on the issue by including archival
Ottoman
documents, which reportedly prove that the genocide never occurred.
Safran’s committee has also decided to exclude incendiary remarks such as “we
crushed the Greeks,” and be particular in its definitions of “heroes” and
“traitors.” Textbooks will note that numerous Kurdish tribes assisted Mustafa
Kemal’s efforts in establishing a “modern” Turkey.

3) Armenian Caucus Co-chairs Call on Bush Administration to Renounce
Accusations by State Department Official on Karabagh

WASHINGTON, DC–US Reps. Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) and Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ),
cochairmen of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues, called on the US
State Department to formally renounce remarks by a State Department
official in
Moscow that described the government of Mountainous Karabagh Republic as
“criminal secessionists.”
The lawmakers made the request in a letter to Secretary of State nominee
Condoleezza Rice, referring to a statement made by Assistant Secretary of
State
Elizabeth Jones during a January 13 digital video-conference with journalists
at US Embassies in Moscow, Rome, and Bratislava.
Expressing serious concern about the inaccurate characterization of Karabagh,
the co-chairs said, “These unfounded and incendiary accusations undermine the
very principles underlying our role as an honest broker in the Organization
for
Security and Cooperation’s Minsk Group Nagorno-Karabakh peace process.”
The letter also stresses the damage of such remarks as it “unfairly
denigrates
the tremendous progress that the people and government of Nagorno-Karabakh
have
made in establishing democratic institutions, even as they have struggled to
rebuild their homes, schools and farms destroyed by years of brutal Azerbaijan
aggression.”
Jones’s false charge that the government is “criminal,” the lawmakers said,
“only serves to further encourage irresponsible senior Azerbaijani leaders
that
are already calling for a military solution to the Karabakh issue.”

4) Melkonian Trust Monitoring Group Meets with Patriarch in Support of Legal
Action

ISTANBUL–The Armenian Patriarch of Istanbul Mesrob Mutafyan, held a meeting
with members of the Monitoring Group on the Melkonian Trust (MGMT) to discuss
the pending suit against New York-based Armenian General Benevolent Union
(AGBU). The January 24 meeting took place Armenian Patriarchal headquarters in
Istanbul.
The MGMT members thanked the Patriarch for his willingness to act on the
issue
in order to assure that the historic school continues to function.
As reported on January 20, Archbishop Mutafyan, in his fiduciary capacity as
Patriarch of Constantinople, filed a lawsuit against New York-based Armenian
General Benevolent Union (AGBU) on January 13, 2005. The suit, which mainly
addresses the formal announcement made by the AGBU in March 2004 that it would
be closing the Melkonian Educational Institution in Nicosia, Cyprus at the end
of the 2005 school year, was filed in the Superior Court of the State of
California for the County of Los Angeles by plaintiff Mutafyan’s
California-based attorney Mark Macarley.
In July 1921, wealthy Armenian businessman Garabed Melkonian donated a
gift to
then Patriarch of Constantinople Zaven Der Yeghyayan, to establish and
maintain
Armenian schools, as well as carry out various charitable works for the
Armenian people. In 1924, the value of the gift was at least $3.5 million and
per Melkonian’s request, an Armenian school and orphanage named the Melkonian
Educational Institute was established in Nicosia, Cyprus.
In 1925, Patriarch Der Yeghyayan transferred the entire Melkonian gift,
including the Melkonian Educational Institute, to the AGBU due to the latter’s
expressed ability to better manage the trust’s assets and execute the donor’s
intentions.
Archbishop Mutafyan informed the members of the MGMT that he first became
aware of the existence and contents of the 1926 Deed of Amendment to the
Melkonian Trust on December 28, 2004, through the Melkonian Educational
Institute Alumni in Los Angeles, and emphasized that he is now cognizant of
the
multiple obligations the AGBU accepted from his predecessor, Patriarch Der
Yeghyayan, in 1926.
The suit, Arch. Mesrob Mutafyan vs. Armenian General Benevolent Union,
petitions to compel AGBU to perform the Trustee’s duties and redress a breach
of trust by payment of money or otherwise.

5) Turkish Army Warns Iraqi Kurds, US over Kirkuk

ANKARA (AFP)–Ethnic strife in Kirkuk, sparked by Kurdish attempts to take
control of the oil-rich city in northern Iraq, would create “serious” security
concerns for Turkey, the Turkish army warned on Wednesday. It might also
open a
rift with the United States, it said.
The number two in line, in the influential Turkish military, renewed Ankara’s
charges that more Kurds than those expelled from Kirkuk under Saddam Hussein’s
regime have now settled in the city and registered for Sunday’s elections in
Iraq.
“We have repeatedly said that such a situation may make the election results
in Kirkuk disputable and make it almost impossible to find a fair and lasting
solution for Kirkuk,” General Ilker Basbug told a news conference.
“Moreover, we are concerned that such developments will pose a threat to
Iraq’s
territorial and political unity and create a great security problem in the
region,” he said. “Such a development will also create a serious security
problem for Turkey.”
Ankara is vehemently opposed to Kurdish control of Kirkuk, which many Kurds
want to incorporate into their enclave in northern Iraq and even see as the
capital of a future independent Kurdish state, a nightmare scenario for Iraq’s
neighbors.
Earlier this month the Kurds reached a deal with the Iraqi government that
cleared the way for an estimated 100,000 Kurds said to have been expelled from
Kirkuk in the past, to vote for the new local government in the elections.
The deal effectively tipped the balance of power to the Kurds, fanning ethnic
tensions in the city, home to a large number of Turkmen, a community of
Turkish
descent backed by Ankara.
Basbug warned that post-election disputes in Kirkuk “may lead to
confrontations…and may pull the trigger for a civil war in Iraq.”
Asked about the United States’s role in preventing unrest in the region, the
general conceded that “the circumstances in Iraq are very difficult,” but
cautioned that ethnic tensions in Kirkuk might deal a blow to Turkey’s ties
with its long-standing ally.
“If the people of Kirkuk endorse the election results, we will conclude that
no major problem exists,” he said. “But if the opposite happens, then we will
see that we have differences” with the US.

6) European Court of Justice Demands Turkey to Pay up for Inhumane Treatment

The European Court of Justice demanded on January 25 that Turkey pay 10,000
euros to a man who was subjected to harm and electric shock when taken into
custody by Turkish police.
On the night of April 1, 1996, 29-year-old Hussein Syunal was taken to jail
and endured inhumane treatment, including electric shock. The same night,
Syunal was taken to the hospital, where he was reported to have had numerous
injuries to his head, body, including his tongue. It later became apparent
that
during questioning, the police had tied electric lines to his tongue.

All subscription inquiries and changes must be made through the proper carrier
and not Asbarez Online. ASBAREZ ONLINE does not transmit address changes and
subscription requests.
(c) 2005 ASBAREZ ONLINE. All Rights Reserved.

ASBAREZ provides this news service to ARMENIAN NEWS NETWORK members for
academic research or personal use only and may not be reproduced in or through
mass media outlets.

Coral Springs Potpourri
A modern cubist, a furniture embellisher, and two chicks named Grace —
lassoed together
BY MICHAEL MILLS
newtimesbpb.com
27 Jan 2005

>From Yuroz’ Human Rights Mural: Using multiple points of view simultaneously

“Yuroz’s Narrative Culture of Cubism,” “Felipe R. Luque: Arte Decorativo,”
“Grace Dubow: Simply Grace!”, and “Grace Fishenfeld: Moving Along Through
Media and Idea.”
On display through February 19.
Where: Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs Center for the Arts, 2855
Coral Springs Dr., Coral Springs, 954-340-5000.

Necessity, so it goes, is the mother of invention. In the case of the Coral
Springs Museum of Art, the need is to fill about 8,000 square feet of
display space on a regular basis. Amazingly, director Barbara K. O’Keefe
does it and does it well, continuing to work with limited resources (a
minuscule budget, a staff consisting mostly of part-timers and volunteers)
and within the confines of city government.
Visit at pretty much any given time and you’ll see the results of O’Keefe’s
inventiveness. Right now, for instance, the museum is host to four solo
exhibitions: “Yuroz’s Narrative Culture of Cubism,” “Felipe R. Luque: Arte
Decorativo,” “Grace Dubow: Simply Grace!”, and “Grace Fishenfeld: Moving
Along Through Media and Idea.” The big center gallery is also temporarily
home to a separate Yuroz work, the massive painting installation United
Nations’ Human Rights Mural 2004.
Off to one side of that main gallery, the museum’s current artist in
residence, Barbara W. Watler, is also at work. (Let’s just say, for the
moment, that a sewing machine and fingerprints are involved.) Adjacent to
Watler’s makeshift workspace are the beginnings of a new art library,
featuring books donated by patrons and custom-made bookshelves. And in the
formerly open space on the other side of the center gallery, behind the
Yuroz mural, there’s now a little seating area furnished with functional art
by W.F. Withers, whose fluid designs for a trio of chairs and a table
beautifully mesh with the museum’s overall look and feel.
As for the exhibitions, while they’re all respectable — O’Keefe rarely
curates a clinker — they also vary in quality. Yuroz, born Yuri Gevorgian
in 1956 in the Soviet (at the time) Republic of Armenia, is the headliner
here. His “Narrative Culture of Cubism,” originally scheduled to end in
November but now extended through mid-February, consists of nearly 30 works,
most of them fairly large oil paintings on canvas or board, supplemented by
a few charcoal drawings.
Yuroz, as the show’s title indicates, specializes in cubism, making him
something of an oddity in contemporary art. He hasn’t, as might be expected,
imposed any radical reinterpretation on the once-revolutionary technique of
using multiple points of view simultaneously. Rather, he has adapted the
classic cubism of Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris to his own ends.
At first glance, some of Yuroz’s paintings could almost be mistaken for the
work of such early-20th-century cubist pioneers. The carefully controlled
palette, the emphasis on geometric shapes, even the subject matter — all
the basic elements are there. Again and again, Yuroz returns to the same
visual ingredients: men holding or playing guitars, women, wineglasses,
flowers, fruit.
And the subjects are almost always couples. There’s one threesome (two men
and a woman) included in the show, and a few paintings feature solo men or
women, although the women, in particular, tend to look forlorn or at least
bored without male companionship. Then again, all of Yuroz’s characters have
more or less the same blank look. Almost anything could be read into this
lack of affect. In at least one piece, Evening Light, a woman’s pose and
demeanor suggest that she’s a prostitute waiting for a customer — naked
except for a pair of bright-red heels, she sits alone with a glass of wine
at a small table, legs crossed, one arm propped on the table with the hand
cupping her chin, a cigarette dangling from the other hand, an impossibly
world-weary look on her face.
It’s tempting to speculate that women, who are almost always nude in Yuroz’s
pictures, are little more than props for the artist, except that his men
aren’t much more animated. In the exhibition’s handout, Matthew Lutt writes:
“In the art of Yuroz, lovers embrace each other with such passionate
intimacy that it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. They
offer roses, exchange fruit, or dance in celebration of their togetherness.”
This sounds exciting, but the paintings don’t exactly bear it out. The
couples indeed seem to melt together, although their closeness seems more a
function of the cubist style than any physical intimacy or emotional
connection. (Occasionally they even resemble conjoined twins.) Those blue
roses and pomegranates Lutt refers to, like the ubiquitous guitars and
glasses of wine, are there to lend variety to the compositions. Cubism’s
tendency to freeze its subjects is probably why its inventors favored the
still life and may be why a Yuroz painting such as Still Life with Blue
Roses by Window is, paradoxically, more alive than his portraits of people.
A huge exception — literally — is the United Nations’ Human Rights Mural
2004, which, despite the generic title, is full of vibrant life. It consists
of six big canvases of overlapping imagery, crammed with people engaged in
all sorts of activities. Individually, the components were the artwork for
stamps issued in the United States, France, and Austria; together, they form
a dramatic narrative of the worldwide struggle for human rights.
Surrounding the mural and stretching beyond the center of the main gallery
are a dozen and a half pieces of furniture by Felipe R. Luque. The native
Spaniard, who settled in Boca Raton after living in New York, works with
wood, iron, and glass, accented with marble, granite, and quartz, all of
which he transforms into tables and consoles of varying dimensions and
shapes (and, in one dazzling piece, into a tiny bench that serves as a base
for a long, narrow, smoky mirror framed by pieces of wood that look like
tree branches).
As the introduction by Roger S. Selby explains, Luque is fond of working
with found objects, each of which might once have been part of something
else — “It might have been a tool, an armoire or a part of a machine. It
already had a predetermined configuration and a patina from constant use” —
which are then incorporated, often with minimal alterations, into the
artist’s work. This accounts for the irregular forms, as well as for a
certain poignancy unusual for furniture.
The small galleries clustered on the museum’s south side feature two Graces
with very different styles and approaches. Grace Dubow, a Texan who came to
Florida by way of Michigan, is the more traditional of the two, working
mostly in watercolors and favoring floral compositions. One grouping
features six versions of Egrets, each executed in a different medium (the
batik version is the best); it’s an interesting experiment made less
interesting by its subject matter. Of the florals, the watercolor White
Cattleya and White Orchid Tree, in painted silk, are the standouts.
Grace Fishenfeld, who still splits her time between Florida and New York, is
more adventurous, dabbling in media ranging from watercolor, pastel, and
acrylic to collage, woodcut, and gouache. She’s also more ambitious, which
can be admirable or lamentable, depending upon the outcome.
Fishenfeld often runs the risk of overconceptualizing, as in the mixed-media
piece Adam & Eve in the City or the dozen gouaches that make up The Myths.
And she can’t seem to resist editorializing, as in this description of the
pastel Anticipating a Visit: “The elderly eagerly await a visit from
children and friends and hope not to be forgotten.” She’s much better off
when her lofty subject matter is secondary to the medium, as in the woodcut
Acrobat and in several mixed-media reliefs incorporating sand.
If Artist in Residence Barbara Watler is at her post, don’t be afraid to
approach and ask her about her art, and don’t be taken aback if she keeps
right on sewing. Quilting, of all things, is the Hollywood-based artist’s
medium of choice, and sample panels and photo albums of her work are
available for examination.
It’s Watler’s quilting quirk, however, that’s of interest. She takes
individual fingerprints (there’s an ink pad and paper at hand if you’d like
to donate yours), enlarges them to varying degrees, then transforms them
into lovely abstracts on her trusty sewing machine. Leave it to the Coral
Springs Museum’s O’Keefe to find such an unusual artist and bring her to our
attention.

Armenian Atomic Dilemma

Aging nuclear power station is a vital source of energy for Armenia, but its
future is uncertain given its location on geological and political
faultlines.

By Kerob Sarkisian in Yerevan, Sophie Bukia in Tbilisi and Idrak Abbasov in
Baku (CRS No. 271, 26-Jan-05)

Its four giant cooling towers dominating the skyline outside Yerevan, the
Metsamor nuclear power station is a huge presence in Armenia – and a major
controversy outside it.
Armenians depend on the station for about 40 per cent of their electricity,
so most believe they cannot do without Metsamor – even bearing in mind the
potential risks from the earthquake-prone land it has stood on for three
decades.
“I have worked at the station for many years and I don’t think it is more
dangerous than any other in the world,” said Metsamor employee Araik
Ovsepian. “Of course, it would be better to live further away from it,
especially as they keep the nuclear waste on site. But I want to work in my
own [professional] field, and I need to feed my family.”
Constructed in 1976, the twin-reactor station sits near major geological
faultlines, one of which caused the Spitak earthquake that killed at least
25,000 people in 1988. Metsamor is also in one of Armenia’s most densely
populated areas. The capital Yerevan is 30 kilometres away.
Only one 440-megawatt reactor is running today, but the European Union says
that given the plant’s location and age and the need for its nuclear fuel to
travel by air, Metsamor should close down altogether. The plant, which is
managed by Russian electricity giant RAO UES, also gives rise to concerns in
the immediate region. The Turkish border is just 16 kilometres away, Iran’s
about 60 kilometres, and Azerbaijan and Georgia are less than 150 kilometres
away.
“God forbid that there should be an earthquake there. There would be a
catastrophe, and there would be radiation fallout within a radius of at
least 400 kilometres,” said Yetermishli Kurban, deputy director of
Azerbaijan’s Seismological Centre.
Georgian Green Party leader Giorgi Gachechiladze added, “According to
computer modelling done by our experts, if anything happens on the Armenian
plant’s territory, we’d have only eight hours to evacuate Tbilisi’s
population,”
Alvaro Antonian, the head of Armenia’s own National Seismic Protection
Service, said he couldn’t rule out the possibility of another major
earthquake before 2008 or 2010, it would happen in the south of the country,
relatively far away from Metsamor.
Armenian officials insist that Metsamor was specially built by Soviet
engineers to survive earthquakes of up to 8-9 on the Richter scale. And
although of a similar vintage, the VVER-440 reactor it uses is safer than
the type at Chernobyl, experts say.
During the 1988 earthquake, the nuclear plant withstood tremors measuring
five to six on the Richter scale. Both reactors at the plant were shut down
in the aftermath of that earthquake, but the second unit was restarted in
1995 because of the country’s dire need for energy.
While Metsamor was out of action, the country suffered electricity
rationing, economic decline and environmental damage as people felled trees
to get through the freezing winters.
“The tragedy was that many people left in winter, while those who stayed had
to warm themselves with firewood and other fuel. This led to deforestation
of Yerevan and the surrounding areas and reduction of the population by a
third,” said a report by the PA Consulting Group, which represents USAID in
Armenia.
The European Union argues that the risk of accidents or earthquakes is too
great, and that more effort must be made to find alternative power sources.
In June last year, the EU froze a grant of 100 million euros because of what
it said was the Armenian government’s slowness in fulfilling earlier
commitments to close the station.
One detail that worries the EU – which wants to see the closure of
Chernobyl-era power plants right across Europe – is Metsamor’s lack of a
secondary containment facility, a failsafe in case of radioactive spills.
Another problem is the need to fly in fuel on Russian planes through
Georgian airspace to Armenia. That “is the same as flying around a potential
nuclear bomb” said Alexis Louber, head of the EU delegation in Armenia, who
has been quoted as saying the plant poses “danger to the entire region”.
Metsamor general director Gagik Markosian said the flights, which pass over
Georgia, take place once a year.
However, Soso Kuchukhidze, in charge of nuclear energy matters at the
Georgian environment ministry, insisted that flights are made only once
every five years. and said he thought there was no danger.
“We know precisely when the fuel is to be transported and on what plane. The
fuel which is carried through Georgia’s airspace is totally harmless and
presents no danger whatsoever until it enters the reactor’s active zone and
the chain reaction begins. When passing through Georgian airspace, the fuel
is a normal substance emitting no radiation.”
Kuchukhidze said the last load was shifted in the summer of 2004, when two
planes transported about 32 tonnes of fuel.
Many Georgians appear poorly informed about the issue, which is rarely, if
ever discussed in the media.
Gachechiladze, the Green Party chairman, said he had never been told. “The
law says no sort of nuclear materials can be transported through Georgian
territory. We are not talking about ordinary fuel. It must be enriched
uranium, which is very dangerous..
“Those who allow it should be imprisoned. Can you imagine what will happen
if such a plane crashes?”
An additional worry is the waste material generated at Metsamor, said Akob
Sanasarian from the Union of Armenian Greens. The practice of burying the
waste on site – in facilities constructed with technical aid from French
firm Fromatom – “cannot be allowed from a security and ecological
standpoint,” he said.
But the main obstacle to shutting down Metsamor is that Armenia simply does
not have the natural resources or the money to find working alternatives.
Energy minister Armen Movsisian said it would cost one billion dollars to
stop the plant. “Negotiations with the [European] Commission are still
underway. Armenia is offering to identify what sources could become the
basis for building new, alternative capacities. But today, when we have no
financial means available, we cannot talk about the closure or any
timelines.”
One plan, which part of the EU grant was meant to help finance, is to lay a
gas pipeline from Iran. However, Movsisian said using gas to power
thermoelectric stations would result in higher electricity bills and have a
negative effect on the economy as a whole.
Electricity tariffs in Armenia are already double those in Russia, according
to RAO UES head Anatoly Chubais. Prices in Georgia are still higher.
Hydroelectric schemes are also limited by the lack of major water resources
in Armenia other than Lake Sevan, which is already suffering the effects of
Soviet-era ecological damage.
While some have even called for a new nuclear plant to be built, Armenian
and Russian experts believe that Metsamor can still function safely for at
least another 11 years.
Plant director Markosian said 35 million dollars had been spent on
improvements since the reopening of the reactor, and 22 million euros have
been provided under the EU’s TACIS programme. “The safety level at power
plant two has increased since 1995 compared with 1989 when the plant was
stopped. We can say with assurance that the safety of the plant has been
growing yearly.”
Markosian said that this second unit should be kept running to the end of
its 30-year service life. Taking into account the six-year period it was
switched off after the earthquake, that would be 2016. However, similar
Russian plants have seen their service life extended by another 15 years,
raising the possibility that Metsamor will stay in operation until 2031.
For neighbouring Georgia, the Metsamor debate is complex. Though some fear
potential disaster, Georgia has its own energy shortages and relies in part
on electricity that Armenia, thanks to Metsamor, is able to export.
Georgia buys between 100 and 150 megawatts of electricity daily from
Armenia – not from Metsamor, but from the Razdan thermoelectric power
station. Bur Georgian energy minister Nika Gilauri warns, “if the Armenian
nuclear power station stops, it will be impossible for Armenia to export
electricity to Georgia. Armenia will have available 400 megawatts less than
now,”
Despite its oil and gas resources, Azerbaijan also experiences electricity
shortages – particularly in the southern Nakhichivan autonomous region,
which is separated from the rest of the country by Armenian territory,
leaving it somewhat isolated ever since the war over Nagorny Karabakh in the
early Nineties.
Armenian energy ministry representative Levon Vardanian said at an
EU-sponsored conference in Baku last November that Yerevan was ready to
export electricity to Nakhichevan.
“We know that there are certain problems with electricity supplies in the
Nakhichivan Autonomous Republic, and we are prepared to cooperate with
Azerbaijan in restoring existing links,” Vardanian said. “Energy specialists
are always ready for cooperation and politicians must set aside the
problems.”
However, Azerbaijan’s deputy prime minister Abid Sharifov said there was no
chance of such cooperation as long as the conflict between Azerbaijan and
Armenia remained unresolved.
“As long as there is no peace deal with Armenia, there can be no talk of
mutual links. They can come here to take part in conferences, but that does
not mean we want to begin some sort of links with them,” he said.
Kerob Sarkisian is a correspondent for Iravunk newspaper in Yerevan. Sophie
Bukia is a correspondent for 24 Hours newspaper in Tbilisi. Idrak Abbasov is
a correspondent for Ayna newspaper in Baku. All three journalists
participate in IWPR’s South Caucasus Network project.

Coalition pull-out from Iraq gathers pace
By Peter Spiegel in London
Published: January 26 2005 22:19 | Last updated: January 26 2005 22:19
FT.com

Even as US forces struggle to stabilise Iraq during the tense election
period, they may soon face another challenge following Sunday’s vote: the
determination of several coalition members to withdraw thousands of troops
from the region.

Several allied countries, many of them eastern European, that were part of
the original “New Europe” group backing the Iraqi war have said they will
either completely withdraw or substantially reduce their forces in Iraq
after the January 30 elections.
The largest reduction is expected to come from Ukraine, which currently has
some 1,600 troops in Iraq, making it the sixth-largest contingent. Earlier
this month, outgoing President Leonid Kuchma ordered the defence ministry to
draw up plans to begin a complete withdrawal by the middle of the year,
after eight Ukrainian soldiers were killed in an explosion.
The move has been backed by incoming President Viktor Yushchenko, who
campaigned on a promise to bring the troops home. “The withdrawal of the
Ukrainian peacekeeping force is one of our priorities,” said a statement by
Mr Yushchenko’s political organisation. He was planning to address it soon
after taking office last weekend.
The move follows a decision by Poland, one of the US’s closest allies in the
Iraq war and with the fifth-largest contingent of 2,400 troops, to reduce
its presence by nearly a third, to 1,700, by the end of next month. The
Polish government has faced intense political pressure domestically, where
its participation is increasingly unpopular, and the reduction may be
followed by a complete withdrawal by the end of the year.
Polish military officers, who command the multinational division in
south-central Iraq, have said their reduced numbers combined with a
Ukrainian withdrawal could force them to cut the number of provinces they
patrol – a decision that may force the US to fill the gaps.
Another eastern European ally, Hungary, had intended to leave its 300 troops
through the elections, but the plan was voted down by parliament, and all
Hungarian forces – save for some logistical personnel responsible for
bringing back military equipment – arrived home last month.
Not all of the countries pulling out forces are from eastern Europe,
however. Earlier this month Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister,
said the Netherlands would move forward with its plan to withdraw its 1,400
troops by the end of March despite intense US and British pressure.
“I understand the feelings of the Americans and British, but even they can’t
avoid the conclusion that the Netherlands has delivered a considerable
contribution in that area of Iraq,” he told reporters.
In addition, Portugal said earlier this month that it would end its
120-strong police mission in Iraq on February 12. Those moves follow Spain’s
withdrawal last year and the refusal of several western European Nato
members – including France, Germany, Belgium, and Spain – to participate in
the alliance’s new training mission in Baghdad, a stance that has infuriated
American officials.
“When it comes time to perform a mission, it seems to us to be quite awkward
for suddenly members in that international staff to say, ‘I’m unable to go
because of this national caveat or national exception’,” Colin Powell,
outgoing secretary of state, said last month. “You are hurting the
credibility and the cohesion of such an international staff or
organisation.”
Despite the growing number of withdrawals, there will still be 24 countries
other than the US and Britain with troops after the announced departures.
Italy, with the largest European contingent, has vowed to keep its 3,100
troops in the region, and South Korea actually increased its presence in the
north of Iraq to 3,600 late last year, making it the largest force other
than the US and UK.
In addition, some of the European Nato members pulling troops out of Iraq –
including Poland, the Netherlands and Hungary – have agreed to send forces
back as part of a security force attached to the Nato training mission.
US officials have vowed to continue to push for more foreign troops,
insisting that requests for help are made frequently by President George W.
Bush during bilateral meetings with world leaders. Some senior US officials
hope that the United Nations-backed election will be a spur to encourage new
deployments.
“After this election is over, we have a chance now to, as an international
community, support a new, elected Iraqi government,” Condoleezza Rice,
incoming secretary of state, said during her recent confirmation hearings.
“And it may be a time that we can enhance the contributions of some members
of the international community.”
It is an effort that may have already paid off, albeit in a small way: last
month, Armenia voted to send 46 soldiers to southern Iraq.
The troops arrived in the southern Iraqi town of Hilla on Friday.