Armenian News

GUL FILES SUIT AGAINST TURKISH PARLIAMENTARIAN WHO CLAIMED

THAT HIS MOTHER IS OF ARMENIAN ORIGIN
PanARMENIAN.Net
23.12.2008 17:23 GMT+04:00

Turkey's President Abdullah Gul has filed a lawsuit against
Republican People's Party (CHP) deputy Canan Aritman, who claimed
that Gul's mother is of Armenian origin. "Aritman, who has political
motivations, caused doubts about the performance of the president,
who has non-political responsibilities," the petition states.

"The defendant's claim, which is based on racism and discrimination,
is a heavy assault on the client's personal and family values,
honor and reputation." The 1 YTL lawsuit petition submitted by the
president's lawyer, Omer Kucukozcan, refers to Aritman's claims.

The petition states that Gul stands at an equal distance from all
citizens in his current position and that in his previous duties as
a Deputy Foreign Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Prime Minister
and President, he expressed his ideas openly at the national and
international platforms on the topic and on Turkish-Armenian relations.

"My client's views have been distorted and it was suggested that he
has ethnic ties on his mother's side, as if he stands closer to a
part of society because of that," the petition states.

The petition also states that according to the news reports, CHP head
Deniz Baykal has been uneasy about Aritman's statements.

"It would be impossible to compensate for the damages that occurred
because of this issue; however, we demand a compensation of 1 YTL only
to identify the injustice," the petition states, Today's Zaman reports.

Last week, member of MHP, parliamentarian Canan Aritman "reminded" of
the Armenian origin of the President's mother. "Abdullah Gul should
be the president of the whole Turkish nation, not of his ethnic
origin. Investigate the ethnic origin of the president's mother,
and you will see," she said.

In response, President Gul announced that his mother's side, the
Satoglu family from Kayseri, and his father's side, the Gul family
also from Kayseri, are Muslim and Turkish, according to centuries of
written genealogy records.

"I respect the ethnic background, different beliefs and family ties of
all my citizens and see this as a reality and also the wealth of our
country with its imperial history. I also would like to emphasize
that all my citizens are equal to one another regardless of any
differences. No one has any superiority whatsoever over another
one. Everybody has the equal and same rights under the guarantee of
our Constitution," Gul said. "I am proud of our country, which has
reached this level of understanding."

ARMENIA, IRAN TO BUILD FUEL PIPELINE: MINISTER
Agence France Presse -- English
December 22, 2008 Monday 4:32 PM GMT

Construction will begin next year on a pipeline to deliver petrol
and diesel fuel from Iran to Armenia, Armenian Energy Minister Armen
Movsisian said Monday.

The 300-kilometre (185-mile) pipeline will run from the Iranian city
of Tabriz to the Armenian city of Eraskh, where a terminal is to be
built, Movsisian said at a press conference.

"Armenia will receive petrol and diesel fuel from the oil refinery
located in the Iranian city of Tabriz through the pipeline,
construction of which starts next spring," he said.

Movsisian said the pipeline would take two years to complete and each
country would pay half the 200-240 million dollar (145-170 million
euro) cost.

He said the project was part of efforts by Armenia to diversify its
energy supplies, in particular after the war in neighbouring Georgia
in August disrupted Russian supplies to Armenia.

"In order to guarantee the country's energy security we are moving
toward the diversification of energy supplies," he said.

Armenia and Iran last year inaugurated a 150-kilometre (95-mile)
pipeline intended to deliver 36 billion cubic metres (1.27 trillion
cubic feet) of gas from Iran to Armenia over 20 years. It has yet to
start operations.

Landlocked Armenia has sought closer links with Iran in recent years.

It suffers from an economic blockade imposed by neighbours Azerbaijan
and Turkey over the disputed Nagorny Karabakh region and its efforts to
gain recognition of Ottoman-era mass killings of Armenians as genocide.

CONGRESS OF WORLD AZERBAIJANIS STARTS COLLECTION OF

SIGNATURES TO CONDEMN ARMENIANS' ACTIONS
Today.Az
Dec 23 2008
Azerbaijan

The Congress of World Azerbaijanis has launched a campaign to collect
signatures against crimes, committed by Armenians against Azerbaijanis,
reports Day.Az with reference to the press service for the congress.

As is reported the aim of the campaign is to attract the attention
of the public to Armenians actions.

"Armenia was occupying the Azerbaijani lands step by step. Armenia
must apologize to the world community and Azerbaijan for its actions.

Moreover, it must recognize the occupation of Azerbaijani lands",
said in the statement.

It should be noted that the campaign will be conducted via Internet
and cover all regions of the world.

In turn, representative of the steering committee of the Congress of
World Azerbaijanis Samir Asadli said that all instructions have been
set for launching this campaign.

ARMENIA'S "THANK YOU" AFTER 20 YEARS FOR TURKEY'S HELP
www.worldbulletin.net
Dec 23 2008
Turkey

Sarkisyan sent an appreciation letter to Turkish President Abdullah
Gul for the 20th anniversary of Spitak earthquake, Anatolian news
agency reported.

Armania President Serj Sarkisyan thanked to Turkey and Turkish citizens
for their help after the 1988 earthquake in his country.

Sarkisyan sent an appreciation letter to Turkish President Abdullah
Gul for the 20th anniversary of Spitak earthquake, Anatolian news
agency reported.

Sarkisyan stated that all world paid attention to Armania's tragedy
after the earthquake and proved that "one's suffering is not just
about them but all".

He expressed his country´s gratitude to everyone who stood with them
during hard times, and added that Armanian citizens are grateful
for the help and support from Turkey and Turkish citizens after
the earthquake.

In his letter, Sarkisyan said: 'We are sure that humane actions
will always be remembered, they increase kindness and light the
world. Best Regards"

THE CAUCASUS: A BROKEN REGION
By Thomas de Waal
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Dec 23 2008
UK

Short-term interests continue to impede hopes of a broad transformation
of this dysfunctional region.

The Caucasus region is a small and troubled place. It should be a
common endeavour for its small and diverse nationalities in Georgia,
Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as the Russian North Caucasus to work
together to build an integrated region.

Unfortunately, no sense of common purpose is discernible: the sad
reality is, that with its tangle of closed borders and ceasefire lines,
the Caucasus more resembles a suicide pact.

Nowhere in the world can there be so many roadblocks. The two long
borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Russia and Georgia are
almost permanently closed. Only two neighbours - Azerbaijan and Georgia
- can be said to have a genuinely close relationship and even that
is based primarily on energy politics rather than common values and
does not translate into many tangible benefits for ordinary people.

Yet, given the chance, the ordinary folk of the Caucasus eagerly
take the opportunity to do business with one another. A tale of two
markets confirms this. The first was the one at Ergneti where, right
on the administrative border with South Ossetia, the busiest wholesale
market in the Caucasus used to flourish. The Ossetians brought untaxed
goods from Russia - from cigarettes to cars - to sell. The Georgians
mainly sold agricultural produce. Because it was unregulated, the new
Georgian government of President Mikheil Saakashvili argued that the
market was knocking a big hole in the state budget and had to be shut
down, which they duly did in June 2004.

The closure of the market was a justifiable step on legal grounds,
except in the words of former Georgian conflict resolution minister
Giorgy Khaindrava, "If Ergneti didn't exist it would have to be
invented." Ergneti was possibly the widest "confidence-building
measure" in the entire Caucasus region, with people of all
nationalities doing business. Arguably the day it closed was the day
the countdown to war in South Ossetia began.

On the Georgian-Armenian border, the Georgian village of
Sadakhlo used to be home to another astonishing spectacle: a mass
Armenian-Azerbaijani market on Georgian territory with virtually
no Georgians in sight. Azerbaijanis bought Armenian produce,
Armenians Azerbaijani goods that flooded the shops of Yerevan. Again,
governmental pressures have curtailed the market, although it has
not shut down entirely. Again, a magnificent example of inter-ethnic
cooperation has been suppressed.

What politics drives apart, common economic and security interests
should drive together. The South Caucasus is a delicate mechanism
in which the malfunctioning of one part affects what is going in
the others.

That became obvious during this August's war in Georgia. Azerbaijan's
prime revenue-earners, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Supsa
pipelines, were shut down. When the Grakali railway bridge in central
Georgia on August 16 was blown up, it also shut the only railway line
linking Armenia to the Black Sea coast, thereby cutting Armenia's
entire imports for a week and costing it at least half a billion
dollars in revenue.

This sad state of affairs is partly everyone's fault.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have adopted intransigent positions which
mean they have failed to resolve the biggest obstacle to peace and
prosperity in the Caucasus, the Nagorny Karabakh conflict. Georgia
has generally ignored its neighbours and Russia in its push
towards Euro-Atlantic integration. In the words of Georgian analyst
Archil Gegeshidze, one reason for Georgia's problems is that the
Saakashvili government unwisely "put all its eggs in the basket of
mobilising western support" and did not pay sufficient attention to
its neighbours.

Europeans and Americans, though often paying lip service to the
idea of regional integration in the Caucasus, have generally pursued
narrower goals. Europe's grand TRASECA project, a communication and
transport project linking the Caucasus to Europe and billed as a new
"Silk Road", has received less than 200 million euro of investment
since it was inaugurated in 1993 and its effects are negligible.

Instead, projects such as NATO expansion, energy security and the
claims of Armenian diasporas have all tended to divide Caucasian
policy into different segments. In Washington, it seems at times that
the Congress, the Pentagon and State Department all have different
policies, with a primary focus on, respectively, Armenia, Azerbaijan
and Georgia.

Moreover, several Washington strategists have suggested that Russia
could be "contained" in the Caucasus, overlooking the fact that the
region has figured in Russian minds and plans for two centuries and
that much of the Russian elite has family or childhood ties to places
that westerners barely know.

For good or ill, Russia still has a special role in the Caucasus. Its
own policies have done it no favours. Russia continues to see the
region in colonial terms, seeking to intimidate or control resources
rather than use the soft power of trade or - its biggest asset in the
region but a diminishing one - the Russian language, to help form a
new and friendly neighbourhood.

People-to-people ties are still in place, often despite the best
efforts of governments. Russians and Georgians are tied together
by innumerable ties of history, culture and business. Hundreds of
thousands of Georgians continue to work in Russia, despite the August
conflict. "[Russian and Georgians] leaders have tried to wreck a good
relationship between two peoples," said analyst Ivlian Khaindrava.

Previous Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze - who after all ran the
foreign ministry in Moscow in the perestroika years - understood this,
even if he was frequently unable to appease the harder-line elements
of the Russian elite when he had returned to Georgia as president.

In an interview with IWPR on December 3 in his residence outside
Tbilisi, Shevardnadze said - in a rebuke to his successor - that he
had always paid the Russians maximum respect. For example, Shevardnadze
said, when the decision was made in 2002 to invite American troops to
Georgia as part of the ground-breaking "Train and Equip" programme, he
had been careful to inform President Vladimir Putin in advance. Putin
went on the record to say that an American troop presence was "no
tragedy" for Russia.

"I always tried to emphasise that Russia for us is not a secondary
country, that it is a great neighbour with big military and economic
potential," said Shevardnadze.

Conflict gives birth to black-and-white thinking, the view that if your
opponent is suffering that is a good thinking. In the current crisis,
says Ivlian Khaindrava, "many in Georgia are just keeping quiet and
waiting for the situation in Russia to deteriorate, the oil price to
go down, tensions in the North Caucasus to escalate."

That approach, he believes, could be a disaster for Georgia, as
an economic downturn in Russia will hurt Georgian migrants and the
families back home they send remittances to, while new violence in
the North Caucasus could spill over into Georgia.

This kind of zero-sum thinking is most acute between Armenians and
Azerbaijanis, many of whom seem content to see their country suffer
so long as the other side in the Nagorny Karabakh conflict is feeling
pain too.

It is hard for locals to transcend these divisions. It is up to
outsiders to give the big picture and the broad vision of how the
Caucasus could begin to function more harmoniously, as a political and
economic entity rather than merely a dysfunctional geographical region.

Ultimately, it seems likely that only one big international
organisation - the European Union - has the transformative power to
treat these countries as a single region and promise them benefits
that make it worthwhile for them to overcome bad habits. The Balkans
provides good proof of it.

Sadly, the signs are that the EU is still too distant and too
inward-looking to care sufficiently about the Caucasus. A positive
development is that European monitors are now on the ground in
Georgia. But the reason that they are there is a tragic one and let
us hope they become the advance guard of a much broader engagement -
not just confirmation for Europeans that this beautiful mountainous
region is a permanent headache that can never be cured.

Thomas de Waal is IWPR's outgoing Caucasus Editor. This is the last
edition of Caucasus Reporting Service he has edited, after almost
seven years with IWPR.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views
of IWPR.


ARMENIA: GOVERNMENT GEARS UP FOR POSSIBLE DEAL

WITH AZERBAIJAN ON KARABAKH
Emil Danielyan
EurasiaNet
Dec 23 2008
NY

With international efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
gaining fresh momentum, Armenia's leadership appears to be preparing
ground for a possible breakthrough in its long-running negotiations
with Azerbaijan. It has pushed through parliament an amendment paving
the way for a nationwide referendum on the issue reportedly promised
by President Serzh Sargsyan.

The move came amid increasingly vocal domestic opposition to a
framework Armenian-Azerbaijani peace accord proposed by international
mediators. The Sargsyan administration faces an uphill battle in
overcoming opposition from nationalist groups in and outside the
Armenian government as well, as the ethnic Armenian leadership of
Nagorno-Karabakh.

The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan met in Helsinki
on December 3 for more talks on the basic principles of a Karabakh
settlement proposed by a team of US, Russian and French mediators
co-chairing the OSCE's so-called Minsk Group. In a joint statement
issued the next day, Foreign Ministers Sergei Lavrov of Russia and
Bernard Kouchner of France and US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel
Fried urged the conflicting parties to finalize those principles
"in coming months."

They also emphasized the "positive momentum" which they said was
established by Sargsyan and Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev during
their most recent meeting -- hosted by Russia's Dmitry Medvedev outside
Moscow on November 2. Aliyev and Sargsyan issued a joint declaration
there pledging to "intensify further steps in the negotiating
process." The mediators hope that they will meet again soon to close
remaining gaps. Aides to the two presidents have said that the next
Armenian-Azerbaijani summit would likely take place early next year.

Bernard Fassier, France's chief Nagorno-Karabakh negotiator, told RFERL
on December 9 that Lavrov, Kouchner and Fried presented to Baku and
Yerevan a "technical document" that puts a settlement within reach
by next summer. The chief stumbling blocks to date have centered on
details of a proposed referendum on self-determination in Karabakh,
and a timetable for the liberation of at least six of the seven
Azerbaijani districts around the disputed enclave that were fully or
partly occupied by Armenian forces during the 1991-1994 war.

Meeting with leaders of nearly 50 Armenian political parties behind
the closed doors on November 19, Sargsyan reportedly indicated that an
Armenian-Azerbaijani peace accord is still not imminent. According to
some participants of that meeting, he also promised to put a possible
peace deal to a popular vote.

Two weeks later, Armenia's parliament passed a government-drafted
amendment to an Armenian law on referendums that enables the government
to hold non-binding plebiscites on any policy issue. Prior to passage
of the amendment, parliament and the president had responsibility
for calling referendums, and authorities were obliged to abide by
their results.

Opposition politicians and independent observers see a direct
link between the adopted amendment and the Karabakh peace
process. Government officials and pro-presidential MPs have not ruled
out of the conduct of a Karabakh-related referendum in Armenia in
the coming months.

A senior member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF,
also known as the Dashnak Party), a nationalist party represented
in Sargsyan's coalition government, asserted at a December 9 news
conference that the signing of a framework agreement on Karabakh in
early 2009 is "not unlikely." Giro Manoyan also reaffirmed the ARF's
opposition to the mediators' existing peace proposals that seem to
allow for continued Armenian control over Karabakh. "What we wanted in
1988 (at the start of a popular movement for Karabakh's unification
with Armenia) can not be a basis for today because a lot has changed
since then," he said. "Azerbaijan is chiefly responsible for that and
it must pay a price." Manoyan and many other nationalists generally
would no longer be satisfied with the formalization of Karabakh's
separation from Azerbaijan. Now, they also want Armenia to keep much
of what is now occupied Azerbaijani territory.

Another ARF leader, deputy parliamentary speaker Hrayr Karapetian,
insisted that the Armenian side should be happy with the Karabakh
status quo and that Azerbaijan will not attempt to win back its lost
territories by force in the foreseeable future. "If this situation
continues for 10 or 20 years, we will still be in a winning position,"
Karapetian told the Yerevan newspaper Pakagits in an interview
published on December 18.

Hard-line opposition groups, though, are even more vocal in
opposing any territorial concessions to Azerbaijan. Like the
ARF, they believe that the occupied Azerbaijani districts are so
vital for Armenia's security that they must not be traded even for
international recognition of Karabakh's secession from Azerbaijan. As
talk of a Karabakh breakthrough intensified in late October, a group
of opposition politicians and intellectuals launched a new movement
called Miatsum (Unification) to campaign against the return of what
they call "liberated territories."

"If we cede any of those lands, we will disrupt the security system
that has served us well for the past 15 years and will make another war
inevitable," Zaruhi Postanjian, a Miatsum leader and parliament deputy
from the opposition Heritage party, told EurasiaNet. "Even if the
international community recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh's independence."

Significantly, government officials in Karabakh seem to share this
view, raising more questions about Yerevan's ability and willingness to
implement the peace formula currently on the table. Armenian Foreign
Minister Eduard Nalbandian visited the Karabakh capital Stepanakert
on December 19 to meet with the self-proclaimed republic's president,
Bako Sahakian. An Armenian Foreign Ministry statement said Nalbandian
briefed Sahakian on details of the Helsinki talks and discussed with
the Karabakh leader other "recent developments" in the negotiating
process. Sahakian's office also gave few details of the talks, saying
only that the two men discussed "the current phase of the Karabakh
conflict resolution." Incidentally, President Sargsyan twice traveled
to Karabakh shortly before and after his last encounter with Aliyev.

The secretary of Sargsyan's National Security Council, Artur
Baghdasarian, has been a rare conciliatory voice in the Armenian public
discourse on Karabakh dominated by outspoken nationalist figures. In a
December 19 interview with the newspaper Iravunk de facto, Baghdasarian
again made a case for mutual compromise with Azerbaijan, saying
that it would give Armenia "unique opportunities for political and
economic development." He said the Armenian leadership will not
accept any agreement that stops short of legitimizing Karabakh's
independence or unification with Armenia and giving the Karabakh
Armenians "international security guarantees."

Baghdasarian, whose Country of Law Party is also a junior partner in
Armenia's ruling coalition, further confirmed Sargsyan's reported
referendum pledge. "God willing, we will arrive at a mutually
acceptable variant of settlement that the authorities will present
to the people's judgment," he said.

Editor's Note: Emil Danielyan is a Yerevan-based journalist and
political analyst.

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