ARKA News Agency
April 6 2004

5th international exhibition `Education and Carrier EXPO-2004′ opens
in Yerevan

Catholicos of All Armenian receives members of Vaspurakan Union

National Unity Party expects CE assistance in protection of human
rights in Armenia

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5TH INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION `EDUCATION AND CARRIER EXPO-2004′ OPENS
IN YEREVAN

YEREVAN, April 6. /ARKA/. 5th international exhibition `Education and
Carrier EXPO-2004′ opened today in Yerevan. According to Director of
National Institute of Education Vardan Martirosian, the exhibition is
to represent all potential of national educational system.
The exhibition will represent 25 educational programs and institutes,
including British Council, EU program Tempus TACIS, Caucasus Media
Institute, French University of Armenia, Moscow State University of
Service.
The organizer of the exhibition is expo-center Logos, official
sponsors are RA Ministry of Trade and Economic Development, RA MFA
and National Institute of Education. The exhibition will last till
April 8. L.D. –0–

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

CATHOLICOS OF ALL ARMENIAN RECEIVES MEMBERS OF VASPURAKAN UNION

YEREVAN, April 6. /ARKA/. Catholicos of All Armenian Garegin II
received members of Vaspurakan Union. The members of the Union
traditionally attend the grave of 125th Catholicos Mkrtich I Khrimian
at his birthday.
Garegin II highly estimated devotion of the Union to the memory of
Catholicos Mkrtich Khrimian. L.D. –0–

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

NATIONAL UNITY PARTY EXPECTS CE ASSISTANCE IN PROTECTION OF HUMAN
RIGHTS IN ARMENIA

YEREVAN, April 6 ./ARKA/. National Unity Party expects CE assistance
in protection of human rights in Armenia, says the letter sent to the
Embassies of US, Russia and European countries. The letter says that
Yerevan City Administration was warned ahead considering conducted
meeting with electors. `Prime Minister assured in prevention of
provocations and preservation of public order, however all roads in
town were closed, which prevented participation of regions’ citizens
in the meeting and police did nothing during attacks on journalists’,
the Leader of the Party Artashes Geghamian stated today. In
accordance with that we expect assistance from CE, Russia and USA in
fulfillment of statement of the convention on human rights
protection, Geghamian concluded.
The meeting of Artashes Geghamyan with people on April 5 was fraught
with serious consequences for the operators and reporters. Unknown
provocateurs broke the cameras of Kentron TV Company, Hai TV, and
PTA. The tape recorder of Shant TV Company’s operator was taken away.
L.D. –0–

Gulf News, United Arab Emirates
April 6 2004

Off the Cuff: One flew over the coocoo’s nest

By Tanya Goudsouzian

Easter in the Armenian home is a much-anticipated event. Setting
aside the religious context, it is an occasion to feast upon special
dishes that do not appear on the everyday dinner table.

As the women of the family prepare these dishes, the tantalising
aromas wafting from the kitchen usually attract a number of
self-appointed tasters. These so-called tasters, who would insert
their fingers or forks into a cooking pot, are expressly unwelcome.

Although a compliment on the “fertile hands” of the chef might help
grease the passage, it is unadvisable for anyone to venture into the
kitchen unless they intend to make themselves useful.

Thus it was from the doorway of a room adjoining the kitchen that I
overheard the events, which I will now relate.

Every station on the kitchen stove was occupied. There were dolma
(stuffed vine leaves) boiling in a large pot, and spicy rice with
raisins simmering over low heat. I could also smell the early stages
of plaki (kidney beans and potatoes). The ‘boeregs (filo dough
stuffed with cheese) were baking in the oven. The parsley, just
washed, was ready for the chopper.

My mother worked best under pressure. Wearing leggings and an
oversized |T-shirt, she was sprinkling sesame seeds on braided little
bits of dough, which would turn into delicious aghi biscot (salty
biscuits) in the oven. Into this fracas walked my grandmother,
donning an elegant house-dress and hand-embroidered apron.

“Hurry up,” she told my mother. “Or I won’t have time to prepare the
coocoo (egg, lettuce and leek pie)…”

My mother, beads of sweat trickling down her brow, looked up
incredulously at her mother-in-law.

“I was thinking I would prepare the coocoo this time,” my mother
said.

“What do you mean YOU will prepare the coocoo?” my grandmother asked.
“I have always prepared the coocoo for Easter. You don’t know how to
make coocoo…” “I found a recipe I want to try,” my mother replied,
coolly.

“What recipe? I will make the coocoo, the way my mother made it,” my
grandmother persisted. “Why are you breaking with tradition?”

“It’s your tradition, not mine. This is my house, and my dinner
table. I will make the coocoo,” my mother insisted. This argument was
clearly not about coocoo. It ran far deeper.

>From the doorway, I could feel the onset of another war between these
two vastly different women. My grandmother was a stubborn woman, with
expensive tastes and traditional notions; and she made no secret of
the fact that my mother was anathema to all she stood for.

My grandmother travelled in taxis; my mother took the bus. My
grandmother had regular manicures; my mother loved gardening. My
grandmother bought a new fur-lined coat every season; my mother paid
the mortgage on the house.

Yes, I could feel the onset of another war. I hoped and prayed there
would be no name-calling, no door-slamming and no threats of leaving
the house. Certainly not over a silly old dish that nobody ever
touched anyway.

In the end, my grandmother retired to her bedroom, and only
re-emerged after I was sent as an emissary to cajole her into joining
us in the dining room. She appeared, proud and stoic. She sat at the
head of table, as she always did.

At the end of the meal, my mother bitterly noted that she ate
everything except the coocoo. Although it was edible for a first try,
I had to admit my mother’s coocoo was a little grizzled. It certainly
did not look as appetising as my grandmother’s coocoo, which was
usually golden brown and fluffy.

No matter. Ultimately, they both won. My grandmother’s tradition to
serve coocoo for Easter was preserved; and after many subsequent
attempts, my mother finally learned to make coocoo properly.

FrontPage Magazine
April 7 2004

The Pulitzer Prize: No Conservatives Need Apply

By George Shadroui
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 7, 2004

The Pulitzer Prizes announced this week demonstrate again the
stranglehold that liberals and leftists enjoy when it comes to
garnering recognition from those who bestow honors for outstanding
journalism and writing.

While it is laudable that Anne Applebaum, who serves on the liberal
Washington Post editorial board, won for documenting the terrors of
the Soviet Gulag, it should be recalled that Solzhenitsyn’s
monumental work on the same subject appeared in the 1970s. Likewise,
the award given to William Taubman for his Khrushchev biography comes
long after the Soviet Union itself had admitted to the crimes and
repression documented. It has apparently taken the liberal and
leftist establishment decades to accept and document crimes that many
anti-communists were assailed for daring to mention back in 1940s and
1950s.

The rest of the awards, however, went pretty much as expected, with
liberal and left-driven journalism taking the honors. In the category
for commentary, the winner and all those nominated were liberals. The
public service writing award went to two PBS leftists. The
investigative reporting award went for a series about American
atrocities in Vietnam, which is standard fare in the awards business.
The national reporting award went to a series attacking Wal-Mart — a
favorite bete noir of the Left. The international reporting award
went to the Washington Post for a series on the reactions of Iraqis
to the American invasion, much of it casting U.S. efforts in a
negative light. The beat reporting award went to a story on college
admissions preferences for the wealthy (not one of the extraordinary
investigations into race preference admissions has ever won). The
drama award went to a play whose lone character is a transvestite.
The non-fiction book award went to a book by a leftist about race
struggles.

In short, like many national awards of this kind, the Pulitzer is a
political prize bestowed almost exclusively on writers, journalists
and thinkers who cater to suitably liberal or left-wing points of
view. It wasn’t always thus, but since the 1960s that’s been the
case. Writers Peter Collier and David Horowitz, for example, were
nominated for a National Book Award for the first of their four
best-selling biographies of American dynastic families. That was when
they were on the Left. Although their book on the Kennedys earned
them the sobriquet “the premier chroniclers of American dynastic
tragedy” and the New York Times described their book on the Fords as
an “irresistible epic,” they were never nominated for an award again.

Having spent more than 20 years working as a journalist or with
journalists, I can attest to what even internal surveys by academics
and journalists have shown: most journalists are either liberal/Left
or so cynical that they resist easy characterization. In fact, in
nearly a decade of working as a local reporter, I do not recall
stumbling across another conservative. So do liberals dominate the
reporting awards? The answer is obvious. And it’s not because the few
conservative journalists don’t write worthy stories. Heather
MacDonald, Michael Fumento, William Tucker, Bill Gertz and the late
Mike Kelly have produced prize-worthy work by any standard, but none
of them have been rewarded by the Pulitzer Board.

Still, many of the awards honor legitimate feats of journalism and
many focus on local news coverage that defies easy ideological
characterization, so let us put aside the journalism categories for
now and look instead at the major book or commentary awards, which
are more high profile and often more slanted. For the purposes of
this analysis, four categories – general non-fiction, commentary,
autobiography/biography and history – are relevant. A review of
winners over 40 years shows that conservatives are basically
excluded.

The category for commentary is an exception. Since 1970, when
commentary was first singled out for recognition as part of the
Pulitzer Prizes, several prominent conservatives have won, including
George Will, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer, Vermont Royster and
Paul Gigot.

But liberals have still dominated, with winners including Mike Royko,
David Broder, Mary McGrory, Ellen Goodman, Russell Baker, Art
Buchwald, Claude Sitton, Murray Kempton, Jimmy Breslin, Clarence
Page, Jimmie Hoagland, Anna Quindlen, Colbert King, Thomas Friedman,
Maureen Dowd and William Raspberry. William F. Buckley, Irving
Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Thomas Sowell, to mention just four
obvious conservatives whose work is impressive in scope and quality,
have never won.

A 4 to 1 ratio is actually a victory of sorts for conservatives when
compared to most other categories or awards. Not a single discernible
conservative has won in the other three major categories being
considered here. Not one. There is a long list of leftists and
liberals, however. Among those honored for their work in history, we
find Dean Acheson, James MacGregor Burns, Leon Litwack, Taylor
Branch, Joseph Ellis, Robert Caro, Stanley Karnow, Gordon Wood, Louis
Menand, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.

In the general non-fiction category, winners have included Barbara
Tuchman, David McCullough, Tina Rosenberg, Garry Wills, Richard
Hofstader, Theodore White, Norman Mailer, Frances Fitzgerald, Annie
Dillard, James Lelyveld, J. Anthony Lukas, Neil Sheehan, Jonathan
Weiner, John Dower, John McPhee, Samantha Power and David Remnick. In
the biography and auto-biography category we have W.A. Swanberg,
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Robert Caro, Joseph Lash, George Kennan,
Edmund Morris, Russell Baker, Katherine Graham, David McCullough,
etc.

Some of these awardees wrote great books and their work deserved
recognition, irrespective of ideological pedigree. It cannot be
ignored, however, that conservative authors are totally overlooked
(or snubbed) going back to the 1960s. No awards for Allan Bloom (The
Closing of the American Mind), George Gilder (Wealth and Poverty),
Charles Murray (Losing Ground), Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom
(America in Black and White), whose books helped set the terms of
national discussion and policy.

Why? For starters, Joseph Pulitzer was a crusader who coined a
much-cited definition of journalistic excellence: to afflict the
comfortable and comfort the afflicted. By this standard, documenting
the defects in society is a priority, often with the goal of
stimulating government activism to redress specific issues. When not
pushing for more government to solve seemingly intractable social
problems, the press is routinely focused on corporate malfeasance.
Finding victims and documenting failure is the paradigm through which
journalists practice their craft — except, alas, when it might cut
against the liberal grain. There will be no Pulitzers for exposing
the destructive effects of liberal programs like welfare, for
example, or the political subversion of the public health system by
the AIDS lobby.

To show just how prevalent this bias is, consider for a moment John
Stossel, the Emmy-winning television reporter, who recently published
a book, Give Us a Break, in which he documents how he was ostracized
by the journalism community when he turned his reporting talents from
major corporations to big government. Once a touted and celebrated
reporter, suddenly he was on the outside among the liberal elite.
Bernard Goldberg, in his books, Bias and Arrogance, also documents
the liberal slant of major news organizations.

This political culture within the profession discourages journalists
from tackling certain stories that would provide a more balanced view
of public policy and international issues. How is it, for example,
that the media have gladly focused on the victims of American and
corporate power, yet done so little to document the suffering of
victims of Ba’athist tyranny in Iraq? Could it be that the media is
reluctant to give moral credence to what is an unpopular war among
leftists and Democrats? Prisons were emptied, mass graves uncovered,
and yet coverage that has explored these issues in depth or
interviewed families or victims at length has been scarce since
Saddam was toppled. Certainly, compared to the coverage given Richard
Clarke’s attacks on the Bush policy in Iraq, efforts to document the
atrocities uncovered by our troops has been miniscule. It is as if we
had defeated the Germans and then no one bothered to document the
concentration camps or the Nazi killing machine, but rather focused
on the imperfections of D-Day.

This bias is evident in coverage of Cold War issues, as well. Again,
it took decades before liberals finally documented atrocities
perpetrated by communism. Yet, their work was quickly recognized.
Meanwhile, the work of Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest and Martin
Malia has never received a Pulitzer. As this year shows again, there
is no shortage of honored books or authors who “dare” to report on
American “crimes” in Southeast Asia or Central America – among them
Frances Fitzgerald, Neil Sheehan, Norman Mailer, Tina Rosenberg and
Gloria Emerson – or for work that takes the traditional liberal slant
on our nation’s race problems. The result is that even well-intended
and more fair-minded journalists or historians often seem to view
issues through the paradigms constructed by anti-American critics
like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

Take as one example recent Pulitzer winner Samantha Power. In her
book on genocide, A Problem from Hell, she documents what she calls
the reluctance of the United States to take any action to thwart the
genocidal policies of other governments. Power, it should be noted,
reviewed Chomsky’s recent book, Hegemony or Survival, for the New
York Times. The book is another in a long line of his anti-American
fulminations. Though Power concedes that Chomsky can be one-sided,
her own work is in some ways a testimony to his influence.

Power, like many critics of American foreign policy on the Left,
views American decision-making outside of historical context. She
judges our action or inaction against some unachievable ideal rather
than against what other nations or governments were doing. If our
record is less than satisfactory, it seems fair to ask how it
compares with the action or inaction of others? To attack the United
States because it has neither the capacity nor the will to right
every horrific wrong being committed across the globe is to hold our
nation to a standard unmatched in history. As we are finding in Iraq
today, the choices are not painless or uncomplicated, but these
factors often are forgotten over time.

For example, what would she have had the American government do to
stop the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide beyond exercising our
maximum military and diplomatic might against the regimes
perpetrating these crimes, which we did once involved in both World
War I and World War II? We lost almost a million men in both wars and
it was not a given that we would triumph. Nor is it a given we will
win in Iraq against a clearly fascist enemy, but our harshest critics
for acting against a tyrannical regime are on the Left.

Back in the 1980s, J. Douglas Bates, a former newspaper editor,
offered some criticism of the Pulitzers in his book, The Pulitzer
Prize. He documented a bias evident in the Pulitzers, not against
conservatives, but against those who worked in the heartland or out
West. His argument was that Easterners had the advantage. Bates also
documented the lobbying effort by leftists on behalf of the work of
Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. When a group of leftist writers took
out an ad in the New York Review of Books arguing that Morrison
should win in the fiction category, the Pulitzer Board a few weeks
later honored her novel Beloved. You can rest assured that those
writers never organized on behalf of black author Shelby Steele,
known for his rejection of politically correct views.

Bates has plenty of sympathy for liberals he feels have been
overlooked by the Pulitzers, including I.F. Stone, Leonard Bernstein
and Neil Sheehan for his reporting on the Vietnam war (though Sheehan
would later win for his history of Vietnam). Yet, not once in his
250-page book did Bates explore the issue of bias against
conservative writers or journalists who cut against the liberal
grain.

The awards, of course, are administered by the Columbia Journalism
School, which is itself a bastion of liberal/Left attitudes. One
Columbia University student once reportedly remarked – all my
professors come from The Nation and the Village Voice. There is not a
single identifiable conservative on the Columbia Journalism faculty.
Bernard Goldberg, in his most recent book, Arrogance, reports that a
blue ribbon panel was established a few years ago to review the
school’s operations in an effort to improve its performance and the
practice of good journalism. Goldberg notes that the panel consisted
almost entirely of known leftists and liberals, while prominent and
respected conservatives were not invited to contribute.

Awards are symbolic but also important. They are the trademark of
excellence and they often make or break careers. They should be based
on the quality of the work being considered, not on the political
prejudices of judges or the industry as a whole. Most conservatives,
I am confident, want fair and balanced reporting even when it cuts
against the grain of their own ideology. This is the bulwark of a
free society. What they can’t accept as easily is the kind of
spectacle witnessed over the past couple of weeks, when Richard
Clarke was given unprecedented air time, during a time of war, to
espouse views at odds with those of conservative administration
trying to win that war.

A self critical journalism community must ask itself why such noted
conservative writers and authors as William F. Buckley Jr., David
Horowitz, Peter Collier, Michael Novak, George Gilder, Charles
Murray, Allen Bloom, William Gertz, Gerald Posner, Dinesh D’Souza,
Thomas Sowell, Florence King and many others have been overlooked by
so many contests that honor writing or letters.

However difficult it might be for liberal elites to acknowledge it,
every major award given for writing or public affairs reporting is
dominated or controlled by the leftist or liberal intelligentsia. Is
it an accident that Jimmy Carter was given the Nobel Prize precisely
when a conservative president whose policies Carter detests was
trying to mobilize the international community against worldwide
terrorism?

Those who would claim to be the standard-bearers of excellence and
the defenders of the marketplace of ideas should be embarrassed by
the discriminatory practices evident in these cherished awards. None
dare call it bias – but bias it is.

Baku Today, Azerbaijan
April 7 2004

US changing Minsk group spokesman

Baku Today 07/04/2004 12:43

US government will be replacing the US chairman to the OSCE’s Minsk
group, said US Ambassador in Azerbaijan Reno Harnish at a meeting
with Azeri defense minister Safar Abiyev yesterday.
US State Secretary’s senior adviser for the Caspian basin issues
Steven Mann will take over the chairman’s post. Mann will succeed
Rudolph Perini who has been the third US chairman of the Minsk group.

Linn Pasko and Kerry Kavano have been the preceding chairmen of the
group.

OSCE’s Minsk group has been functioning to facilitate a peaceful
solution to the Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Three nations are currently presiding over the group to coordinate
the mediation efforts. Alongside with the United States Russia and
France are the chairmen of the group.

The three nations have been operating in joint chairmanship since
February 11, 1997.

International Herald Tribune

Chechnya and war through the camera

Joan Dupont IHT Tuesday, April 6, 2004

PARIS-There is a generation of filmmakers who risk their lives to expose the
terror and humiliation of war. They work independent of television and cable
news channels and are not in the business of being embedded.

Gilles de Maistre, a leading French reporter, for instance, is known for
“J’ai 12 ans et je fais la guerre” (I’m 12 years old, and I make war), an
investigation of preteen warriors that won an international Emmy.

And Mylène Sauloy is one of a handful of women to enter Chechnya
clandestinely, draped in a headscarf. “Then, I put my camera in a plastic
bag, and pile bananas on top – I could be a housewife coming back from
market,” she said.

Raised in Marrakech by a Moroccan doctor father and Russian-Hungarian
mother, the director lived in Colombia for 17 years, making films. She also
worked with de Maistre, interviewing street kids in Bogotá for a
documentary.

“One day, I read an article in Le Monde about this small rebel people in
Caucasia who resist colonization. It wasn’t a European story like Bosnia,
about ethnic racism – it was about a fight for freedom.” When the first war
broke out in 1994, she negotiated with the cultural television channel Arte
to make a film in Chechnya. “I went right from Bogotá to Grozny,” she says.

Sauloy has filmed broken families, shattered homes and a children’s dance
troupe that made it out of the country to perform in Paris but couldn’t wait
to return home to Grozny.

Her first film, “Le Loup et l’Amazone” (The Wolf and the Amazon), made from
1995 to 2000, was inspired by independent-minded women in the mountains of
Caucasia, who, legend has it, may be descended from the Amazons. “It’s a
poetic idea,” she says. The Amazon theme crops up again in her current
project, which focuses on an army of women hiding in the mountains of Iraq.

In her headscarf and long skirts, Sauloy has crossed borders into Chechnya
14 times, turning out films such as “Le 51,” about an apartment house in
Grozny inhabited Chechens, Armenians and Jews. “Grozny used to be a modern
city, like Algiers, cosmopolitan, with an intelligentsia.”

Two wars – from 1994 to 1996 and from 1999 to today – and a reign of terror
have reduced Grozny to rubble. The prewar population was less than a
million; 250,000 have been killed, 200,000 live in exile.

Sauloy’s latest film, “Danse Avec les Ruines” (Dance With the Ruins), tells
the story of a Chechen choreographer and his family who return from exile in
Turkey. “I hopped a bus with them in Istanbul, without realizing they were
really going back home. I was there when they walked into their bombed-out
house.”

She followed the troupe of 30 children – originally 60 – to Grozny and shot
the family repairing their home, fitting windows, returning to rehearsal and
to school. The children sewed their costumes and dreamed of the tour to
France, “a country where we won’t be greeted as terrorists,” in the words of
a teenage daughter.

Recently, Sauloy, 45, split her weekend between a screening of “Danse Avec
les Ruines” at the International Women’s Film Festival in Créteil, a Paris
suburb, and her own festival of films on Chechnya at the Cinéma des
Cinéastes in Paris. “Tchétchénie Criblée d’Images” (Chechnya, Riddled with
Images), as the festival was called, screened films of rare beauty, such as
“Eliso” (1928), a silent film by the Georgian director Nikoloz Shengelaya
about the first deportation of the Chechen people in 1864, under the czars.
And there were recent films like Andrei Konchalovsky’s “House of Fools”
(2002) and Sergei Bodrov’s “Prisoner of the Mountain” (1996), which show
sympathy for the predicament of the Chechen people.

In the public imagination, Chechnya has never been a popular cause but a
thorn in the side of the Russian government, and an embarrassment to Europe.
Perceived as poor refugees at best, bandits, terrorists and radical
Islamists at worst, this mountain people of Caucasia live with a terror that
takes a daily toll on both Russians and Chechens.

Five years ago, Sauloy founded an arts association, Marcho Doryila (“Let
freedom be with you”), and recruited figures like the stage and film
director Ariane Mnouchkine and the philosopher André Glucksman to support
Chechen artists. Mnouchkine opened her Théâtre du Soleil in Vincennes, a
suburb of Paris, to the dance troupe from Grozny; at the film festival,
Glucksman led a debate after the screenings, calling Chechnya Europe’s
guilty conscience.

Sauloy started filming three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
when some interpreters, journalists and humanitarian workers also worked as
informers. Her first interpreter in Chechnya was “crazy and dangerous,” she
said, “a regular Russian Mata Hari,” which decided her to learn Russian. “I
was raised with several languages. My grandfather spoke Hungarian, and my
grandparents spoke Yiddish together. At first, I wrote out questions in
Russian, but I couldn’t understand a word of their answers until I went home
and translated.”

For Sauloy, the problem is not a Chechen problem, but a Russian one. “It’s
about dehumanization, and it’s about our silent complicity. The Chechens are
the last resistants in the Caucasian mountains, and as a filmmaker, I’m
interested in resistance, in showing what is left of humanity in wartime.”

She sees the Chechens as an endangered species living in a codified society.
Hospitality is sacred. “When I enter a Chechen home, my host sits next to
the door and seats me furthest away from the door so, if we are attacked, he
will be killed, not I.”

Sauloy balks at the way Chechens have been demonized, yet admits that the
situation has changed since the October elections, which installed a
pro-Russian Chechen government. “Before, when you crossed a Russian
checkpoint, you knew where you were. Now, there’s a Chechen militia, paid to
do the dirty work. Life is becoming more dangerous, the way it was in France
under the Occupation.”

After the first war, Saudi Arabia recruited 2,000 Chechen students, who
became hardline Islamists. “Things have changed,” she says, “since the first
woman Chechen suicide bomber blew herself up in front of Russian military
quarters, and the whole number was filmed on video.” Sauloy has talked to
the orphaned families of these kamikazes, “women who aren’t real Islamists,
but university educated, and who have adopted the look, the headscarf, the
business of reciting the Koran.”

The Chechens traditionally practice Sufism, a mystic form of religion,
“something like the whirling dervishes. But now I know dancers and actors
who never prayed before, who pray. There’s a saying, the more bombs fall,
the more beards grow.”

Now, Sauloy is making a film from a Russian soldier’s home video. “You see
his friends shoot and kill and hear him comment on what he does and sees.
That video has been sold all over. Watching people kill has become a
business.”

Her work, she insists, is more dangerous for those who help her than for
herself. “It’s not that I’m fearless, but these people, and these children,
teach me courage.”

Is her family frightened for her?

“Oh yes, they are afraid, and they are proud of me,” she said.

International Herald Tribune

NT Highlights #13 (515)
5 April, 2004

Much Ado About Nothing?
By Haroutiun Khachatrian

Outsiders visiting Armenia on these days may be surprised to learn from mass
media, (including the state-owned ones) that there is a political tension in
this country.
There are almost no real signs to prove this.

In fact, I believe the people saying that there is little basis for
extensive shock and shaking in Armenia are right.

The opposition has declared a single goal: to force Robert Kocharian to
resign, as the results of his re-elections last year were falsified. Event
if one agrees with this allegation, it still remains to see what are the
resources the opposition plans to use to force Kocharian to leave the
President’s office? Its leaders mention one single resource: the people will
organize, in reply to the appeals of these leaders, mass actions of protest
and civil disobedience.

Will they? I doubt deeply. These same opposition leaders failed to persuade
the population to participate in such actions a year ago, immediately after
the presidential elections, when emotions were much higher than now. The
simple fact that Geghamian and Demirchain act jointly now (they failed to
coordinate their actions last year) is evidently insufficient to spark a
large-scale “people movement”now. Despite the high level of negative
emotions towards the authorities and Kocharian personally.

Those seeing parallels between today’s Armenia and Georgia of the last
November miss an important factor: both the life standards and the
capacities of the state machinery in Armenia are much higher than in the
neighboring country. Hence, the basis for a type of “rose revolution” here
is very small if any.

For this reason, the nervous reaction of authorities to the threats of the
opposition leaders look often exaggerated, to put it mildly. The ridiculous
actions of egg-throwing or organizing faked funeral ceremonies to prevent
the actions of oppositions are followed by criminal cases which cannot be
explained by common reason. The same is true for the anti-opposition
campaign in state-run media. I may be wrong, but it seems that this reaction
roots in peculiarities of the character of Robert Kocharian, who takes every
criticism as a personal insult. Anyway, these actions may bring the
situation to even higher degree of tension (and cause more damage) than it
could be in case if the authorities had a more sober stance.

—

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

A1 Plus | 15:20:31 | 06-04-2004 | Politics |

STATEMENT OF NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ON VIOLENCE AGAINST JOURNALISTS YESTERDAY

That disgustful action was directed against speech freedom aiming to hamper
unbiased information in Armenia and to reflect the reality in the anomalous
mirror.

National Press Club condemns the violence demanding the Authorities and the
law-enforcement bodies who neglected their professional obligations to take
urgent steps to punish the pogrom-makers and to exclude such accidents in
the future or else violence may spread among our public.

In the 21st century speech freedom has no alternative in Armenia, too, and
the Armenian journalists must strive for it. NPC calls upon its colleagues
who abet the thugs by distorting what happened, to respect their
professional duty.

—

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

A1 Plus | 14:51:39 | 06-04-2004 | Social |

STATEMENT BY ONNIK KRIKORIAN

At the rally on April 5 Armenian from Diaspora Onnik Krikorian, press
photographer of “Hetq” Internet site of Investigating Journalists’
Association, was beaten while performing his professional duties.

He has appeared today with a statement. Here we represent it.

“In the aftermath of yesterday’s attack on journalists and photographers
covering the rally organized by the National Unity Party of Artashes
Geghamian, I am obliged to issue a statement regarding the events that
resulted in a number of media representatives being attacked by men
identified as working for the authorities.

In particular, I am concerned by coverage of the event on state-sponsored
Public TV. In their reports, Public Television — which is broadcast via
satellite to the Diaspora — lay the blame on the opposition for the attacks
despite all eye witness accounts identifying the men as having the
protection of the state.

As a British citizen who was hit in the face by one of the thugs and who
approached two policemen who witnessed events but refused to intervene, I
can state quite categorically in the instances that I witnessed at least,
that nobody in the crowd responded to the provocation. Moreover, it was
plainly clear that the group of men were there with the full knowledge and
protection of the Armenian police.

In light of Public TV’s attempts to propagandize yesterday’s events as
evidence of violence by those attending an otherwise peaceful rally, the
authorities must respect the role of journalists in this period of
confrontation. I urge Public TV to report the facts and not to disseminate
propaganda that they know to be untrue in order to fulfil the orders of the
state and to escalate an already tense situation.

In particular, it should be noted that Public TV did not report the presence
of half a dozen men believed to be hired muscle despite the large number of
people, including foreign citizens, that saw them attack journalists and
citizens alike without any provocation.

Journalists are not parties to this conflict between the opposition and the
government. Journalists are responsible for covering the events and I call
upon both sides and especially the police to respect that role”.

—

PRESS RELEASE
Land and Culture Organization
P.O. Box 1386
Hoboken, NJ 07030
Contact: Raffi Niziblian
Tel: 1-888-LCO-1555
E-mail: [email protected]
Web:

LCO IS ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR ITS 2004 SUMMER CAMPAIGNS

The Land and Culture Organization (LCO) has begun recruiting
volunteers for its 2004 summer campaigns.

Established in France in 1977, the Land and Culture Organization is an
international, non-profit organization that has undertaken a variety
of challenging activities ranging from restoration projects of
national historical monuments, to social and economic assistance
programs for Armenian communities living on ancestral lands. The LCO
creates enriching opportunities for men and women of all backgrounds
and interests to directly participate in the process of getting back
to their roots, bridging gaps between past and present and forging
links with today and tomorrow. For over 27 years, Armenians of all
ages have participated in LCO summer campaigns from North and South
America, Europe, Australia, Armenia and the Middle East and
experienced their ancestral homeland beyond the hotels and tourist
spots in Yerevan. They meet and work with local villagers and interact
with their land in a way that deepens their understanding and bonds
them to their heritage.

The LCO first began holding restoration projects in the Aterpatakan
region of northwest Iran and eventually spread its activities to
Kessab in Syria, Armenia and Nagorno Karabagh. This year, the LCO is
proud to be celebrating 15 years of activity in Armenia. A few of our
past projects were the reconstruction of the St. Astvadzazin Church
(Holy Mother of God) in Gogaran, the renovation of the St. Minas
Church in Tatev and the restoration of the Saghmosavank Monastery in
the Ashtarak Region. The LCO has also completed social assistance and
economic projects such as the building of solar fruit dryers in
Madrasa (now called Dprevan) and last year in Ayroum, a refugee
village located in the Northern part of the country near the Georgian
border.

The LCO has also been very active in the Nagorno Karabakh Republic
(NKR) since 1997, when it adopted the war-torn village of
Karintak. This village, situated below the rock on which the town of
Shushi sits, has earned the reputation of being a heroic village,
particularly during the clashes for the liberation of Shushi by
Armenian forces. The four-year project included the renovation of
their cultural center, the village church, its kindergarten and
finally its school. Since 2001, the LCO has renovated vital parts of
the Shushi polyclinic and General Hospital, including the Delivery
Room, the Maternity Ward and several hospital rooms. In 2003, the LCO
volunteers undertook the renovation of the water pipeline which
provides the hospital with running water and the septic system.

The work sites and projects approved for 2004 during its Annual
Assembly held in Paris in February of this year, the International
Union of Land and Culture Organizations selected (1) the
reconstruction of the school in the refugee village of Shatvan located
in the Vartenis region of Armenia; (2) the continuing effort to
renovate the operating rooms of the Shushi Hospital, and (3),
continuation of our ongoing restoration work in Kessab, Syria.

The reconstruction of the village school in the refugee community of
Shatvan located to the east of Lake Sevan in the province of
Gegharkunik is one of the 34 villages in the Vartenis area that was
predominantly settled by Azeris during the soviet years. As of late
1988, the village of Shatvan has been repopulated by Armenian refugees
who have arrived from 33 different parts of Azerbaijan. The total
number of the current population is 834. The main concern is to
provide the basics for young families to help them settle down
permanently, and as such the village school is a major
priority. Currently it has 114 students with a staff of 20. The
building is in a very dangerous state. The roof is completely damaged
and parts of the floor on both levels are to be replaced. The
renovation of this building demands immediate attention.

The second project is in Nagorno Karabagh. There, LCO will continue
its commitment to the Regional Hospital of Shushi. This picturesque
town which had a population of 17,000 inhabitants before the war, is
now home to only 3000 people. While this is a huge building, it only
needs to cater to 3000-5000 people. In consultation with the chief
physician, Dr Vigen Khachadryan, and the Minister of health Zoya
Balayan, it was decided that only the East Wing of the hospital would
be restored and all the wards would be concentrated there. This
summer, it is expected that our volunteers will renovate the operating
ward.

As for our third site, we will continue our restoration work of the
houses in Kessab that represent typical Armenian architecture. Last
year, twenty-five LCO volunteers renovated a house that is destined to
become an Armenian ethnographic museum. Kessab is a small
Armenian-populated town in Syria, near the Mediterranean Sea. It dates
back to the Cilician Kingdom. The LCO has been holding campaigns in
Kessab for the last 14 years. For 2004, LCO will complete this
project. The campaign in Kessab is held only during the month of
August.

We have already started accepting volunteer applications for these
campaigns and invite volunteers to join us and take a month off this
summer to “Explore – Dream – Discover” Armenia. The effort is
voluntary, the results are far reaching! The deadline to apply for the
campaigns of July and August is May 21, 2004. You will be able to
download all application information and forms from our website or by
asking us to mail you a volunteer package. All applicants must be a
minimum of 18 years of age to be considered. We are also looking to
fill two site leader positions. These positions are open only to
returning LCO participants. For information about applying for a site
leader position, please contact the Projects Coordinator at
[email protected]. The deadline for these positions is April
30, 2004.

For more information about the Land and Culture Organization an dour
activities in the Aterpatakan region, Kessab, Armenia and Nagorno
Karabagh, please visit or contact us at
1-888-LCO-1555 or write to [email protected].

A1 Plus | 16:01:27 | 06-04-2004 | Politics |

SERJ SARGSSYAN’S BROTHER’S BODY-GUARDS BEAT JOURNALISTS

“Body-guards of Sashik Sargssyan, brother of Serj Sargssyan, were the main
provokers of yesterday meeting”, “National Unity” Party Chair Artashes
Geghamyan announced at the press conference in the party office.

According to him, the body-guards of other oligarchs were “just watchers”.
Mr Geghamyan has appealed to the Embassies in Armenia over the incidents
occurred in “Nairi” Cinema yesterday. In the appeal he accused “the most
intimate oligarchs of Armenian President” who have attacked journalists.

“All these are the logical continuation of Poghos Poghosyan’s murder by
Robert Kocharyan’s body-guards”, Geghamyan said in the letter to the
Embassies.

He announced that the Armenian Authorities merged with the criminal
elements. “We expect support of USA and Russia in the situations we have”,
Geghamyan said at the end of the letter.

He added that the arrests are senseless since Authorities arrest even those
who have held the flag of Armenia at the rallies.

—

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress