Armenian News‏

Asbarez

OSKANIAN SAYS ARMENIA-TURKEY RELATIONS MAY GET WORSE
May 21st, 2009

YEREVAN-Armenia's longtime former Foreign Minister, Vartan Oskanian,
has said Turkey and Armenia will not be able to make progress in their
efforts to normalize relations if Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan continues to bring the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to the table,
the Turkish Today's Zaman newspaper reported on Thursday.

Oskanian's remarks came during a discussion with a group of Turkish
journalists who are in Yerevan this week participating in the
International Hrant Dink Foundation's Turkey-Armenia Journalist
Dialogue Project.

Speaking to the journalists, Oskanian warned that Ankara could make
relations with Armenia even worse if Turkish officials continue to
politicize the negotiations.

"The moment we leave Karabakh out, we can improve Turkish-Armenian
relations. If we bring Karabakh in, I really don't see this
happening. Karabakh is a separate issue," Oskanian was quoted by Zaman
as saying. "My conviction is that if Turkey normalizes its relations
with Armenia first, then the Karabakh solution will be much easier."

Oskanian said the Turkish Prime Minister began bringing the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to the forefront of Turkey's negotiations
with Armenia three months ago.

"Until that time, I was really hoping that there was a change of
policy on the part of Turkey and we would get results," he said.

Visiting Baku last week, Erdogan reaffirmed his government's intention
to link the two issues. "Occupation of Karabakh is the cause here
and closing of the border is the effect. It is impossible for us to
open the border unless that occupation ends," he told a joint press
conference in Baku with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev.

Turkey, a non-actor in the Karabakh conflict, has been seeking to boost
its role in the peace process by conditioning its own negotiations
with Armenia to a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict being
mediated by the US, France and Russia through the OSCE Minsk Group.

The French co-chair of the group, Bernard Fassier, on Monday warned
Ankara to drop efforts to link the two unrelated issues. He said
that linking the Karabakh peace process with the normalization of
Armenia-Turkish relations can jeopardize the new momentum in the
Karabakh talks.

Armenia's Government has also criticized Erdogan for the statements,
saying they could hamper both processes.

Oskanian reiterated those warnings, stressing also that Erdogan's
threats to Armenians deport Armenians working in Turkey were also
not helpful to fence-mending efforts between the two countries.

"I am beginning to be concerned that not only will Turkish-Armenian
relations not improve, but they may even get worse," said Oskanian,
who founded the Yerevan-based Civilitas Foundation late last year to
advocate peace and stability in the Caucasus.

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE BOOK IN TURKISH
Panorama.am
17:27 19/05/2009

"Armenian Genocide and Turkish war trials" by famous Armenia historian
and genocide professor Vahagn Dadryan has been translated into Turkish
by the efforts of the printing-house director of Turkish University of
America, the writer told the students of the Yerevan State University.

"This is an important and great event. The book is published in Turkish
and is being spread in different Turkish cities. This is unbelievable
for me that the Turkish governments trying to refuse the Armenian
Genocide suddenly publish the book by the initiative of the Turkish
University," the writer said.

The book will be translated into English as well. Note that Vahagn
Dadryan has been honored President's Prize for his investment in
making the Armenian Genocide recognized and condemned in the world.

325 LARGEST ORGANIZATIONS IN ARMENIA POST 5.4% STAFF

REDUCTION IN MARCH 2009
/ARKA/
May 21, 2009
YEREVAN

Armenia posted a 5.4% year-on-year staff reduction in March 2009,
with 99,513 employees being listed in the roll of the local leading
companies.

According to the Analysis of the March 2009 monitoring of Armenia's
major taxpayers (available on the RA State Revenue Committee's
website), the reason for job cuts is the ongoing global financial
crisis.

Despite the global recession, wage allocations rose 4.6% to 13bln
drams in Armenia in late march. The country saw a 3.6% quarterly
staff reduction, with 99,842 employees being recorded in the reporting
period.

Quarterly wage allocations rose 5.4% to 38.1bln drams. ($1 - 372.82
drams)

GERMAN UNIVERSITY OF ARMENIA TO BE OPENED IN YEREVAN
ArmInfo
2009-05-22 19:33:00

ArmInfo. German University of Armenia (GUA) will be officially
inaugurated in Yerevan July 4.

Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University Edward
Saroyan says that GUA was established as a legal organization
in 2005 and has conducted different training courses and research
projects since then. It has established cooperation with many German
univesities: Kassel University, CVJM, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg,
etc. Presently, GUA is negotiating with the Free University of Berlin
and Humboldt State University. With some of the universities GUA has
concluded dual magistracy diploma agreements.

Over 30 professors from Germany have already expressed wish to give
lectures at GUA.

This year GUA will announce admission to a European behavior
magistracy course covering international relations and politics,
innovative economics, culture, general management. The university
will also offer Modular Architecture, Spiritual Theology course as
well as intensive German language courses.

Saroyan says that many German professors will give their lectures in
English. So, excellent German will not be a must at the initial stage.

GUA will also have different reseach institutes where students and
professors will be able to carry out practical research. "As a result
our graduates will be competitive in both Armenia and Europe. We have
already established an Institute of Inter-religious and Inter-Cultural
Communications, an Institute of Practical Psychology, an Institute of
East-West Studies. The tuition of one year will be 600,000 AMD. But
the first students will enjoy discount," says Saroyan.

To note, Armenia already has American University, French University,
Armenian-Russian (Slavonic) University and European Regional Academy
of the Caucasus (ERIICTA).

Oneworld Multimedia

Eurovision opens new wounds in the Caucasus
22.05.2009 by Onnik Krikorian

Already notorious more for its political block voting than even its
kitsch and glitzy musical entries, nothing could have prepared anyone
for the controversy surrounding the three countries of the South
Caucasus in this year's Eurovision Song Contest. In February, the
international song contest was already off to a bad start when Georgia,
still fuming over the August 2008 war with Russia, decided to enter a
retro disco track into the competition scheduled to be held in Moscow.

The song, `We Don't Wanna Put In' by Stefane and 3G, mocked the Russian
prime minister and was naturally considered unsuitable for the contest.
Eurovision's organizers requested that the lyrics be changed, but
Georgia refused. Besides, the country had initially considered
boycotting the competition and the song had anyway enjoyed considerable
international media exposure. Georgia instead decided to stage its own
`alternative' music festival which was held concurrently in Tbilisi last
week.

However, the first real attempt to politically exploit this year's
competition had actually come in June 2008 when rumors started to spread
that internationally renowned American-Armenian metal band System of a
Down (SOAD) would enter the competition for Armenia. The band's front
man, Serj Tankian, was quoted as saying SOAD would consider doing so if
it could perform a song written about the 1915 massacre and deportation
of 1.5 million Armenians living in the then Ottoman Empire.

A campaign was launched on social networking site Facebook to support
the band's apparent Eurovision bid, and popular contest web sites even
picked up on the rumors. Armenian nationalist blogs selectively quoted a
French journalist as confirming SOAD's entry as late as December last
year while Turkish parliamentarian Akif Ekici believed the hype so much
that he even tabled a question on the matter to Turkey's prime minister.
By January 2009, however, it became apparent that the rumors were untrue.

The news came as a huge disappointment for many in Armenia as well as
its large Diaspora, but rather than focus on who might instead represent
the country, attention was turned towards finding a suitable scapegoat
to blame.

With centuries of ethnic rivalry and hostility slow to die out in the
region, it was obvious where one could be found. Distorting the actual
chronology of events, prominent nationalists such as American-Armenian
propagandist Harut Sassounian were quick to point the finger at Turkey,
accusing it of manufacturing the SOAD rumors.

A few weeks later, when the actual Armenian Eurovision entry was decided
in a televised national competition, all attention turned to how another
set of rivalries in the South Caucasus might play out.

Although Azerbaijan didn't enter Eurovision until last year, it has
nonetheless been highly critical of Armenian entries in the past. In
2006, for example, a complaint was lodged against Armenia's entry -
Andre, a young singer hailing from Nagorno Karabakh. Yerevan and Baku
are still technically at war over the disputed territory situated within
the borders of Azerbaijan. Other years have also been accompanied by
accusations that Armenia has `stolen' Azeri melodies, and many expected
the same to be true this year. Surprisingly, however, it wasn't.

Instead, Eurovision had appeared to be devoid of the tit-for-tat
accusations of the type defining earlier competitions. That is, until
the first semi-final held last week in Moscow when Azerbaijan discovered
that the presentation video for the Armenian entry included images of a
statue situated in Nagorno Karabakh. After complaining to the event
organizers, the image of the statue - considered to be the symbol of the
territory and also used on its coat of arms - was reluctantly removed.
However, Armenia's Public TV nonetheless plotted to display the image
live on air during the final itself.

In an elaborate plan to have its presenter - last year's entry, Sirusho
- stand in front of a video image of the monument displayed on a large
LCD screen in Yerevan's Republic Square, the singer also had a
photograph of the statue stuck to the back of the clipboard used to read
out votes cast by the Armenian public. The singer, recently engaged to
the son of former Armenian and Nagorno Karabakh President Robert
Kocharian, gleefully performed her task and local bloggers happily
documented much of the preparations for the provocation online.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan had also decided to retaliate against its
erstwhile foe in the South Caucasus by not displaying the telephone
number for viewers to vote for Armenia's entry. True, few would probably
have done so anyway, but Armenia did at least award one point to
Azerbaijan. Even so, ethnic rivalry between the two competing nations
was of course more noticeable than any symbolic gesture, with bloggers
in Baku reporting that not only was the sound turned down for Armenia's
entry in some local nightspots, but jeering occurred in at least one bar.

For most viewers outside of the two countries, however, the latest shots
fired in the war between Yerevan and Baku over Nagorno Karabakh hardly
rang out, although some did pick up on Armenia's blatant disregard of
the earlier Eurovision ruling about the statue. Therefore, perhaps in an
attempt to save face, nationalist bloggers in the country soon started
to accuse Azerbaijan's act, Aysel and Arash, of displaying an image of a
monument in Iran, even going so far as to accuse Baku of making
territorial claims on its southern neighbor.

The station also made an official complaint against Azerbaijan for its
removal of the telephone number necessary for viewers to vote for
Armenia's entry, although that would hardly have made much of a
difference. When all the votes had been tallied from the 42 countries
competing from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) on Saturday night,
Azerbaijan finished third with 207 points, Armenia came in tenth with
just 92, and Norway won the competition far ahead of the crowd with 387.

Predictably, however, the `battle' did not end when the competition did,
with Aysel and Arash returning to Baku on a private jet named `Karabakh'
while many in Armenia and its Diaspora applauded the decision of Public
TV to disobey Eurovision's earlier ruling about the statue. And with one
local newspapers in Yerevan now alleging that Armenia's Eurovision jury
had been `pressured' into awarding a full 12 points to Russia, the
controversy over this year's Eurovision certainly looks set to continue.

Yet, among the nationalist bickering to be heard from both sides, there
are at least some voices of reason struggling to be heard. `Perhaps it's
time to switch from this kindergarten approach to real conflict
resolution?' asked one young Azeri rhetorically on her blog. `Our kids
need fairy stories, not war tales - love, not hatred. Our kids deserve
the peaceful happiness we never had.'

ARMENIA CONTRIBUTES $49 THOUSAND TO UN BUDGET
/PanARMENIAN.Net/
22.05.2009 12:05 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The United Nations regular budget for 2008-2009
is facing a USD 1.5 billion gap, most of which is caused by nine
countries, including the United States, Britain, China and Germany,
in arrears, a top official with the world body said on Friday.

Angela Kane, Under-Secretary-General for Management, told a press
conference that the countries in arrears - and accounting for more
than 90 per cent of the budget gap as of May 7 - are Brazil, China,
Germany, Iran, Mexico, Norway, Republic of Korea, the United Kingdom
and the United States.

The UN Controller's office listed the arrears, as of May 7, as: USD
993 million (US), USD 121 million (UK), USD 104 million (Germany),
USD 53 million (South Korea), USD 33 million (China), USD 21 million
(Brazil), USD 19 million (Norway), USD 13 million (Iran) and USD 13
million (Mexico).

Russia has contributed USD 29 million, Georgia USD 73 thousand,
Armenia USD 49 thousand, Ukraine USD 1 million.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~