FIVE COMPANIES AWARDED WITH “QUALITY 2004” GOVERNMENTAL PRIZES

YEREVAN, January 21 (Noyan Tapan). Five companies are awarded with the
“Quality 2004” governmental prizes on January 21. The governmnet
selected “Ashtarak Kat”, “Dilijan Frolova Balka”, “Yerevan Brandy
Company”, “Vrasfer Technopark” and “Horizone 95” amomg nine companies
submitting bids. To recap, this prize is given for considerable
achievements in the sphere of quality provision and introduction of
effective methods on quality management.

Fresno Bee (California)
January 20, 2005, Thursday FINAL EDITION

Ohanyan’s Corner Family-run deli has offered Armenian foods for 25
years.

Paula Lloyd THE FRESNO BEE

The pungent smell of spices and the rhythmic thump of a
sausage-making machine fill Ohanyan’s Deli on a recent chilly
morning. The small family-run delicatessen, market and manufacturing
plant has been a fixture at Shields and West avenues for 25 years.

Markos Garabetyan kept the name of the previous owner when he bought
the shop. A deli case is stocked with Armenian sausages made in the
small manufacturing plant in the back of the building.

Garabetyan came to America from his native Turkey in 1976.

His son, Hayik Garabetyan, 32, has worked in the family business
since he was 8. He left college to join the family business. The best
education, he says, “is hands-on experience.”

Hayik Garabetyan’s uncle, Jerry Hancer, and cousin, Robert Hancer,
also run the family business, which includes a plant at Ashlan and
Valentine avenues where pasta and dried meat are made.

“We sell to all the other Armenian delis in town,” Hayik Garabetyan
says, and in turn Ohanyan’s Deli carries pastries and breads from
local Armenian bakeries.

The shelves at Ohanyan’s are stocked with Armenian and Middle Eastern
foods, including dry bulk lentils, rice, bulgur and garbanzo beans,
cans of grape leaves, jars of Armenian cucumber pickles and preserves
made from eggplant, pumpkin or rose petals.

The neighborhood has changed around the small shop.

“I’ve seen kids grow up here who come in,” Hayik Garabetyan says, but
his father expresses frustration at the way he says the neighborhood
has shifted.

Walking out to the alley behind the store, Markos Garabetyan points
to trash against his building and graffiti on a nearby fence.

“The rent is cheaper than up north, but my customers complain,” he
says about trash and panhandlers. “When I started, there was a lot of
call for retail.”

“Every day varies,” Hayik Garabetyan says. “Sometimes it’s busy. For
the holidays, it’s mainly for the products we sell.”

But customers still come in for sandwiches. Above the counter is a
sign advertising a lunch special: a turkey sandwich, soda and baklava
for $4.

“You cannot buy that in town anywhere,” says Markos Garabetyan with a
grin. “We try to bring the customers. Is business trick.”

The reporter can be reached at [email protected] or or at (559)
441-6756.

GRAPHIC: PHOTOS BY TOMAS OVALLE — THE FRESNO BEE Hayik Garabetyan
makes a sandwich at Ohanyan’s. Garabetyan has been in the family
business since age 8.
Shields and West avenues in Fresno is the site of Ohanyan’s, which
includes a deli, market and manufacturing plant.

Federal News Service
January 21, 2005 Friday

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN’S “ONE ON ONE” GUESTS: FRANCIS SHARRY, EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR, NATIONAL IMMIGRATION FORUM AND MARK KRIKORIAN, EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES

IMMIGRATION AND ILLEGAL ALIENS IN THE U.S.

TAPED: THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2005 BROADCAST: WEEKEND OF JANUARY
22-23, 2005

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: “Mi casa es su casa.” Now that his second term of
office has begun, one of President Bush’s first priorities is to
legalize the status of the 8 (million) to 10 million illegal aliens
now residing in the United States. Republicans in Congress have
warned the president that they are in no mood to give amnesty to
illegal aliens, but Mr. Bush is undaunted. He says that the coming
struggle with Congress is like his first term battle to enact tax
cuts, which he won. Well, can he win on an amnesty bill, whether
announced as such or presented as a guest worker bill? Or will
immigration reform split the Republican Party wide open? We’ll ask
immigration experts Frank Sharry and Mark Krikorian.

(Announcements.)

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Here we go. Let’s talk about basics. Welcome, Frank.
Welcome, Mark.

How many illegal immigrants are there in the country today, Frank?

MR. SHARRY: Best estimate’s 10 million.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Ten million.

What do you think?

MR. KRIKORIAN: About that. It’s roughly 10 (million). It’s between 8
(million) and 12 million. Nobody’s really sure.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’ll use the Urban Institute as a standard, and I
guess it’s highly regarded: 9.3 million. Does that sound about right?

MR. SHARRY: Yes, it does.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Right.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: How many are believed to have steady jobs?

MR. SHARRY: About 60 percent of illegal aliens are in the labor
market actually working, either on the books or under the table.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: How many are dependent — either in a dependent
status or have part-time jobs?

MR. SHARRY: Well, most of the folks who aren’t working — 6 million
are working — they’re kids or wives who are staying at home.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Where to the illegal aliens come from, Mark?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Mexico, overwhelmingly. Between maybe two- thirds,
maybe as much as 70 percent come from Mexico.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: I see 5.3 million, or 57 percent.

MR. SHARRY: Sounds right.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Where do the rest come from?

MR. SHARRY: Another 20 percent or so come from other parts of Latin
America, primarily Central America, and then the rest are a very
diverse lot from all over the world.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: China?

MR. SHARRY: Some.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Africa?

MR. SHARRY: Some.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is China increasingly in the hemisphere in an
immigrant — illegal immigrant status?

MR. SHARRY: Well, there’s been a problem of smuggling from China into
the United States for some time, and — the numbers aren’t very big,
but it’s a very — it’s a real nasty industry.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Had you observed that Hugo Chavez was in Beijing
recently?

MR. KRIKORIAN: No, that I did not know.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you know that the Chinese are cutting a deal with
regard to oil with him?

MR. SHARRY: I mean, China’s moves in Latin America aren’t necessarily
related to illegal immigration in Latin America but they might well
be. There’s significant numbers of Chinese illegals in Central
America.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: As a digression, do you think the president will show
more attention to Latin America than he did in his first term?

MR. SHARRY: I do. I think he has a real affinity for Latin America. I
think he —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Well, we heard that before the first term.

MR. SHARRY: Right. But — and he was making strong progress in that
direction until 9/11, and for obvious reasons he directed his entire
administration’s focus on to the post-9/11 response.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: How many are intercepted at the border, illegals?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Million usually a year; a little more than a million.
And then some of them, though, are people intercepted, the same
people several times, and others get by and are never caught.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What’s the increase of the interceptions of 2004 over
2003?

MR. SHARRY: I don’t know. You tell me.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: The Washington Times says 25 percent. I see 20
percent. Does that sound about right, the increase of illegal aliens
crossing the Mexican border?

MR. KRIKORIAN: That would sound right, but the number that are caught
go up and down depending on a lot of factors — how many agents there
are, are they deployed in different ways? So the number of illegals
that the border patrol catches isn’t a perfect barometer of the flow
of illegal immigration.

It gives you a general idea, at best.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is it a myth or is it true to say that illegal aliens
do not come to the United States during economic downturns?

MR. KRIKORIAN: That’s a myth.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: That’s a myth?

MR. KRIKORIAN: That’s a myth. We’ve actually done research on this,
and even though a century ago immigration, generally speaking, seemed
to respond to booms and busts in the economy, nowadays it pretty much
seems to continue regardless of economic conditions.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is it a myth or is it correct to say that illegal
immigration increases whenever we offer amnesties or legalization
programs?

MR. SHARRY: It’s a myth. It has to do with basic economic realities
of people who want to work and jobs that are available. It is not
very responsive —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Have you heard the names —

MR. SHARRY: — (inaudible) — policymakers —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Have you heard the names Simpson-Mazzoli?

MR. SHARRY: I’m familiar with those names, yeah.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you recall the bill that they put together on
immigration?

MR. SHARRY: They did. They passed immigration reform in 1986.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Was there an amnesty involved?

MR. SHARRY: There was a legalization program for almost 3 million
people who were in the country.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What year was that, Mark?

MR. KRIKORIAN: 1986 is when it passed. And then the amnesty was
implemented the next several years, and actually created a boom in
new illegal immigration.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Ah! So does that contradict what you just said? That
an amnesty or the equivalent thereof, a legalization process
increases the surge of illegal immigrants?

MR. SHARRY: Because the rooster crows doesn’t mean it causes the
morning. The fact is that there’s been an ongoing flow of workers to
jobs in the United States that preceded Simpson-Mazzoli and
post-dated Simpson- Mazzoli.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are you denying that there was a surge that’s
traceable to Simpson-Mazzoli?

MR. SHARRY: I’m not denying that. I’m saying there’s an ongoing labor
migration that has to be dealt with, and that’s what President Bush
and leaders of the Democrats and the Republicans want to do.

MR. KRIKORIAN: We looked at it, and our estimate was something like
800,000 additional illegal immigrants came in after Simpson- Mazzoli,
as a result, sort of as an echo of the amnesty for the ’80s. And the
same thing is going to happen —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What does President Bush want?

MR. SHARRY: What President Bush wants to do and what many Democrats
and Republicans want to do with him is take immigration —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And many do not —

MR. SHARRY: Right. Exactly. Very controversial. But there’s a growing
drumbeat of people who say wait a minute, the system’s broken, let’s
bring immigration out of the black market and out of the shadows and
under the rule of law. That is what he is trying to do. That’s the
big idea.

MR. KRIKORIAN: There’s two things he wants to do. One is legalize or
amnesty the illegals who are here, as Frank mentioned. The other part
of the president’s proposal is the most radical thing anyone has
suggested in our history, is open the entire labor market to any
foreign worker at any wage, as long as any employer is willing to
give them a job. It would inundate the American labor market.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is what Bush is proposing both de facto and de jure
amnesty?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Yes, absolutely. I mean, amnesty is somebody who’s
broken the law gets away with it. And what he would be doing is
giving the illegals legal status. That’s amnesty pure and simple.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is it true that illegal aliens take low-paying jobs,
only take those lower-paying jobs that American workers don’t want?

MR. SHARRY: For the most part, of course. I mean, look, the fact is,
John, is that in 1960, half of the American high school students
dropped out and went into the labor force. Now only 10 percent of a
smaller number of Americans drop out. What that means is that there’s
a smaller number of Americans for roughly half the jobs in the
economy that are service and agriculture. Who’s doing the
housekeeping, the child care, the construction, the landscaping jobs,
the meat-packing, picking the crops? It’s immigrants. So we’ve
created this huge sucking sound for workers to come from south of the
border to fill service and ag jobs — north of the border — without
rules that make sense.

MR. KRIKORIAN: But, John, the fact is that because these immigrant
workers were available, since we didn’t enforce the law, and had
legal immigration rules that allowed massive immigration, the economy
develops differently. So that agriculture is constructed the way it
is precisely because farmers count on large numbers of low- skilled
workers. If that supply were constricted, the economy would actually
move in a more high-tech, high-productivity direction and away from
sort of the third-world economic characteristics that some sectors of
our economy are showing.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Let me add to your exposition. The wages paid in many
of the low-income jobs taken by illegal aliens are low for a reason;
employers keep diluting the labor pool by hiring illegal aliens. If
free-market forces were allowed to work and immigration laws were
enforced, these same employers would have to offer more inducements
and Americans would fill the jobs.

MR. KRIKORIAN: They’d be doing two things; that’s one of them — more
money, better benefits, better working conditions. The employers at
the same time, though, would come up with ways of getting rid of the
jobs that shouldn’t even exist in a modern economy. So you’d have a
smaller number of people working more productively and making
somewhat more money. That’s good for the country.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is it a fact or a myth that illegal aliens are
disproportionately involved in other crimes in this country in
addition to their violation of immigration laws?

MR. SHARRY: It’s not true. There is a lot of so-called illegals in
federal prisons, and they’re drug mules who didn’t spring up out of
local communities. The rate of crime in immigrant communities is the
same as for native-born communities.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is that your view?

MR. KRIKORIAN: The immigrants are not uniquely predisposed toward
crime. This is one of the straw men that the open borders people seek
to knock down. Immigrants are regular folks like anybody else, but
what happens is immigrant communities end up serving as kind of
incubators and cover for organized crime and for gangs. And so even
though most of the people in these communities have nothing to do
with the criminality, they nonetheless create a host for it. It’s
like Mao said, the criminal — the immigrants are the sea within
which the criminal fish swims.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are you familiar with this statistic? The INS has
deported some 400,000 aliens with significant criminal histories.

MR. SHARRY: Sure, yeah. I — yeah.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: You’re familiar with that, too?

In states with large illegal alien populations, such as California
and Texas, more than 30 percent of the current population in prison
is composed of illegal aliens who have committed serious crimes.

MR. SHARRY: Federal prisons it’s 25 percent. State prisons it’s
roughly 8 percent.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Well, are you prepared, then, to say — are we
prepared to say that the crime rates for illegal aliens are
dramatically higher than for U.S. citizens?

MR. KRIKORIAN: No. You’d have to control for their education. In
other words, poorly educated or poor Americans probably have similar
crime rates. You know, I’m not going to say, because I don’t think
it’s true, that immigrants as individuals have uniquely higher rates
of crime. The problem is they create the conditions within which
crime can flourish.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What does that mean?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Insular communities. You know, in the old days the
Italian communities, there was this code of omerta. You do not talk
to the police. That sort of thing.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Correct. Is that fear of engaging the police or
meeting the police or encountering the police have any affect on our
crime statistics of illegal aliens?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Presumably it suppresses the reporting of crime. And
it’s not even just illegal aliens; it’s immigrants in general because
they are — because they’re foreigners, basically, and they’re less
comfortable in society than Americans.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is it a myth or is it accurate to say that illegals
contribute a benefit to the United States?

MR. SHARRY: It’s accurate. I mean, look, I mean, you talked about
this zero-sum economy in which, if we didn’t have immigrants, wages
would go up and people would live beautiful lives. The fact of the
matter is that we have very few Americans interested in doing the
dirty jobs that need to get done. So when you go to a hotel and you
want your bed made or you go to a building and you want it clean or
you’re a professional couple and you want your kids taken care of so
you can make two incomes — you can say, well, if those immigrants
weren’t there, they’d be more efficient somehow, but we’d have slower
economic growth. Immigrants would have fewer opportunities. Employers
would have fewer opportunities. The tax base would suffer, and our
economic growth would suffer. That is the story of American
prosperity.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Did you do a study called “The High Cost of Cheap
Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget?”

MR. KRIKORIAN: We did indeed.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What was the conclusion of that?

MR. KRIKORIAN: What we found was that if you look at the taxes that
illegal aliens pay to the federal government and the services they
get, the gap is something like $10 billion a year. And if those
illegals get an amnesty, as the president proposes, that gap would
balloon to almost $30 billion a year because even though their wages
would go up a little bit, their use of welfare and other services
would go up even more.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: The advocates of illegal immigration say that while
today’s migrants start out poor, over time they assimilate socially
and economically and enter the middle class. Opponents say this is no
longer true; the limited educational level of today’s illegal
immigrants means we are importing a permanent social and economic
underclass. Which is myth and which is fact?

MR. SHARRY: Fact is, is that the American dream lives on. Michael
Barone, who you know well, has studied this, and he compares
particularly Mexican and other Latin American immigrants to
yesteryear’s Italian immigrants. Yes, it took a few generations
before Italians went from the ethnic ghetto to the Ivy League, but
that has happened, and that will happen with Mexican and other Latin
Americans.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Michelle Malkin and her book “Invasion” take an
opposite view.

MR. KRIKORIAN: A variety of people writing on this do. And the fact
is that immigrants do better over time, there’s just no question
about it. The problem is that over time they do better at a slower
rate than everybody else, so they have fallen behind the rest of
society instead of catching up. It took the Irish a hundred years to
catch up with the rest of society. It is entirely plausible that the
low-skilled immigrants of today will take even more than a century to
catch up with the rest of society.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: “Give us your tired, your huddled masses, your poor,”
is that a good policy for the United States in an age of global
economic competition?

MR. SHARRY: No.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: It’s not?

MR. SHARRY: No. We want strong, determined, hard-working people who
make a contribution. And that’s what we’re getting. What we don’t
have is rules that allow people to come in legally with rights and
with vetting. That’s what Bush, that’s what McCain, that’s what
Kennedy — that’s the big idea that’s on the table now is bring
immigration under the rule of law through legal channels so we know
who’s here and we know who’s coming.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Highly skilled, highly educated workers — isn’t that
what we’re looking for?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, we’re clearly looking for people following the
rules, to begin with. But yes, the fact is that educated or skilled
workers create far fewer of the problems that we are now experiencing
than low-skilled, unskilled workers from other countries.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you think that there should be a far-ranging
discussion of how many people Americans want in this country? Is it
going to be a Switzerland with a relatively high economic social
level? Or should we have a billion people or 750 million or 500
million or 300 million? Should there be a debate on that, an open
dialogue?

MR. SHARRY: The fact is we’ve already decided. The American people
decide that every day when they decide how many kids to have. And
Americans have smaller families nowadays on their own, without any
hectoring or coercion. And what immigration represents is Congress
telling the American people: You’re not having enough kids, so we’re
going to bring in some extra people.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Are the offspring of illegal aliens automatically,
under the U.S. Constitution, granted citizenship status?

MR. SHARRY: They are. Those who are born on U.S. soil are considered
U.S. citizens.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So that swells the population of Mexicans —

MR. SHARRY: Well, it —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: — and other illegals who become legal.

MR. SHARRY: Look, the question — you know, we can debate numbers.
The question, though, that most Americans want resolved is the
question of orderliness, is the question of legality. Is this country
anti-immigration and anti-immigrant? No, because we’re a nation of
immigrants. But we’re anti-lawlessness and disorder, and we want
someone to come along — and American people hunger for a controlled
system that works, rules that are effectively implemented and
effectively enforced. And that’s what people are debating.

MR. KRIKORIAN: You can’t have a controlled system nowadays with the
level of immigration that we are experiencing.

Our immigration bureaucracy is choking on immigration. It is
incapable of doing its job now in properly screening people and
moving them through the system. The idea that adding 10 million more
people to this system of vetting or screening and checking their
backgrounds is a fantasy. We are going to have massive fraud if we
have an amnesty and bad guys are going to get documents, legalized
criminal —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: (Inaudible) — considerations of distributive justice
involved in this question?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Sure there are. The question is, what do we owe as
Americans to our fellow countrymen who are poor? And my concern is
that the supporters of mass immigration — and have told me this
explicitly — they see no greater obligation on the part of an
American to a poor American as opposed to a poor European or African
or Asian. And I say, sorry, I have a greater obligation to my fellow
countryman who is poor than I do to someone overseas who is also
poor.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Do you regard that as selfishness on your part?

MR. KRIKORIAN: No, I regard it as what one philosopher called
concentric circles of obligation. I owe my family responsibility —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: First, primarily —

MR. KRIKORIAN: — and then my countrymen, and then the rest of
humanity.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: You accept that in principle, don’t you?

MR. SHARRY: Not only in principle in practice. I think that we should
have U.S. immigration policies that protect American borders, protect
American workers, protect immigrant workers and grow the economy. And
that’s if we have a fix that allows people to come legally and with
vetting and to contribute — we’ll have that.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’ll be right back.

(Announcements.)

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is the coming debate going to be about much more than
how to fix a broken immigration control system and ethnic politics;
that in fact we’ll have a far-ranging debate about America’s economy,
our middle class standards, our safety from crime and terrorism, and
even our environmental policy? We’ll put that question to our guests.

But first, here are their distinguished profiles.

Born, Hartford; 48 years of age. Wife, Rosa; two children. Catholic.
Democrat.

Princeton University, B.A., American History.

U.S. Refugee Program for Refugees in Indonesia, deputy director, one
year.

American Council for Nationalities Service, New York, director of
Refugee Services, six years.

Centro Presente, a local agency that helps Central American refugees
and immigrants in the Boston area; executive director, four years.

Taxpayers Against Proposition 187 — the aim of that initiative was
to eliminate illegal immigrant eligibility for public education and
other public services — deputy campaign manager, four months. The
effort to defeat the initiative was itself defeated. The initiative
passed 59 to 41 percent.

National Immigration Forum, executive director, 14 years and
currently.

Hobbies: soccer, swimming, fluent in Spanish.

Francis Peter Sharry Jr.

Born, New Haven; 43 years of age. Wife, Amilee (sp); three children.
Religion: Armenian Apostolic Church. Republican.

Georgetown University, B.A., History and Government. Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy, M.A. International Relations. Yerevan State
University Armenia, postgraduate work, Armenian language and
literature.

Federation for American Immigration Reform, Immigration Report,
editor, one year. The Winchester Star, Virginia, editor and staff
writer, four years altogether.

Center for Immigration Studies, executive director, 10 years and
currently.

Hobbies: collecting shot glasses; fluent in Armenian.

Mark Steven (sp) Krikorian.

Where do the shot glasses come from, Armenia?

MR. KRIKORIAN: All over the place. From Siberia, Armenia, everywhere.
I don’t even drink that much; I just collect them.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Interesting.

Let’s take a look at a poll. Do you approve or disapprove the way
Bush is handling immigration issues? Take a look at the screen there,
Mr. Sharry, and weep: approve, 33 percent; disapprove, 54 percent; no
opinion, 13 percent. Why is it that he is going with an extremely
argumentative piece of legislation he hopes to get into existence on
the guest-worker program, de facto and de jure amnesty? How is he
going to effect this? Is he going to have emissaries up there doing
his work for him?

MR. SHARRY: Most likely what’s going to happen is that Bush is going
to promote the big idea of bringing immigration out of the shadows
and under the rule of law; that the likes of Senator John McCain and
Senator John Cornyn, working perhaps with Ted Kennedy, will put
together a bipartisan bill that could come out of the Senate; and
then the real showdown will be in the House, where both parties are
much more divided on whether to move on this now.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: So if it goes down, there’s no rap against the
president?

MR. SHARRY: Well, I don’t think the president would be bringing it up
if he’s not serious. I think he was accused of that in the election
here, but —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: I know he’s serious, but if this develops into a
wide-ranging discussion of the elements that I mentioned earlier, you
know, this could take a lot of time and ultimately could not pass.

MR. SHARRY: Well, look, the fact is is that President Bush thinks
it’s the right thing to do and he’s going to promote it, and that is
going to be a very positive thing for moving the cause of bringing
immigration under control forward.

MR. KRIKORIAN: But it’s almost certainly going to fail, assuming it
even gets that far. The fact that it’s so at odds with what the
American people want and what the Republican majority in the House
wants, it has no chance at passage.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Have you taken note of Frank Sharry’s rhetoric?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Of course I have.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: “Bringing this out of the dark and into the
sunlight.” What do you think of that?

MR. KRIKORIAN: The interesting point is that it assumes that illegal
immigration — there’s a set amount of immigration and we just need
to legalize it so that it’s all out in the open. The fact is —

MR. SHARRY: That’s right.

MR. KRIKORIAN: — that the more immigration you have, the more
immigration you create. Illegal immigration would be supercharged by
an amnesty; it would not be ended.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Were you identified as a Democrat on the screen?

MR. SHARRY: I was.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: You were. Do you think that it’s Democratic policy to
take the position that you take automatically, or do you think
there’s another course of action that Democrats could take?

MR. SHARRY: Oh, sure. Democrats could blow this up and say the
president doesn’t want to go far enough and wait.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And ascribe it to what?

MR. SHARRY: We’ll — they’ll ascribe it to policy, but it will
probably be political motivated.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Ascribe it to big business and George Bush catering
to big business. Does that occur to you?

MR. SHARRY: It does. And the fact is that the employer community does
want to see immigration reform, the labor unions want to see
immigration reform, the Catholic Church wants to see immigration
reform. And guess what, John — I know this is hard to say in
Washington, D.C. these days — it actually is the right thing to do
to legalize and regulate immigration so the public can have
confidence we have rules that are being enforced, that employers can
have a reliable source of workers.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: He’s not disputing that. I’m not disputing that.

MR. KRIKORIAN: So what Frank’s saying is that the political elite —
big business, big labor, big religion — wants open borders and the
public doesn’t want it. This is what the —

MR. SHARRY: Not for open borders; smart borders, Mark. That’s the
problem, is that —

MR. KRIKORIAN: This is what the research shows, is that the political
elite of both sides don’t care too much about controlling immigration
and tight borders.

MR. SHARRY: We have a control agenda. Unfortunately, your status-quo
agenda perpetuates the illegality of —

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: You know, it’s possible the president could be
opening a Pandora’s Box here, you know that?

MR. SHARRY: He’s beginning a long-overdue debate about how to fix a
broken system.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: And that could be a Pandora’s Box.

MR. SHARRY: It’s going to be a very positive development because the
American people have to get real about migration and how to control
it.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: We’ll be right back.

(Announcements.)

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Will the president get his immigration out of
Congress this year?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Not a chance.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Not a chance.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Not a chance.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Frank?

MR. SHARRY: Pass the Senate in ’05, pass Congress ’06.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Thanks very much for a stimulating discussion of a
subject that is increasingly important and controversial and protean
in its scope.

PBS SEGMENT

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Why is — or is the guest worker program important to
Mexico?

MR. KRIKORIAN: Mexico — there’s a couple of reasons. One, the
Mexican elite wants to make sure that political discontent is
exported so there’s no political challenges to its rule, regardless
of what party’s in charge. And the second thing is they want to
export a source of people who are going to send remittances home. And
then let me add a third one, because I forgot, which was to help them
exercise greater influence over American policy. I mean, that’s
really what this amounts to.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: They have surplus population, which is defined as
they don’t have the economic means to take care of that population.
So there are distinct foreign policy components of this whole matter,
are there not? And also, it is in our interest, is it not, to assist
Mexico in clearing this hurdle? Is that correct?

MR. SHARRY: That’s right. The long-range solution is economic
development in Mexico so people don’t have to migrate. And that’s
probably a 20- to 30-year prospect. In the meantime, for us to have
legal channels for Mexicans to come and work legally is part of the
integrating labor market that we have with the south of the border.

MR. KRIKORIAN: Mexico needs tough love because the changes that are
necessary in that society aren’t going to happen when everybody with
get up and go gets up and goes. I mean, the challenges to the
political elite aren’t going to happen, and that’s why the elite
likes mass immigration to the United States.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Wouldn’t it make sense to do what the European Union
is doing; namely, to amalgamate? They will have a common
constitution, common currency. What about annexing Mexico peacefully
and distributing some states in Mexico? Then there would be perfect
equality between the Mexican and the United States homegrown
American, homegrown now, because it will all be one.

How would that work? Or do you ever — is that hypothesis — is that
comical?

MR. SHARRY: I don’t think we should declare war on Mexico. I think we
should continue to integrate with them. We have integrating
economies, we have an integrated labor market.

Publishers Weekly
January 10, 2005

In Defense of History;
PW Talks with Deborah E. Lipstadt

by by Sarah F. Gold

PW talked with Deborah Lipstadt by phone while she was in Israel to
speak about Jewish education and the danger of fighting “the
so-called new anti-Semitism” by teaching the young to see the
Holocaust as a motivation for Jewish identity.

PW: Your case received much media coverage, and books have been
written about it. Why did you feel a need to write your own book,
History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving [reviewed above]?

Deborah E. Lipstadt: First of all, nobody except me has been able to
tell the whole story from the inside… the fund-raising effort, the
assembling of the legal team, how we built our legal strategy,
because we very carefully never talked about that.

But even more importantly, [I wrote it] to give the perspective of
what it was like to be the defendant in a case like this: what it was
like to go from being a relatively obscure… professor to being on
the world stage.

And probably the third reason was that I had these powerful
interactions with [Holocaust] survivors and with children of
survivors and various people in the course of the trial, and I felt
that was a story I also wanted to tell.

PW: What has been the long-term impact of the trial on your life and
career?

DEL: On the one hand, I’ve gone back to being a professor [at Emory
University] and to doing what I love most: teaching and writing and
doing research. On the other hand, to be honest, on some level,
people listen more when I speak out in terms of the new
anti-Semitism, as it’s called. I’ll tell you another place where I’ve
been able to use my voice in a new kind of way. I’ve worked with a
number of people who have been fighting in terms of increased
recognition of the Armenian genocide. Whereas people listened before
because of my work on Holocaust denial, when I work in [the Armenian]
area, I’ve been able to get more of a hearing, and that’s been very
gratifying.

I didn’t choose this area of study to be called to the bar to defend
history, but… even though it took a lot out of me… I feel on some
level gratified to have been the one, as Irving said, “pulled out of
the line” not, as he meant, to be shot but to defend history.

PW: In the book, you’re quite harsh about a New York Times article
that appeared before the trial. In general, how did you feel about
media coverage of the case?

DEL: I think at first they bent over backward to make sure that
Irving got a fair hearing. And it annoyed me, but I understood why
they did it. But if you watched the press coverage over the course of
time, you saw the shift, from reporters who sat in that courtroom day
in, day out, how they began to see the measure of the man in terms of
David Irving, that he lied, that he distorted, that he invented, that
he misquoted, all the things that the judge said that he did, and
that was very gratifying to watch. I’m not one of those who beat up
on the media.

PW: I heard at some point that a movie was being made about the case.

DEL: There was supposed to be a movie. It wasn’t being done based on
the book, because the whole thing was in the works before the book
was done. Ridley Scott’s production company had hired Ronald Harwood
(who did The Pianist for Polanski), and he wrote a screenplay, and
HBO was going to put it on. HBO asked Harwood to put in some
fictional elements… and Harwood refused to do that. He said… on a
case that’s about truth, for you to ask me to put in fictional
elements just doesn’t cut it. So the movie died.

Caucaz europenews
01/23/2005

Who’s Who

Robert Simmons [SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE – NATO]

By Marie ANDERSON in Tbilisi
On 18/01/2005

NATO Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia

June 2004. During the summit in Istanbul, NATO Heads of State and Government
decided to create the new position of Special Representative for the
Caucasus and Central Asia. Robert F. Simmons Jr. was appointed to this
position.

Objectives

declared objective : to develop the cooperation with partner countries,
notably by supporting their military reform. To fulfill this objective, a
Partnership Action Plan on Defense Institution Building, also so-called
Democratic institutions, was implemented in those very countries.

In addition, there are also three other programs on NATO’s agenda :
– NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP)
– Planning and Review Process (PARP)
– Individual Partnership Action Plans (IPAP), only for the Central Asia
countries, so as to prepare their Forces for joint military exercises.

Robert Simmons, appointed on September 15th 2004, has his office in Brussels
and should frequently visit the Caucasus and Central Asia countries. For
this mission to be successfull, NATO has also assigned two liaison officers
both in Central Asia and in Caucasus.

First visit as the newly appointed Representative: in October-November 2004,
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Robert Simmons visited the
partner countries in Central Asia (Kyrghyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan), and in Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan),
so as to meet the regional political leasders, and to demonstrate the
Atlantic Alliance’s willingness to expand its relations with the partner
countries of those two regions.

Political profile

July 2002. During a visit to Washington of NATO sub-committees on
Transatlantic Relations and on the Proliferation of Military Technology,
Robert Simmons, then Deputy Director of the Office of European Security and
Political Affairs at the US Department of State, reminded the concerns
raised among his administration about the countries on the “axis of evil”
(Iran, Iraq, and North Corea). He also mentioned that even if the Iranian
reformers were to have the upper hand in the struggle against the
conservative clerics, Tehran would still try to develop weapons of mass
destruction and missile capabilities.

It is important to remind that, with his new NATO prerogatives, Robert
Simmons occupies a key position as regards the relations between Iran and
the Central Asian, as well as South-Caucasian countries.

Besides, during last November official visit of Jaap de Hoop and Robert
Simmons to Turkmenistan, President Niyazov made a quite diplomatic point as
he stated that« he was not worried about the expansion of NATO », adding
that « in this complex region, by the very presence of Afghanistan and Iran,
[…], NATO has a big role to play. ».

Personal profile

A former US Department of State official, Robert F. Simmons Jr. occupied
several positions where he dealt with Eurasian security and arms control
policy issues.
He then becomes a Senior Advisor to the US Assistant Secretary of State for
European and Eurasian Affairs.

Currently working at NATO International Staff, Robert Simmons serves both as
NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and Security
Policy, his first position in NATO, and as the Special Representative for
the Caucasus and Central Asia.

San Diego Union Tribune, CA
Jan 23 2005

Migrant fieldworkers are losing their traditional livelihood to
mechanized pickers, global competition
By Diane Lindquist
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

PARLIER – For the past century, raisins in California’s Central
Valley have been harvested in exactly the same way: a monthlong
frenzy of hand picking that required more workers than almost any
other crop.

Last season, many raisin growers turned to machines to do the work.
Although they had long held out, they are now joining growers
nationwide in embracing mechanization to fend off global competition.

But the switch to mechanical harvesting is taking a heavy toll on the
Mexican migrants who fill most of the state’s lowest-paying farm
jobs. With machines picking more crops, the need for field hands is
falling sharply. Where 50 men once were needed to harvest a field of
raisins, five now suffice.

“I’ve been going all over the valley looking for work, but there
isn’t any. If I’m lucky, I get one or two days a week,” said Fidel
Rosales Rodrguez, who last spring paid smugglers $1,200 to sneak him
from Mexico into California.

Even legal fieldworkers say they have never experienced such a tough
year. There were more migrants, they complain, and jobs were all but
impossible to find.

Mechanization portends big problems for a region strained in the past
two decades by the arrival of impoverished rural Mexicans. They are
widely estimated to be coming to the United States at a rate of more
than a half million a year, with a quarter to a third of them
entering California.

The challenge of absorbing so many newcomers is taxing the economic
and social well-being of the valleys that produce fruits, nuts and
vegetables for markets worldwide.

“We’re adding a lot of poor people into what’s already a pretty poor
area. It’s a dangerous path,” said Philip Martin, a migration
specialist at the University of California Davis.

California, the setting for John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”
and Cesar Chavez’s historic farmworker union movement, is
experiencing the emergence of a worrisome strain of rural poverty. It
exists alongside the relative prosperity associated with the state’s
$25.7 billion agriculture business. If, for instance, the Central
Valley were a state, it would rank first in the nation in
agricultural production but 48th in per-capita income.

“People used to think California was divided between the north and
south, but it’s really between the wealthy coastal areas and the
impoverished interior valleys,” said demographer Hans Johnson of the
Public Policy Institute of California.

The sheer magnitude of the influx of Mexican migrants is prompting
tension and resentment that mirror anti-immigrant feelings in other
parts of the United States. California’s agricultural valleys have
become Balkanized as numerous ethnic groups have reshuffled into
separate communities.

“We risk falling into warring factions,” said Assemblyman Juan
Arambula, a former Fresno County supervisor.

Parlier, a small farming town 20 miles southeast of Fresno that is in
the heart of raisin country USA, typifies the dilemma that confronts
many rural California cities.

An unceasing arrival of migrants has transformed Parlier into one of
the scores of communities known as “Mexican towns” that dot the
Central Valley. Since 1990, Parlier’s population has doubled to
12,000. Every year when field hands arrive for the harvest, the city
has 4,000 more residents for a few months.

The community also is one of California’s poorest. Unemployment
hovers year-round at 30 percent. Per-capita income averages $5,300;
family incomes are slightly more than $24,000.

Some families are struggling on less than $3,000 a year, the average
wage in Mexico.

“We’re transferring rural poverty from Mexico to rural California,”
Martin of UC Davis said, “and we don’t have a game plan to get out of
it.”

The mechanization of the raisin harvest threatens to make the
situation even worse. State officials believe two or three migrants
are currently competing for each of California’s 400,000 to 500,000
seasonal farm jobs. If machines pick the raisins, agricultural
experts say, labor demand will drop to a tenth of the 40,000 to
50,000 workers typically hired today.

“I’m reluctant to say we don’t want any more (workers),” Arambula
said. “But to the extent we have more people than work, we need to
slow it down.”

The region is looking to U.S. immigration measures to control the
flow.

President Bush has put the issue back on his agenda, vowing that
Congress this year will implement a guest worker program and some
type of provision to legalize undocumented people living in the
United States.

Also expected is legislation that would increase border enforcement
and impose enforceable sanctions on employers who hire undocumented
workers.

Any immigration reforms could greatly affect the state’s farm picture
as well as areas nationwide that have attracted large numbers of
Mexican migrants and increasingly are coming to resemble rural
California.

Still, it’s uncertain whether new measures would help.

For example, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 spawned
unintended consequences that contributed to the economic and social
stress felt today. The legislation legalized 3 million undocumented
immigrants, a third of them under a special agricultural provision.
But it failed to halt illegal entries. Instead, it quickened the
flow.

Once legalized, Mexican men secretly brought their wives and children
across the border to join them. Meanwhile, fresh job seekers arrived
to replenish the ranks as the back-breaking work drove older workers
from the fields but not necessarily from California.

Such post-IRCA inflows have caused the population of farmworker
communities to grow twice as fast as populations elsewhere in
California.

Estimates of undocumented people living in the United States
generally vary from 9 million to 12 million, with Mexicans accounting
for about 5.4 million of the total.

“Every year, the numbers of undocumented immigrants flowing into the
United States is higher than the year before,” said Jeffrey Passel, a
research specialist at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic
and social policy research group in Washington, D.C. “The number in
the last decade is more than any other decade, and the statistics
might be low.”

Growers in Fresno County, home of the entire U.S. raisin crop, have
long relied on workers from Mexico to collect the dried, wrinkly
fruit they sell as a baking ingredient and snack.

“We couldn’t have gotten the crop picked without them,” said grower
John Pabojian.

But Pabojian has stopped hiring from among the migrants who arrive
each season. Instead of the 100 workers he once took on for the
monthlong process, he now has six year-round workers and a machine
that finishes the harvest in half the time.

The transition many of the state’s 5,500 raisin growers are making is
considered the most significant innovation in the raisin harvest
since the industry was established in 1873. It’s also happening
faster than anyone expected. Last fall, the amount of raisin acreage
picked by machine increased by more than 30 percent.

Harvests of most crops raised in California are already mechanized,
from beans to nuts and some citrus. And experts predict that machines
will soon pick more of the fruits and vegetables now routinely picked
by hand.

By eliminating so many jobs, the raisin industry’s mechanization is
dramatically changing the overall job market.

“For a very traditional industry that always has been in the lead of
fighting for hand laborers, it’s revolutionary,” said Martin of UC
Davis.

Raisin harvesting machines were developed in the 1950s, but growers
resisted them until economics forced the issue. They had argued that
only humans were capable of the painstaking work of cutting grape
clusters from vines, laying them on the ground in paper trays to dry,
turning them once, rolling them and, once they’ve become raisins,
collecting them.

Raisin growers, like those in the sugar and tomato industries,
invested much political capital to convince lawmakers they needed a
guest worker program to ensure an adequate supply of cheap labor.

And now that President Bush is promising one will be enacted, they
are not backing off.

“We’ve got to have a guest worker program,” said Manuel Cu×ha Jr.,
president of the Nisei Farmers League. The work force is rife with
fraudulent documents, he said. With tightened homeland security laws
and stricter enforcement, “it’ll be all over” if the fields are
raided.

U.S. immigration agents, however, routinely have refrained from
pursuing undocumented workers in California’s agricultural valleys.
Last summer, the Border Patrol closed its Fresno County office.

Nevertheless, Cu×ha said, legalization would assure growers an
adequate supply of stable, skilled laborers required for
mechanization and, at the same time, offer workers the opportunity to
move on to other, better-paying jobs.

For workers, mechanization and the drop in labor demand last season
hit without warning.

“I’ve been coming here for 25 years. Back then it was the place to
find work,” said longtime field hand Simon Martnez of La Paz, in Baja
California Sur. “This year has been the most difficult ever because
there’s been more people and a lot less jobs.

“I have to come back next year. My family is counting on it. I have
10 children, and I also help support my parents,” he said.

It’s too early to know how the permanent job cuts will affect the
flow of migrants from Mexico.

“The assumption is they’ll go someplace else to where there are
jobs,” said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center.

Labor issues are not driving the transition to mechanization.
Globalization is. Producers in Chile and Turkey are sending cheaper
raisins into an already saturated U.S. market. As a result, growers
in Fresno County are being forced to cut costs.

“The cause has been the basic economics of the industry,” said Bert
Mason, an agricultural economist at Fresno State University. “And
because of that we’ve seen a rapid change in attitude toward
mechanization.”

Competition has forced daunting decisions on California’s raisin
farmers, most of whom are Armenian or Japanese immigrants or
descendants of immigrants. Many are in their 60s and 70s.

While they once were able to make a decent living on less than 50
acres, foreign competition and four straight years of poor crops and
low prices have made such operations big money losers.

Some growers have put their grapes into table wine. Others are
shutting down. In the past two years, the amount of acreage devoted
to raisins shrunk to 200,000 acres from 250,000. The remaining
farmers have little choice but to mechanize.

“I’m going to switch over,” Garvin Lane said. “You’ve got to convert
or get out.”

Easing the transition has been the development of harvesting
machines, new grape varieties and planting systems. Professional
harvesters, with their own equipment and crews, have materialized.

Although methods vary, all allow the fruit to dry on the vine, rather
than on trays laid out on the ground. Machines fitted with big
brushes then advance along the rows, gently knocking the raisins into
bins. Because the fruit never touches the ground, the quality is
higher.

“It’s a huge challenge to learn how to do it,” Mason of Fresno State
said.

The shift is expensive.

A machine typically costs about $150,000. Even if growers hire a
professional harvester, the expense of preparing for mechanization –
planting vines, trellising and installing subsurface drip irrigation
– can run initial costs to about $4,500 per acre, or $2,500 more per
acre than conventional planting.

But yields more than double, boosting returns quickly enough to repay
the investment.

The biggest saving is in labor costs. Field hands are paid by the
tray, averaging 15 to 17 cents each, with workers picking an average
of 300 trays a day. Machines can cut that expenditure by 80 percent.

“Everybody was looking for ways to survive and cut costs, and that’s
the way they found to cut costs,” said grower Sohan Samran. “Even
though we’re mechanized, labor still is our biggest expense.”

Armenian MP denies being charged with theft in Dubai

Public Television of Armenia, Yerevan
21 Jan 05

[Presenter in studio] While the members of the National Assembly were
discussing events and changes expected in political life, the member
of the People’s Deputy bloc, Akop Akopyan, called the editorial office
of Aykakan Zhamanak newspaper from a remand centre in Dubai and denied
the report about the charges against him.

[Passage omitted: Akopyan was reported to have been charged with theft
in Dubai]

USA may use occupied Azeri territories to attack Iran – Armenian paper

Haykakan Zhamanak, Yerevan
20 Jan 05

The Armenian-controlled Azerbaijani territories are the most
convenient place for deploying American bases and attacking Iran, the
Armenian newspaper Haykakan Zhamanak has said. This option will be
advantageous to the United States as it will solve several problems,
including the Karabakh conflict, it said. The newspaper went on to say
that the sense of US-Azerbaijani diplomatic cooperation in the recent
period is to convince the world that the Azerbaijani territories
controlled by the Armenian forces belong to Azerbaijan and are its
sovereign territories. On this basis, Azerbaijan and the USA will sign
an agreement under which Azerbaijan will allow the USA to deploy its
military bases in the occupied districts. The paper added that the
“Iran problem” may damage Armenia’s relations with Iran and Russia and
called on the government to draw up a clear-cut contingency plan. The
following is the text of Arman Karapetyan’s report by Armenian
newspaper Haykakan Zhamanak on 20 January headlined “New complications
for Armenia”. Subheadings as published:

US President George Bush’s statement that he does not rule out that
the USA will take military action against Iran complicates Armenia’s
geo-political situation. This statement means not only that the USA is
interested in our country from a geo-political or military-political
point of view, but also that our country is of very specific
significance in the context of settling a very specific problem. And
the policy of complementarity established by [Armenian President]
Robert Kocharyan and [Armenian Foreign Minister] Vardan Oskanyan, who
are torn between Russia, the USA and Europe in their unsuccessful
attempts to establish equal relations, may simply collapse as a result
of the Iran problem becoming more intense and affect Armenia.

For this reason, from now on, the political forces, authorities and
diplomats of Armenia should develop a strict position and have several
scenarios of possible developments around Iran and models of Armenia’s
position if any of these scenarios is put into practice. But before
drawing up these strategic approaches, Armenia has more pressing
problems in the context of Iran-US relations, which are directly
linked to the settlement of the Karabakh issue.

Bases in the occupied territories

Irrespective of whether Bush orders an attack on Iran or not, the USA
will continue strengthening its military presence in areas close to
the Iranian border. This is necessary not only for the successful
conduct of possible military actions, but also in order to launch a
psychological attack on Iran. Iran’s borders are almost surrounded by
US troops: Iraq and Turkey are to the west of Iran and there are
enough US troops there. The Persian Gulf in the south is totally
controlled by the US armed forces. Afghanistan is to the east, and
there are enough American troops there.

The other eastern neighbour of Iran, Pakistan, is the USA’s strategic
partner. And only in the north, does the USA not have a military
presence on the Iranian border. Iran’s northern neighbours are
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Thus, it is evident that the
USA’s next strategic problem is to ensure its military presence north
of Iran, and there is a natural question against this background:
where may US military bases be located? The Turkmen option should be
ruled out immediately as American-Turkmen relations are not at the
necessary level to discuss such an issue. Turkmenistan’s domestic
political situation is another reason for this, and the USA cannot
cooperate with this country first of all on principle.

Analysis shows that the so-called “liberated-occupied” territories are
the most convenient place for deploying American military bases north
of Iran. The recent statement made by US Assistant Secretary of State
Elizabeth Jones about the criminal nature of the authorities of the
Nagornyy Karabakh republic [NKR] confirms this view once again. This
option will be advantageous to the US authorities as it will settle
several problems, including the Karabakh conflict.

Is it possible to deploy American military forces in the
“liberated-occupied” territories? The sense of US-Azerbaijani
diplomatic cooperation in the recent period is to convince the world
that the Azerbaijani territories controlled by the Armenian forces
belong to Azerbaijan and are its sovereign territories that have been
illegally taken by Armenians.

The factfinding group that will visit these occupied territories by
the end of the month will make “horrible discoveries” about the
situation there and the world community will conclude that it is
necessary to return these territories to Azerbaijan immediately. This
point will have a declarative nature, and the main essence of such
propaganda again will be that the occupied territories belong to
Azerbaijan. Through diplomatic channels, it will be suggested that the
Armenian authorities pull out of the occupied territories. Naturally,
our authorities will not agree to such a “betrayal”. During that
period, it will be fixed in all the documents and people’s minds that
the occupied territories belong to Azerbaijan and are de-jure
controlled by its authorities. Only on the basis of this note, will
Azerbaijan and the USA sign an agreement under which Azerbaijan will
allow the USA to deploy its military bases in Fuzuli, Zangilan,
Cabrayil, Kalbacar, Agdam, Lacin and Qubadli Districts
[Armenian-occupied districts of Azerbaijan], and this will be de jure
an unquestionable decision again [as published].

Let us hope that the Armenian army does not have commanders who will
order their soldiers to fire at the American army, understanding that
it is pointless.

Other complications

The aforesaid is not the only complication for Armenia in the context
of the further development of events around Iran. As is the case with
Iraq, we shall have the problem of providing the USA with an air
corridor in this case as well. Of course, the problem will not be
limited only to providing an air corridor, and the Americans will try
to rent one of Armenia’s military airports. And here the problem will
be seen not only in the context of Armenian-Iranian relations, but
also in the context of Armenian-Russian relations. And on the whole,
if the USA has the problem of changing the political regime in Iran,
what will Armenia’s position be like?

These are really complicated problems and it will be impossible to
avoid them not only in conditions of rivalry between Armenia and Iran
[as published], but also between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the
context of all these developments, Armenia should be able not only to
demonstrate a correct position regarding the USA, Russia and Iran, but
also to try not to lag behind Azerbaijan in this process in terms of
gaining dividends. This is a problem that seems impossible to settle
in the current domestic political situation in Armenia. Over the last
few years, Armenia has created such a geo-political bloc around itself
that it is possible to overcome it only by using Ukrainian and
Georgian experience [as published].

US official apologizes for Karabakh remarks – Armenian minister

Public Television of Armenia, Yerevan
21 Jan 05

Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan has said that US Assistant
State Secretary Elizabeth Jones has apologized for her recent remarks
describing breakaway Nagornyy Karabakh as a criminal separatist
regime. In his interview with Armenian television, Oskanyan said he
had a telephone conversation with Jones and she called her statement a
“misunderstanding”. Oskanyan also praised the Armenian public for
protesting against the statement and called on it to calm down and
consider the issue to be closed. The following is the text of report
by Armenian Public TV on 21 January. Subheadings have been inserted
editorially:

[Presenter] Mr Oskanyan, you signed a memorandum of understanding
between the secretariat of the Arab League [the League of Arab States]
and Armenia in Cairo. At the same time, US Assistant Secretary of
State Elizabeth Jones made her well-known statement. What is your
attitude to it?

“Apology”

[Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan] You know, I was watching
the developments from Cairo. But when I came back and read the press,
I saw that our people had expressed a strong protest at that
statement. I was positively surprised at all this and naturally, this
is the way it should be. Because it was an accusation that can never
be accepted. These protests had to be expressed and I consider them
normal.

The cause of the public outcry was the content of the article
presented to the people by the media. I consider the contents of the
information presented to be normal, too, because I can say, summing up
Jones’s statement, that based on that statement, the contents of the
articles presented to our people cannot have been different. Because
that statement was indeed ambiguous. Although the points in the
general accusation cannot apply to Karabakh, on the other hand, this
statement does not rule out Karabakh either. This is where the
ambiguity lies. The fact that the statement did not rule out Karabakh
and that the accusation was strong and used the term criminal
separatists gave us grounds to express a strong protest.

I had a telephone conversation with Elizabeth Jones about half an hour
ago. It was her initiative to call me. Now I can tell you what
exactly she said. I asked her if I could tell our public what you
said, she said yes. She said – I apologize for the misunderstanding on
my part. I assure you that I did not and could not mean Nagornyy
Karabakh by using the term criminal separatists. I apologize for that.

I think we have to calm down after this phone call and consider the
issue to be closed. If we give it a closer look, we can see that it
could not have been otherwise.

It is true that the statement was ambiguous and caused doubts as to
what really happened. But on the other hand, taking into consideration
that the USA is involved in the process [of settling the Nagornyy
Karabakh conflict], has had a stable position for these years, issued
neutral statements to date and that the US Congress gives Nagornyy
Karabakh 15m dollars in aid every year, I was feeling that there was a
kind of misunderstanding involved. I welcome and appreciate the fact
that Jones had the courage to apologize for it.

Arab world “important”

As for the Arab League, I told your TV channel in Cairo that it is a
historic event. Although we only signed a memorandum of understanding,
it can be assessed as the start of the development of our relations in
the future. It is historic because this understanding reflects the
glorious history of the Armenian and Arab peoples and their
friendship. Today we already have a chance to build relations not only
with individual Arab states, but also with the entity that unites
them. In turn, this opens up long-term opportunities for deepening and
developing our relations with Arab states in the future.

The Arab world is important to us and we have Armenian communities
there. As you may know, we have been lately involved in the Iraq
issue, too, and we have our own position on the Palestinian issue as
we support its independence. The position of Arab states on the
Nagornyy Karabakh issue is also of importance to us. We also cooperate
with them within international organizations. So this memorandum opens
up opportunities for us to work efficiently with this centre [the Arab
League], to raise our problems there and help each other in an
atmosphere of cooperation.

Holocaust and Armenian genocide

[Presenter] Mr Oskanyan, you are expected to visit the USA on 24
January to take part in the special UN session dedicated to the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of prisoners of war in the Second World
War. What will be the topic of your speech there?

[Oskanyan] I should say that it is a historic event, too. It is the
60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It will be marked in
a special UN session. The fact that a representative of Armenia,
i.e. its foreign minister, will take part in it is already a political
position in itself. It is our moral duty to be there and have our
say. Auschwitz is the embodiment of the Holocaust, which is related to
Hitler. Hitler’s famous statement – who remembers the Armenian
genocide today – is related to the Holocaust.

Genocide is a topical issue in international politics. We can neither
mark the Holocaust justly, nor speak about preventing future cases of
genocide without going back to the recognition of the first genocide
of the 20th century and talking about it. The gist of my address will
be the following: genocide can be prevented through condemning and
recognizing it.

Good relations with Italy

I will travel to Rome after New York and will join our president
[Robert Kocharyan]. He will start his official visit to Italy on 27
January. It is also important, since it will be the president’s first
official visit to Italy in seven years. We have quite good relations
with Italy. I believe that this visit will strengthen our relations
with that country, especially in the sphere of the economy and small
and medium-sized businesses. The dialogue between Armenia and Italy is
developing within the framework of the EU, especially its New
Neighbourhood Programme.

Armenian leader criticizes mayor for illegal construction in Yerevan

Public Television of Armenia, Yerevan
21 Jan 05

[Presenter] The president of our republic [Robert Kocharyan] has told
a meeting at the Yerevan mayor’s office that some problems have been
properly resolved since they were discussed last year. However, he
added, the mayor’s office has not done enough to resolve some other
problems. The president said serious efforts should be made to
eliminate the shortcomings registered last year. Summing up the work
done in 2004, the city mayor reported to Kocharyan about the work to
be done in 2005.

[Correspondent] During the traditional meeting held at the mayor’s
office, the republic’s president drew attention to the problems that
were not resolved last year.

[Kocharyan] First, I would like to talk about the quality of the work
the staff of the mayor’s office have carried out. I am talking about
the work that has been done with the people and about timely reaction
to their petitions and complaints. The mayor says that they are
working in line with the rules we have defined. However, I am sure
that today, the quality of our work is not so high as it should have
been. We have not been able to achieve good results because of last
year’s shortcomings. Perhaps, we have even taken some steps back. It
means that we should seriously focus on these issues this year.

[Correspondent] Another basic issue noted by the head of state was
related to illegal construction. The president said that the fight
against this is going on very slowly.

[Kocharyan] The construction of private buildings on the pavements is
still continuing. In fact, we are directing our citizens from the
pavements towards the carriageway. It is not difficult to see these
cases at any time. Who has given this right to our mayor’s office and
local executive authorities? I am sure that anyone who has even little
respect for the city and people should not allow this to happen. I and
the mayor have repeatedly driven through the streets of the city in
another car without bodyguards. This has already become a
tradition. They mayor was feeling very bad when we drove through some
streets of the city. He was simply feeling ashamed. Is that right, Mr
Zakaryan? This applies especially to the points of entry and suburbs
of the city. In the city centre, this issue is more or less in
order. My supervisory service will take care of these issues.

[Correspondent] One of the ways to prevent illegal construction work,
the president said, is citizens’ attitude. The best way of protesting
against tasteless and dirty petrol stations and kiosks on the
pavements is not to use them. The head of state thinks that it is
necessary to use various solutions in order to prevent illegal
construction work.

[Kocharyan] It is necessary to bulldoze these buildings in the city
centre regardless of who they belong to. I should say that they are
not building them on their own, they start building them after getting
someone’s verbal consent. Some of the illegal buildings appear
because if they act according to the law, they will take 1.5-2 years
to put all papers in order.

[Correspondent] The head of state also said that it is important to
ensure the transparent work of the mayor’s office. He noted that he is
receiving complaints about the mayor’s office refusing to present
copies of its decisions.

[Kocharyan] The mayor’s office should not engage in secret
activities. What is the problem that our citizens and public
organizations cannot get a copy of a decision? It does not matter if
this decision applies to them or not. I have familiarized myself with
your programmes for 2005 and these programmes contain no such
point. That’s why bear in mind that you’ll have to work on the basis
of this mechanism in 2005.

[Correspondent] The president demanded transparency during land
auctions. He noted that there is distrust among the public in this
sphere.

[Passage omitted: The meeting also discussed other issues]