Month: April 2010

EU ‘Pleased’ With Armenian Caution On Turkey

Belgium — EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Catherine Ashton holds a news conference after a EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, 22Mar2010

27.04.2010

The European Union on Tuesday welcomed Armenia’s decision not to walk away from its fence-mending agreements with Turkey, while expressing concern about “the loss of momentum in this process.”

The EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Catherine Ashton, also reaffirmed through a spokesperson the bloc’s support for an unconditional and speedy ratification of the Turkish-Armenian protocols sought by Yerevan.

“The High Representative is pleased to note that Armenia remains committed to pursue the process of normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations but at the same time expresses concern about the loss of momentum in this process,” the unnamed spokesperson said in a statement circulated by the EU delegation in Yerevan.

“The EU reiterates its call to both countries to continue their dialogue and remain committed to the process of normalization without preconditions and in a reasonable timeframe,” said the statement.

Germany, a key EU member state, also praised President Serzh Sarkisian for not formally ending the normalization process, in a separate statement released by its ambassador in Yerevan, Hans-Jochen Schmidt. “We greatly welcome that,” said Schmidt.

France, another EU heavyweight, as well as the United States reacted to Sarkisian’s move in a similar fashion late last week. “We applaud President Sarkisian’s decision to continue to work towards a vision of peace, stability, and reconciliation,” said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon.

Both the U.S. and the EU have essentially shared Yerevan’s view that Armenia and Turkey should normalize relations regardless of decisive progress in international efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Ankara regards such progress as a necessary condition for Turkish ratification of the protocols.

“The High Representative believes that the full normalization of bilateral relations between Armenia and Turkey will contribute to security, stability and cooperation in the Southern Caucasus,” read the EU statement. “The EU will continue to provide its political and technical support to this process and stands ready to help implementing the steps agreed between the two countries.”

https://www.azatutyun.am/a/2026197.html

April 27, 2010
Turkey Should Withdraw From The Territories And Return Them To Armenia: Jirinov
Turkey Should Withdraw From The Territories And Return Them To Armenia:
Jirinovski
26/04/2010

“We will liberate Western Armenia and return to Armenia,” said Vladimir
Jirinovski, vice-president of the State Duma and the president of
the Liberal Democrat Party, according to Echo of Moscow.

“Armenians, I address to you. We will liberate Western Armenia
and return to Armenia. Turkey should withdraw from the occupied
territories; we should make it do so. North-eastern Turkey belongs
to Armenia, the south-eastern Turkey – to Kurdistan. Turkey has not
existed in this territory, here was ancient Armenian state. I declare
openly: Turkey should withdraw from the territories and return them
to Armenia and you should back the return of Crimea to Russia,” V.
Jirinovski said.

——————————————————-

YAHUDI KOKENLI CIKDI ……………….

Vladimir Jirinovski (Rusça: Влади́мир Во́льфович Жирино́вский Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovskiy, doğum adı: Vladimir Volfovich Eidelshtein Эйдельште́йн), (d. 25 Nisan 1946), Rus Liberal Demokratik Partisi’nin kurucusu ve lideri (LDPR), Duma Meclisi ve Avrupa Parlamentosu üyesidir.

vladimir jirinovski
1. neo-karayüz ırkçı şahsiyet.
2. aşırı milliyetçi liberal demokrat partisi lideri vladimir jirinovski tam bir türk düşmanıdır.kafası eserse arada bi türkiye aleyhine atıp tutar.zamanında türkiyeye’de gelmişti ama şimdi gelemiyo
3. nasyonal sosyalist rus liberal dEmokrat partisi’nin lideri.
  sscb’nin yıkılmasından bu tarafa her devlet başkanlığı seçimlerinde aday olur ve seçilemez. yıllar önceki başkanlık seçimlerindeki propagandasında, iktidar olması halinde 25 milyon insanı öldüreceğini ve rusya’da istikrarı sağlayacağını belirtiyordu. sık sık parlamento oturumlarında sağa sola bardak içerisindeki suyu fırlatır. her dem alkollü bir izlenim verir. bir de, çok iyi seviyede türkçe bilir bu adam.
April 27, 2010
Noah’s Ark ‘discovered’ 4,800 years on… 4,000m up a mountain in Turkey

According to tradition, Noah’s Ark set sail, carrying his family and pairs of the world’s animals to save them from the great deluge.

Now, 4,800 years on, a group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers claim to have found the vessel’s remains – 4,000 metres up a mountain in Turkey.

The explorers said specimen samples taken from the structure on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey were proven to date from the time the boat was said to be afloat after undergoing carbon testing.

The team made the announcement of their find yesterday (April 26) – the same day the bible says the flood waters abated and the ark came to rest.

Yeung Wing-cheung, a Hong Kong documentary filmmaker and member of the 15-strong team from Noah’s Ark Ministries International, said: ‘It’s not 100 per cent that it is Noah’s Ark but we think it is 99.9 per cent that this is it.’

He said the structure had several compartments, some with wooden beams, which were believed to house animals.

The group of evangelical archaeologists ruled out an established human settlement on the grounds that one had never been found above 3500m in the vicinity.

Local Turkish officials will ask the central government in Ankara to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status so the site can be protected and pave the way for a major archaeological dig.

The biblical story says God decided to flood the earth after seeing how corrupt it had become, and told Noah to build an ark and fill it with two of every animal species.

After the flood waters receded, the Bible says, the ark came to rest on a mountain.

Many believe that Mount Ararat, the highest point in the region, is where the ark and her inhabitants came aground.

The group of evangelical archaeologists ruled out an established human settlement on the grounds that one had never been found above 3500m in the vicinity.

Local Turkish officials will ask the central government in Ankara to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status so the site can be protected and pave the way for a major archaeological dig.

The biblical story says God decided to flood the earth after seeing how corrupt it had become, and told Noah to build an ark and fill it with two of every animal species.

After the flood waters receded, the Bible says, the ark came to rest on a mountain.

Many believe that Mount Ararat, the highest point in the region, is where the ark and her inhabitants came aground.

This shows racks found on a wall inside a compartment of a structure found on Mount Ararat, where the Bible says the Ark came to rest

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1269165/Noahs-Ark-discovered-4-800-years–4-000m-mountain-Turkey.html?ito=feeds-newsxml#ixzz0mKPk6va9

April 27, 2010
Students unite in campaign for better bus service

Student Unions for three colleges join in public transport appeal

Students from three major higher education establishments in Leeds are joining together for a major campaign to fight for better public transport.

Student Unions for the University of Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan Universityand Leeds Trinity University College in Horsforth are uniting under the banner of Leeds Student Bus Service Campaign in a bid to improve bus reliability, increased frequency of buses and fairer pricing.

Between them, the unions represent almost 100,000 students in Leeds. Protest plans are only at an early stage, but student bodies could unite to boycott buses by organising walking and cycling events.

A website – www.leedsstudentbuscampaign.com – has been launched where students can complain about late buses and sign a petition calling for improvements. The campaign also has a page on Facebook.

Hannah Greenslade, community officer at Leeds University Union, said:

“We put a lot of money into the buses in Leeds, it would be quite effective if we were to withdraw that custom in some way.

“We’re hoping to get support from outside the student body as well – we’re aware that there is a lot of feeling among local residents about the frequency and reliability of services.

“Too often buses are late or simply don’t show up at all. It would be better if services ran on a regular basis like every 10 minutes or so, instead of giving specific times

“The 97 bus, for example, is the only bus that stops at Leeds Trinity and other parts of the local community – yet at peak times, there is one bus every 20 minutes, which is often full.”

Greenslade is also calling for fairer pricing for all Leeds students.

She added: “The Green Zone buss pass scheme does little to help students as those that travel by bus most often are those that live outside it. Termly and monthly passes are expensive and do not allow students to receive discounts if just making occasional journeys.

“We are calling for a universal student discount which applies to all university and college students throughout the year.”

Greenslade said she’d recently had a meeting with bus operators First Group which runs the majority of buses in Leeds, which she claimed had seen the company fail to move on any of the issues.

A spokesman for First said:

“First provides a high-quality, dedicated, bus service for students in Leeds, especially in terms of cost and frequency.

“Cost – we have a number of specially discounted tickets for students to use on our services to ensure they get good value for money.

“Frequency – Many of our routes used by students have dedicated 10 minute frequencies allowing students quick and easy access into the city.

“We will listen to the concerns of the students unions, as we have done so in the past, and will try and work out ways we can address some of these concerns.”

Metro, which works on behalf of West Yorkshire bus and rail passengers, said today that the work it is doing to develop a Quality Contract schemefor West Yorkshire’s buses would address the issues being raised by the Leeds students.

By bringing bus services under a London-style franchising system where operators bid for the right to run services, Metro says it would be able to set standards in terms of fares, frequency and reliability of services. This arrangement would also end the current confusion over different operators’ tickets by enabling Metro to introduce a flexible ticketing system which could be used on all the county’s bus and train services.

What do you think? Are buses unreliable and overpriced? Have your say in the comments section below.

The Guardian

April 27, 2010
Frozen Protocols… And Warmed Over Obama Statement

Two developments on Armenian-Turkish issues spilled a lot of ink last week. Neither one was significant, but assumed significance because of extensive international media coverage.

On April 22, exactly a year after the release of the roadmap, ostensibly to normalize Armenia-Turkey relations, and six months after the infamous Protocols were signed by the two countries with great fanfare, Pres. Serzh Sargsyan announced their suspension.

There was actually nothing new in this announcement. It has been crystal clear for months that Turkey’s leaders never intended to ratify the Protocols. They simply wanted to exploit them in order to extract further concessions from Armenia. Turks repeatedly announced that unless Armenia turned over Karabagh (Artsakh) to Azerbaijan, the Turkish Parliament would not ratify the Protocols. As time went by, Turkey added more inane demands, such as reversal of the Armenian Constitutional Court’s decision, and withdrawal of genocide resolutions from Parliaments of other countries. Since Armenia had repeatedly announced that it would not be the first to ratify the Protocols, the accords were already frozen for months, if not stillborn.

Even though some may view Pres. Sargsyan’s decision as a bold move, it would have been far more preferable for him to withdraw his country’s signature from the Protocols, since they were dead in the water anyway. He could have easily blamed their collapse on Turkey’s intransigence. He did acknowledge in his last week’s public announcement that he decided to suspend the Protocols, after Russia, France and the United States asked him not to abandon them completely.

Now that Armenia has blinked first, Turkey is blaming it for causing the collapse of the Protocols. Armenia has thus helped Turkey to wiggle its way out of the intense international pressure it was subjected to in recent months for its failure to ratify them.

Moreover, as long as the Protocols are not completely discarded, Turkey will continue to exploit them by cleverly claiming that it is still committed to their ratification under the “right” conditions, and will use them as a viable tool to defeat all initiatives by third countries on the Armenian Genocide.

Regrettably, Turkey is not the only country exploiting the Protocols. Pres. Obama, after pressuring Armenia not to reject the Protocols, dodged the term “Armenian Genocide” once again in his annual statement. He used as an excuse the non-existent “dialogue among Turks and Armenians.”

Just as he had done last year, Pres. Obama substituted the term “Meds Yeghern” [Great Calamity] for the Armenian Genocide and used the same worn out euphemisms and shameful word games for which, as a Senator and presidential candidate, he had condemned Pres. George W. Bush.

The overwhelming majority of Armenian-Americans, who had supported Obama’s candidacy and trusted him, now feel disillusioned and deceived. He ran his campaign on the promise of change, only to adopt the same immoral position of his predecessors, even though he keeps saying that he has not changed his mind regarding his pledge to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide!

In a column I wrote last year after Pres. Obama first broke his campaign promise on the Armenian Genocide, I stated that Armenian-Americans do not need to beg him to acknowledge the Genocide. Thirty years ago, Pres. Reagan issued a Presidential Proclamation referring to the Armenian Genocide. Therefore, Armenian-Americans see no special advantage in a repeat statement by Pres. Obama. By not keeping his word, however, Pres. Obama succeeded in undermining his own reputation and credibility with the American people and world public opinion.

It is simply mind-boggling that the President of the United States would go out of his way to issue a statement that would alienate the very people he is trying to accommodate.

Just imagine what the outcry would be had Pres. Obama referred to the Holocaust as a massacre or a tragic event. Yet, this is exactly what he has done on the Armenian Genocide by using a series of euphemisms in his April 24 statement: “Dark past,” “Dark moment in history,” “painful history.” “awful events of 1915,” ” a devastating chapter,” “one of the worst atrocities of the 20^th century,” “murder,” and “terrible events.” Pres. Obama’s aides could have spent their time more usefully by reading a history book rather than a dictionary of synonyms.

The only new idea in Pres. Obama’s April 24, 2010 statement is the following brief sentence: “I salute the Turks who saved Armenians in 1915.” This is a commendable notion which unfortunately becomes devoid of any meaning, in the absence of who or what exactly these Armenians were saved from!

We all hope that the solemn commemorations next April 24 would not be tarnished either by the Protocols (frozen or thawed) or by Pres. Obama’s offensive statement!

April 27, 2010
Obama Again Avoids ‘G-Word’ In Armenian Remembrance Message

U.S. — US President Barack Obama speaks about reforming Wall Street and the financial reform bill in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York, 22Apr2010

24.04.2010

Emil Danielyan

Backtracking on a campaign pledge, U.S. President Barack Obama on Saturday again declined to describe the 1915 massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as genocide as he honored the victims of “one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.” (UPDATED)

As was the case in April 2009, Obama used instead the Armenian phrase Meds Yeghern, or Great Calamity, to mark the 95th anniversary of the start of the mass killings and deportations. “In that dark moment of history, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire,” he said. “Today is a day to reflect upon and draw lessons from these terrible events.”

“The Meds Yeghern is a devastating chapter in the history of the Armenian people, and we must keep its memory alive in honor of those who were murdered and so that we do not repeat the grave mistakes of the past,” he added.

Obama at the same time again made clear that he stands by his statements on the subject issued during the 2008 U.S. presidential race. “I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed,” he said.

In a January 2008 statement to the Armenian community in the United States, Obama, then a presidential candidate, called the Armenian genocide “a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.” “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that president,” he said at the time.

Obama backpedaled on that pledge after taking office, anxious not to antagonize Turkey, a key U.S. ally. In his April 2009 statement on Armenian Remembrance Day, Obama implicitly cited the need not to undermine the U.S.-backed rapprochement between Armenia and Turkey. The process culminated in the signing of Turkish-Armenian normalization agreements in Zurich last October.

Obama’s latest message contains no explicit references to the normalization process that has stalled because of Ankara’s refusal to unconditionally normalize ties with Yerevan. It only voices support for continued historical dialogue between Armenian and Turkish societies.

“I salute the Turks who saved Armenians in 1915 and am encouraged by the dialogue among Turks and Armenians, and within Turkey itself, regarding this painful history,” Obama said. “Together, the Turkish and Armenian people will be stronger as they acknowledge their common history and recognize their common humanity.”

The current and previous U.S. administrations have strongly encouraged and even sponsored Turkish-Armenian contacts at various levels. The U.S. State Department was, for example, behind the establishment in 2001 of the non-governmental Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC).

TARC called for the unconditional normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations before being disbanded in 2004. It is also famous for commissioning a study on the events of 1915 from the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ).

In a 2003 report, the ICTJ concluded that the Armenian massacres “include all of the elements of the crime of genocide” as defined by a 1948 United Nations convention. Former U.S. President George W. Bush repeatedly cited the ICTJ study in his April 24 statements.

U.S. — President Barack Obama (L) greets Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC, 12Apr2010

Obama on Saturday also paid tribute to the “remarkable spirit” of the Armenian people. “The indomitable spirit of the Armenian people is a lasting triumph over those who set out to destroy them,” he said. “Many Armenians came to the United States as survivors of the horrors of 1915. Over the generations Americans of Armenian descent have richened our communities, spurred our economy, and strengthened our democracy.”

These words will hardly placate influential Armenian-American advocacy groups that had strongly backed Obama’s presidential bid and now deplore his reluctance to use the word “genocide.” They have also criticized the Obama administration for opposing a congressional draft resolution affirming the Armenian genocide.

The Turkish government scrambled to halt further progress of the resolution after it was approved by U.S. House Foreign Affairs committee on March 4. Turkish leaders also warned Obama against uttering the politically sensitive word in his April 24 message. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested after meeting Obama in Washington last week that the U.S. president will heed the warning.

Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian seemed resigned to that as he addressed the nation Thursday on the future of the Turkish-Armenian normalization process. But he implied that Obama’s failure to term the 1915 massacres a genocide will not halt the decades-long Armenian campaign for genocide recognition.

“Our struggle for the international recognition of the Genocide continues,” said Sarkisian. “If some circles in Turkey attempt to use our candor to our detriment, to manipulate the process to avoid the reality of the 24th of April, they should know all too well that the 24th of April is the day that symbolizes the Armenian Genocide, but in no way shall it mark the time boundary of its international recognition.”

https://www.azatutyun.am/a/2023467.html

April 25, 2010