Canoe.ca, Canada
April 23 2004

Grits get ripped

Private member’s bill approved, but not ‘official’

By KATHLEEN HARRIS, Parliamentary Bureau, Sun Media

Prime Minister Paul Martin is under fire for reneging on his promise
to empower MPs and tackle the “democratic deficit.” This week, the
House of Commons supported a private member’s bill formally
recognizing the genocide of Armenian Turks during WWI. But just hours
after the 153-68 vote, Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham issued a
statement declaring the motion doesn’t reflect the government’s
official position.

Debates and votes on private members’ business in the House is an
“integral” part of the democratic process, but motions aren’t binding
on the government, he said.

NDP MP Alexa McDonough blasted Martin and his “gutless” cabinet
ministers, accusing them of putting economic self-interest before
principle. Turkey is a key ally and had warned of economic
consequences.

‘ARROGANCE’

“I think it’s unspeakable arrogance and proves that their commitment
to actually addressing the democratic deficit is virtually
non-existent,” she said.

Turkey called Canadian MPs who supported the motion condemning the
genocide “narrow-minded.” In Ottawa, a top diplomat said there would
be consequences for judging Turkish history.

“Parliamentarians shouldn’t be judges or historians,” said Fazli
Corman, consul at the embassy. “But when they act because of their
ridings, because of their need for votes, they are acting.”

Ara Pappin, Armenia’s ambassador in Ottawa, wasn’t upset the motion
wasn’t formally adopted.

“We are more concerned about the opinion of Parliament, because
Parliament is a reflection of people’s opinion,” he said.

Conservative MP Stockwell Day accused Martin of being hypocritical
for ordering his cabinet ministers to vote against a “painful” motion
then failing to show up.

“I don’t think this reflects well on him, that on a vote of
conscience, a vote of the heart, he refused to allow his ministers to
vote with the heart and didn’t appear with them to share the grief,”
he said.

Workpermit.com, UK
April 23 2004

UK – Change to nationalities exempt from IED charge

The Home Office has announced that from 1 May 2004, three new
countries will be added to the list of countries whose nationals are
exempt from the charge for Immigration Employment Documents (IED)
(work permit) applications. These countries are:

Albania
Armenia
Croatia

It has been realised that these countries are indeed signatories to
the Council of Europe Charter or the Social Charter when this IED
charge was introduced on 1 April 2003. These countries were never
included on the original list of exemptions, and Armenia should have
been included on this list from 1 March 2004.

Those employers, individuals or representatives who have been charged
incorrectly will be refunded in full by the end of June 2004.

Baku Today
April 23 2004

Apresyan, Teryan might leave Azerbaijan

Baku Today 23/04/2004 19:50

Leaders of an international group which functions for release of
prisoners of war and hostages Bernhard Clasen and Paata Zakareishvili
have met with Artur and Roman in Baku today.
The two ethnic Armenians have asked Clasen and Zakareishvili to
assist them in getting residence `in a third country’, according to
ANS.
Apresyan and Teryan had fled to Azerbaijan from Armenia in quest of
refuge against constant abasement to their personalities on the part
of Armenians.

Clasen said, his group will help and to leave Azerbaijan for another
country.

`We hope to settle their problems with humanitarian methods,’ said
Clasen.

Sunday Times, Australia
The Mercury, Australia
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia
Advertiser, Australia
April 24 2004

On This Day

1915 – The Ottoman Turkish Empire begins the brutal mass deportation
of Armenians during World War I.

Highlights in history on this date:

1514 – Selim I, Sultan of Turkey, begins marching his army to Persia.

1521 – Spanish rebels are defeated at Villalar, Spain, and leaders of
anti-Hapsburg movement are executed.
1558 – Mary Queen of Scots, aged 16, marries the Dauphin of France,
the future Francois II.
1617 – Concino Concini, Marquis d’Angre, is assassinated by order of
France’s King Louis XIII, and Charles d’Albert, Duke of Luynes, takes
charge of government of France.
1671 – Defeated Cossack rebel leader Stenka Razin is captured by
loyalist Cossacks in Russia and turned over to the czar’s forces.
1704 – The first regularly issued American newspaper starts
publication.
1731 – Death of Daniel Defoe, British journalist and author of
Robinson Crusoe.
1792 – France’s national anthem, La Marseillaise, is composed by
Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
1819 – Turkey, after lengthy negotiations with Britain, the protector
of the island, obtains Parga from Ionian Republic.
1833 – The soda fountain is patented by Jacob Ebert and George
Dutley.
1877 – American Federal troops are ordered out of New Orleans, ending
the North’s post-Civil War rule in the South.
1898 – Spain declares war on United States after receiving US
ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.
1915 – The Ottoman Turkish Empire begins the brutal mass deportation
of Armenians during World War I.
1916 – Some 1,600 Irish nationalists launch the Easter uprising by
seizing several key sites in Dublin. The rising is put down by
British forces several days later.
1939 – Robert Menzies becomes Australian prime minister, succeeding
Joseph Lyons, who died earlier in the month.
1945 – US forces liberate Dachau concentration camp.
1953 – British statesman Winston Churchill is knighted by Queen
Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.
1962 – The Massachusetts Institute of Technology achieves the first
satellite relay of a television signal, between Camp Parks,
California, and Westford, Massachusetts.
1967 – Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is killed when parachute
straps of his spacecraft get entangled and he plunges to earth.
1969 – Lebanon’s Premier Rashid Karami resigns amid dispute over
government’s restrictions on Palestinian guerrillas.
1970 – China launches its first satellite.
1971 – Soviet cosmonauts link up with unmanned satellite prior to
attempt to build world’s first orbiting space laboratory.
1975 – Terrorists from the German Red Army faction occupy the West
German Embassy in Stockholm, taking 12 people hostage and killing two
of them; Thousands of Vietnamese refugees are flown to US island of
Guam as communists move rapidly in their takeover of South Vietnam.
1980 – The United States launches an abortive attempt to free
American hostages in Iran, a mission that results in the deaths of
eight US servicemen. President Jimmy Carter announces the failed
mission to the American people.
1986 – Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, for whom King Edward
VIII gave up the British throne, dies in Paris at age 89; Paul Hogan
film Crocodile Dundee premieres in Australian cinemas.
1989 – Rebels shell eastern Afghanistan city of Jalalabad, killing at
least 54 people.
1990 – The US space shuttle Discovery takes the Hubble Space
Telescope into orbit.
1991 – South African government announces it will uphold agreement
with African National Congress to free all political prisoners by
April 30.
1992 – OPEC nations reject a demand by Iran for increased production.

1993 – Commandos break into a cockpit of a commandeered Indian
Airlines plane in Amritsar, India, shoot dead the lone hijacker and
free all 141 people aboard.
1994 – Cuban exiles are received by President Fidel Castro, the man
some have long wanted to overthrow.
1995 – The British government upgrades its talks with Sinn Fein, the
political ally of the IRA, by assigning a minister to negotiate.
1996 – The Palestinian parliament declares in Gaza City that it no
longer seeks Israel’s destruction and has abandoned armed struggle.
1997 – Islamist militants armed with sabres and axes strike two
villages in Algeria, butchering 47 people in a pre-election terror
wave that leaves an estimated 420 dead in a few weeks.
1998 – In front of a cheering crowd, 22 Rwandans convicted of
genocide are executed by firing squad in Kigali.
1999 – A car bomb explodes in one of London’s biggest Bangladeshi
communities, injuring seven people. A racist group claims
responsibility.
2000 – Iranian hardliners close down 14 pro-democracy publications in
a strike against a major pillar of the reform movement.
2001 – A jury is chosen in the murder trial of a former Ku Klux
Klansman charged 38 years after the church bombing that killed four
black girls in Birmingham, Alabama.
2002 – Sweden’s National Food Administration reports that potentially
harmful amounts of a chemical suspected of causing cancer are
produced when starchy foods are baked or fried at high temperatures.
2003 – Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela,
is convicted of fraud and theft by a regional court in South Africa
and sentenced to five years in prison.

The Australian, Australia
April 24 2004

Food-for-oil claims shake UN
>From The Times

SIMULTANEOUS investigations of the former United Nations oil-for-food
program aim to expose how Saddam Hussein used Iraq’s oil wealth to
buy political influence around the world.

The US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, the US Congress and an
independent panel established by the UN have started investigating
claims the Hussein regime used oil to bribe politicians, political
parties, journalists and a leading UN official.

The inquiries are examining Iraq’s system of kickbacks, which Baghdad
used to break sanctions, fund his military and sustain his regime.

The scale of the alleged corruption is huge. The investigative arm of
the US Congress estimates Saddam earned $US4.4 billion ($5.7 billion)
in illegal surcharges and after-sale service fees on contracts
overseen by the UN. Individual bribes allegedly ran into millions of
dollars.

The claims have created an atmosphere of dread at the UN, which ran
the oil-for-food scheme, at a time when the world organisation is
being urged to play a larger role in the political transition in
Iraq.

The allegations have also sent shockwaves around the world, because
hundreds of prominent figures in two dozen countries are accused of
involvement in the oil deals.

The overthrow of Saddam has made available hundreds of documents that
contain some of Iraq’s most closely guarded secrets. Few have been
made public, but coalition officials have secured the evidence they
need.

The UN oil-for-food scheme was the largest UN humanitarian program in
the organisation’s history, handling a total of $US64 billion worth
of Iraqi crude from December 1996 until it was wound up last year.

The program was established after the first Gulf War to mitigate the
effects of the economic embargo imposed on Iraq after the 1990
invasion of Kuwait. Britain and the US played a leading role in its
creation because they did not want to be accused of starving the
Iraqi people.

At times both powers bent to pressure from other countries to turn a
blind eye to corruption and mismanagement so that Iraq continued to
co-operate with the scheme.

The UN exercised oversight through its control of Iraqi oil revenues.
Money generated from approved Iraqi oil sales was deposited in a UN
holding account. The UN then released funds to pay for approved
imports of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies.

The price was set by a panel of UN oil overseers, and all contracts
had to approved by the UN Security Council’s 15-member sanctions
committee, operating by consensus so any single member could block a
decision.

But Iraq found ways to circumvent the monitoring, enabling it to
demand billions of dollars in kickbacks.

The first weakness of the UN system was the mechanism to set the oil
price.

Although there were originally three oil overseers, retirements and
resignations reduced this to one — a relatively young former Russian
insurance executive. And for more than a year, Russia blocked the
appointment of new overseers to replace those who had left.

Until late 2000, the UN’s price for Iraqi oil was set at the start of
each month. That allowed Iraq to time its sales under the program to
exploit the ups and downs of the world oil market. A higher world
price meant a higher margin over the price set by the UN, allowing
Iraq a greater profit, which it could then demand be paid over to
Baghdad.

Congressional investigators estimate Iraq levied an illegal surcharge
of US10c to US35c a barrel on crude oil shipped under the UN program,
providing millions to cash-strapped Baghdad

Iraq also made money by demanding kickbacks on contracts to supply
Baghdad with humanitarian goods under the UN scheme.

US officials say the customary kickback was 10 per cent. A vendor
selling Iraq $US100 of goods would notify the UN that the shipment
was worth $US110 and give the $US10 to Iraq. The money generated was
deposited in front companies, bank accounts or Iraqi embassies abroad
and transported back to Iraq as cash. But some was also used to
rebuild Iraq’s military and buy prohibited equipment abroad.

Charles Duelfer, the former UN inspector who is leading the CIA
search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, told Congress last
month that Iraq funnelled oil-for-food money to its Military
Industrialisation Commission, which worked with the Iraqi
intelligence services to set up front companies overseas to procure
arms.

The commission budget increased nearly 100-fold from 1996 to 2003,
totalling $US500million in 2003.

Iraq’s demands for kickbacks were long known to British and US
officials, who tried to fix the UN system to counter them.

Eventually, Russia allowed the replacement of the departed oil
overseers and the UN sanctions committee changed to “retroactive
pricing” to cut Iraq’s possible margin on the program’s oil sales.

But what really ignited the issue was the publication by Iraq’s
Al-Mada newspaper in January of a list of 270 politicians,
journalists, businessmen, and even a UN official, who were allegedly
given vouchers to buy Iraq oil.

There are some doubts about the veracity of the list, but it
nevertheless includes powerful figures in key UN powers, such as
Russia and France, as well as a range of Middle Eastern countries.

Among the alleged recipients are the Russian Peace and Unity Party of
President Vladimir Putin, as well as the Russian Communist Party and
companies linked to the party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a Russian
nationalist.

Charles Pasqua, the former French interior minister, and a former
French ambassador to the UN are on the Al-Mada list. Also named by
the paper was Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who is said
to have received 1 million barrels of oil as the daughter of
President Sukarno, and 1 million barrels as herself.

Recipients of the vouchers did not have to trade the oil themselves.
They could sell the vouchers to oil traders for US10c-US30c a barrel.

An example of how the system was used to peddle influence is the case
of Shakir Khafaji, one of two Iraqi-American businessmen on the list.
Khafaji told the London Financial Times last week he had been awarded
oil allocations by the Saddam regime and sold them to an Italian firm
on his family’s behalf.

Khafaji provided $US400,000 to fund an anti-sanctions documentary by
former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter that was shown around the
world.

The UN’s investigation, led by former US Federal Reserve chairman
Paul Volcker, is initially focusing on allegations against Benon
Sevan, the Cypriot Armenian UN official who ran the oil-for-food
program. A “Mr Sevan” named on the Al-Mada list was allegedly
allocated 14.3 million barrels of crude. The UN official has denied
the claims.

US television network ABC reported this week, citing US and European
intelligence services, that three unnamed UN officials had taken
bribes from Saddam. “The UN oil-for-food program provided Saddam
Hussein and his corrupt and evil regime with a convenient vehicle
through which he bought support internationally by bribing political
parties, companies, journalists and other individuals of influence,”
a British consultant for the Iraqi Governing Council, Claude
Hankes-Drielsma, told the US Congress this week.

Azer Tag, Azerbaijan
April 24 2004

US ANALYSTS CALL NATO TO STRENGTHEN ITS ROLE ON SOUTHERN CAUCASUS

As was reported by correspondent of AzerTAj from the USA, the Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute of Studies in Washington has prepared
research work on the subject `Establishment of stability on Southern
Caucasus: multilateral safety and the role of NATO’. Authors of
research are known experts on the region Frederic Starr, Vladimir
Sokor, Svante Cornell, William O’Malley and Roger McDermott.

At the forum, which has been lead by institute, authors have
acquainted representatives of political circles in Washington with
the basic moments of the uncompleted research. The 90-page scientific
work included conditions of safety in each of three states of
Southern Caucasus, interests of various geo-politic forces in region,
military potential of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, the detailed
information on the program `Partnership for Peace’, carried out here
by NATO, the materials displaying the military assistance by the USA
and the Western circles to Georgia and Azerbaijan. Then, the authors
have presented their recommendations concerning policy of NATO in the
states of Southern Caucasus.

Speaking at the forum, Vladimir Sokor noted that earlier the West
looked at Southern Caucasus as the region located on border of Europe
and Asia. Recently such approach has changed. The reason is connected
to three factors – weakening of the authority of Russia in region,
revealing of huge natural resources of the Caspian basin being a key
for the future power resources of the West, and the role, which plays
the region in antiterrorist struggle. Vladimir Sokor marks that there
is a need for wider participation of the NATO in the region. In his
opinion, summit of the Alliance, which will be held in Istanbul in
June of this year, can become a favorable forum for demonstration of
support of intentions of Georgia and Azerbaijan to become members of
the NATO and for statement by the Alliance of priorities of safety on
Southern Caucasus. The cooperation offered by NATO to these two
countries, should touch and Armenia. However, the question on
membership of Azerbaijan and Georgia in the Alliance should not
depend on objections of Armenia and Russia.

Speakers at the forum have emphasized that to speak about regional
economic or social development, not having provided safety of
Southern Caucasus, is inappropriate. In this sense, the
Armenian-Azerbaijan, Nagorny Karabakh conflict and other conflicts in
region should be shortly settled, and available foreign military
forces should be removed from the region.

Lowell Sun, MA
April 24 2004

Armenians to observe Martyr’s Day

LOWELL Armenians across the Merrimack Valley will gather tomorrow
outside Lowell City Hall to commemorate the 89th anniversary of
Armenian Martyrs’ Day.

A procession through downtown Lowell will precede the 10 a.m.
observance, led by an honor guard from the Armenian-American
Veterans.

The event, which features a speech from Rev. Vartan Kassabian and a
proclamation from Mayor Armand P. Mercier, honors the memory of 1.5
million Armenians who were victimized by the Ottoman Turks from
1915-1923.

State Sen. Steven Panagiotakos and a representative from Rep. Marty
Meehan’s office will also be on hand.

Local youth will conduct a flag-raising ceremony and a buffet
reception will follow inside City Hall.

Baku Sun, Azerbaijan
April 24 2004

German FM presses on human rights

BAKU (AP) – German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, meeting with his
Azerbaijani counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov, on Wednesday encouraged
the country to adhere to European human rights norms.

Fischer told reporters that Germany was interested in improving
cooperation with all the countries in the Caucasus region.

`For the cooperation of Germany with the region, in particular with
Azerbaijan, an important condition is the faithful fulfillment by the
country of the recommendations of the Council of Europe,’ the
continent’s main human rights watchdog, Fischer said. Fischer also
expressed hope for a quick resolution of the dispute over
Nagorno-Karabakh.

The enclave in Azerbaijan has been separated from the country since
the mid-1990s, under the control of ethnic Armenians after a
separatist war.

The land conflict has yet to be resolved.

The South End, MI
April 24 2004

Overlooking the present
Ali Moossavi
Vibe Editor

I have absolutely no problem with Holocaust Remembrance Day. This
may come as a shock to those who confuse my anti-Zionist views for
anti-Semitism, but my hatred for an apartheid state’s settler
colonial policies does not equate to respect for racist mass murder.

Logic states that if I’m offended by one form of dehumanizing
violence, then others will offend me equally. And I’m a logical
person, or at least that’s what the voices in my head tell me.

What I do have a problem with is the use of one people’s horror to
justify another. The use of the Holocaust as a propaganda tool to
justify the conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine is not only
tired in its repetition or immoral as a phenomenon; it’s also an easy
target. There are other important topics to deal with, so I’ll leave
this one alone.

Another aspect of Holocaust Remembrance Day that does annoy me,
however, is the fact that only the Holocaust is noted. Some
commentators in the Israeli press have noted this and suggest that
steps should be made toward helping Armenians gain recognition for
their 1915 genocide that claimed 1.5 million people by the Ottoman
empire, now modern day Turkey.

While well intentioned, it completely misses the point. Despite
the necessity of studying and remembering past genocides, it doesn’t
do any good to sit back and self-righteously condemn other societies
for their sins while ignoring one’s own.

This seems to be the case with the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum. On their Web site, they have something called
“Genocide Watch,” which currently includes Chechnya and Sudan. This
may seem noble, and in fact it is, the problem with it is that the
United States has little or nothing to do with these atrocities,
either directly or indirectly.

Considering that the museum documents a 65-year-old genocide under
a country we were at war with, while pointing a human rights
microscope away from our allies and ourselves and onto others, smells
of moral dishonesty serving political interests. That’s not what
“never again” was supposed to mean.

It would be braver – and more pertinent – to extract the universal
lesson that the Holocaust teaches, which is that mass murder – in any
form and for any reason – is universal.

After all, unlike the Germans during World War II who for the most
part didn’t know what was going on in the east, mass murder has been
with American politics since this country’s founding and has been
well-documented. Yet, despite its relatively well-known existence,
Americans have sat idly by, with some celebrating it, while others
pretend to know nothing.

Take the genocide against Native Americans, for example. It is now
widely known that millions of indigenous people were killed over a
period of almost two centuries, either through conventional or
biological warfare (remember those smallpox-infected blankets?) for
the purpose of stealing their land.

It was an American Lebensraum, genocide and expansion, much like
Hitler’s conquest of Eastern Europe. Yet no museum exists to
commemorate it, or anything that happened since then, including
Vietnam.

No one ever thinks of the Vietnam War as mass murder. Yet that’s
exactly what it was. The United States and its South Vietnamese
allies killed at least two million Vietnamese during the war, which
lasted from 1965-1973, when the direct American role ended, followed
by the fall of Saigon in 1975. Many of those deaths resulted from the
enormous aerial bombardment, but a significant proportion also
occurred from rampaging American soldiers.

This isn’t to say that all American GIs were rampaging killing
machines. Many of them became outspoken critics of the war and their
efforts led to the Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit, where
testimonies regarding the many massacres that made up the war were
heard.

An elite Army unit called, “Tiger Force,” carried out one such
massacre, which lasted over a period of seven months in South
Vietnam’s Central Highlands, in 1967. Hundreds of villagers were
killed, by being blown up with grenades or shot execution style. Then
their bodies were mutilated by having their ears cut off to make
necklaces.

Worst of all, commanders knew that these things were going on, yet
did nothing. In fact, a four-year investigation by the Army, which
went all the way to the Pentagon and the White House, was kept secret
and no charges were filed when it was dropped in 1975. The only
reason anybody knows about this is because of an investigation
conducted by the Toledo Blade newspaper.

Incidentally, the Secretary of Defense in 1975 is also the Defense
Secretary now – Donald Rumsfeld. Mass murder of the kind that
occurred in 1967 is probably happening in Iraq now, and remembering
the Holocaust isn’t going to stop it unless immediate action is
taken.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Daily News Tribune, MA
April 23 2004

Armenian-Americans celebrate, live on
By Mark Benson / Tribune Correspondent
Friday, April 23, 2004

WALTHAM — In her 70s, Alice Der Parseghian created the first of
hundreds of high-quality, hand-crafted dolls dressed in clothing
native to the Armenian villages she fled in 1913 to escape a Turkish
campaign to exterminate her race.

This year, Rebecca Boujicanian, 93, penned more than 50 pages of
a memoir celebrating her 43 years with her husband, a musician who
likewise emigrated from his native Armenia to avoid annihilation by
Turkish authorities.

Today, state representatives Peter Koutoujian, D-Waltham, and
Rachel Kaprelian, D-Watertown, are honoring Der Parseghian,
Boujicanian, and Waltham residents Zabel Assadoorian and Paul
Jelanian at a State House ceremony for survivors of the Armenian
genocide.

Each year, April 24 is a solemn day of mourning in the world
community. On that day in 1915, the Turkish government systematically
killed 300 leading Armenians, then slaughtered another 5,000 in the
streets and homes in Constantinople, the prelude to the murder of 1.5
million Armenians from 1915-1921.

This year, Koutoujian successfully sponsored legislation to
designate April 2004 as Armenian-American Heritage month, and, the
ceremony for Der Parseghian, Boujicanian and all Armenians will add
to our understanding of the history of this race.

“Making April in Massachusetts Armenian-American Heritage month
was very important, because this April, we are not just mourning
losses from the genocide, we are celebrating the contributions of
Armenians,” said Koutoujian, actively involved in archival,
historical and legal efforts connected with the Armenian genocide at
the Armenian Assembly and National Committee.

“My grandparents, Abraham and Zarouhi, fled Armenia but they
were split up — my grandfather went to the United States, my
grandmother to an orphanage in Syria. The American Red Cross helped
my grandfather find my grandmother — he sent for her, and they
created a life in America,” said Kotoujian, whose grandfather and
Uncle Jack co-owned a Moody Street store, near where the Jack
Koutoujian Memorial Playground is today.

“I have fond memories of that store, and my grandfather giving
us candies and raisins when I was about five years old,” Koutoujian
added.

A swatch of stitchery is prominently displayed in Koutoujian’s
Boston office — it is a pattern unique to the Armenian village of
Marash, home to Koutoujian’s grandparents.

Those are the types of authentic Armenian stitches Der
Parseghian replicated in the hems of the dresses and other garments
she created for her homemade dolls.

“There I was in my mid-70s, living in Florida, lonely, and I got
an idea — why don’t I leave a legacy to my family. I loved making
paper dolls when I was young, so, I decided to make a doll for every
region in Armenia,” Der Parseghian said yesterday from her apartment
at Waltham Crossings.

“The bride doll here — I made that based on my Armenian
granddaughter’s wedding dress,” said Der Parseghian. “Then I made all
the dolls for an authentic wedding.

“After that, my husband asked me to make a Vartan doll, part of
blessing the sword and dagger before going to war to fight for our
people,” Der Parseghian said. “The hair for Vartan, we couldn’t get
that right, so I asked my daughter to send me a lock of her black
hair — we used that for Vartan’s hair.”

Der Parseghian’s granddaughter lives in Washington, where most
of Der Parseghian’s dolls are in a home display. In 1983, Der
Parseghian held an exhibit of her dolls in Washington, and, in the
mid-1990s, conservators at the Smithsonian Institute asked if they
could have her dolls for keeps.

Watching Der Parseghian look at her favorite Cinderella doll in
her Waltham apartment, it is clear that the dolls bring her great joy
right where they are.

“In the 1930s, I staged Cinderella, the play, in Armenian, and
added an Armenian prayer to the scene where Cinderella prays to her
fairy godmother for a prince to take her to the ball,” Der Parseghian
said. “That is my favorite scene — the fairy godmother’s wand brings
a prince and Cinderella’s clothes transform to a silver gown.”

Favorite memories fill the 50-plus pages of Boujicanian’s
memoir.

“Many people in my husband’s family were musical,” said
Boujicanian, who also received a letter from Koutoujian and Kaprelian
about today’s ceremony.

“My husband was 16 when he left — he was self-taught,
well-read, a violinist. Our children had those same talents in music.

“I went to a girl’s high school in Boston — I was at the top of
my class of 500 students,” Boujicanian added. “I decided recently,
why not write, why not write about my Armenian husband and our life
together? Many happy memories came back, thank goodness.”

And Boujicanian has created many more — with help from
Koutoujian and Kaprelian, there are more positive examples of
Armenian culture to commemorate.

For those interested in reading more about Armenians, Koutoujian
recommends “The Road to Home,” the 2003 autobiography of Vartan
Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Foundation, who describes his
childhood in a poor Armenian Christian enclave in Iraq.

For details about the Armenian genocide, Koutoujian cites two
books by Peter Balakian — “The Black Dog of Fate” and “The Burning
Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.”

Another local resource is in Kaprelian’s hometown of Watertown
— The Armenian Library and Museum of America, 65 Main St.,
Watertown.