Or maybe it’s eenchman? Well, personally I’d like to see more stories like this. Apparently the inchman is an Armenian version of Big Foot.

The story starts in 2001 when foot prints were found in the snow near Zorats Qarer (also known as Qarer Hunj) near Sisian in Syunik marz. Sightings have since been made in river canyons, on the tops of mountains, and other places. The above photo was taken by chance by some hikers. There is a whole site dedicated to Inchman.

So, if you see Inchman, let us know!

HETQ Online has a series of reports on prostitution in Armenia. They include brief interviews with prostitutes, and details of the daily difficulty in their lives.

Life and death in the Armenian sex trade
The Armenian sex trade - 2
The Armenian sex trade - 3
The Armenian sex trade - 4

As one might expect, the women risk violence and thieving on a daily basis, and have abundant problems with the police.

Arminfo reports on the rise of HIV/AIDS in Armenia. Apparently Armenian men use an average of 2.36 condoms each annually. They got that figure by dividing the number of condoms imported annually into Armenia, 10.9 tons, or 2.181 million, by the number of men in the country, apparently 1.54 million.

Maybe not very scientific, but there are around 3000 cases of HIV/AIDS in Armenia according to the AIDS Prevention Center.
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This report would be laughable if it wasn’t unfortunately a true statement of Armenian-Azeri relations.

The Baku newspaper “Echo” “accuses” the Azeri ambassador to Uzbekistan Aydyn Azimbekov of good relations with Armenians.

There are certain materials about Azimbekov’s activities in Tashkent. The newspaper says that during the construction of the new building of the embassy the windows and doors were made by local Armenians with whom some embassy employees are good friends. Accusing Azimbekov of building summer houses for his colleagues for the money meant for the House of Azerbaijan the author of the article says that he has the recording of the ambassador’s saying that Armenian children will visit the House of Azerbaijan.

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting have a report from Karabagh on the elections there.

Originally, there were ten candidates, but the field has now narrowed to five, after two were denied registration and three pulled out. Most observers are agreed that the ballot comes down to a fight between two men, Pavel Najarian, a former deputy mayor of Stepanakert, and Eduard Agabekian, chairman of the committee on social issues in the Karabakh parliament.

Najarian was one of the participants in the 1988 movement for secession from Azerbaijan and has a reputation of being an experienced business professional, having managed the local buildings material plant, one of the most successful factories in Karabakh in recent times.

The article raises the same questions that affect the RA. A legal vacuum that “not only makes possible pressure from above but various kinds of bureaucratic arbitrary rule with all its accompanying side-effects: corruption, protectionism and so on”.

news@nature.com has a story about Mexican research into housing in poorer earthquake-prone countries.

Earthquakes in rich countries such as the United States or Japan do not tend to cause huge numbers of casualties, because buildings are designed to withstand the shaking. But in poorer areas such as parts of Iran, Turkey or the slums of Mexico, cheaply built housing can collapse almost instantly during an earthquake, killing thousands and stripping families of their only asset

Their research points to structural weaknesses in the mortar, and the answer is simply be more careful with the mixing of this mortar. Of course this doesn’t make earthquake-proof buildings, but it could go a long way to reduce the destruction wrought.

In 2000 I travelled for the first time to Syunik, and the town of Sisian. There, I was privileged to meet Ashot Avagyan, an artist who takes his inspiration from the pre-historic rock art found at Ughtasar, high up in the mountains above Sisian.
The journey to Ughtasar was incredible, we used large military trucks to transport an odd assortment of artists, reporters, Yerevantsi, Diasporans, and the odd odar (me) 3000 metres up the mountain, to a lonely and desolate place where prehistoric man had etched pictures of animals into the rocks.

Next month there will be a trip organised from Yerevan to Ughtasar, which Ashot will be leading. I have posted the details for anyone who is interested.
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Misak Ohanian wrote to me today in response to my earlier post about the “coup” that had taken place at CAIA, the Centre for Armenian Information and Advice in London.

Ohanian had run CAIA for 17 years but had been evicted by four members of the seven member board. I have posted Misak’s email to me with his permission:

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ANCA have put out a press release endorsing John Kerry for President. This isn’t surprising, as Kerry is certainly the most friendly to the Armenian cause.

After the jump is the full press release:
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Here is an all-too-common story, from ArmenPress.

The company Royal Armenia imports coffee into Armenia, 9,000 tons annually of the stuff in the form of coffee beans. They have been complaining recently about a bias against them by customs guards on the Georgian-Armenian border.
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This from HellenicNews.com (Via Groong):

On July 14, 2002, Wolfowitz in a CNN Turkey interview stated:

“I think a real test of whether a country is a democracy is how it treats its minorities. And actually it’s one of the things that impress (sic) me about Turkish history-the way Turkey treats its own minorities.”

It’s hardly surprising to hear such a statement from Wolfowitz, and shows very well the way the current US government views the rest of the world.
Turkey = NATO while Armenians, Kurds, and Greeks equal nothing of real value. No oil, no value.

According to the Pasadena Star-News, John Kerry has vowed to recognize the Armenian genocide. It’s not the first time we’ve heard this, and of course Bush said the same thing and then reneged on his promise.

“I think we might expect something different from candidate Kerry,’ said Peter Balakian, author of “The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.’

“He spent his whole life immersed in the Armenian community,’ Balakian said, noting that Massachusetts is home to about 30,000 Armenian Americans. “This is a candidate with a great depth of knowledge on this history.’

So IF Kerry gets in he MAY recognise the genocide.

However, there is good evidence to suggest that with Kerry as president, America may finally recognise the first genocide of the 20th century. On April 26th, Kerry made a statement in commemoration of the genocide, and has seperately called for its recognition.

Another photostory from Onnik Krikorian of HETQ Online. This time the theme is the The Armenians of Javakhk, in southern Georgia. One of the poorest parts of Georgia (and Georgia is usually rated with a lower per-capita income than Armenia), the region straddles transport routes between Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia and Armenia, including the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.

The photostory.

The debate is hotting up about Yerevan’s green spaces, and questionable developments going on. Arminfo reports that Armenia’s greens demand punishment of officials.

At his press conference, the representative of the Social Ecological
Party of Armenia Armen Dovlatyan stated that environmental
organizations demand that the RA Government and Yerevan Municipality
put an end to all illegal and “Legal’ allotments of lands for
construction in Yerevan’s green zones. They also demand the
restoration of the greenery destroyed as a result of construction.
According to Dovlatyan, the forests in Nork are deliberately being
destroyed for the purpose of further construction there. He said that
some of the forests are no longer under the jurisdiction of the
“ArmForest” CJSC, as construction is not allowed in territories under
the jurisdiction of the “ArmForest” CJSC. Dovlatyan stated that over
1,500 of 2,000 hectares of Yerevan’s green zones have been
destroyed. He stressed that over 1,000 hectares were destroyed in
1995-2003. “If the destruction of Yerevan’s green zones continues, the
capital will turn from semi-desert into a desert, which will affect
the population’s health,” he said.

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ArmeniaNow.com reports on the successes being met by some Armenian artists and musicians in Turkey. The duduk maestro Djivan Gasparyan was apparently invited to Turkey during Soviet times, but only on the condition he change his surname. Naturally he declined. He finally went there in 2000.

“My performance was a part of Vollenweider’s concert program and before announcing the names of artists audience didn’t know who performed except Vollenweider at the concert. When my name was announced silence fell in the concert hall for a moment and suddenly the audience burst into applause,” says Gasparyan, still excited by the moment.

ArmeniaNow.com makes the point that these artists are succeeding where politicians are failing. That’s because they are not engaging in politics. If they tried to talk about the political issues the mood would change very quickly.
Last year Gasparyan played in London along with Azeri musician Alim Qasimov, although there was no public hand-shaking or embracing.

There is an easy, quick way to keep up to date on new posts at Blogrel.

Use the RSS feed and My Yahoo!
If you have any account at Yahoo! (from using their email, for example), you can now make your own news page using a combination of Yahoo! News and RSS feeds from other sites.

To do this, simply click on the “Add to My Yahoo!” button below, and then confirm.

I have added this button on the right of every page.
You can also add RSS feeds from other sites, and keep updates to your favourite sites all in one place.

A Photo CD created by Onnik Krikorian and supported by the AGBU London Trust has been updated, and is available for free download (for educational and not-for-proft purposes).
Onnik comes from the UK, and has lived and worked in Armenia for several years as a photo-journalist. His work is often to be seen on the HETQ Online website, who he currently works for.

The CD is a series of photos, narratives, and interviews, created in Flash. You can download it as a series of files and then burn these to a CD-R.

A sample of the content can be seen here.

It’s not a travel CD, but takes you on a journey through the social reality of post-independence Armenia. One of the questions one hears nowadays is why the Diaspora doesn’t make its voice heard more in Armenian politics, the way for example that the Jewish Diaspora does in Israel, where it can make and break the fortune of any Israeli (or even American) politician. Perhaps seeing this CD will make some Diasporans to feel more inclined to make themselves heard in Armenia’s immature political arena. They certainly have the power to affect policy should they so desire.

Responding to reports from a Turkish newspaper that Turks and Armenians had gathered in Vienna and were exchanging documents about the genocide, Lavrenty Barseghian, the director of Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan has denied this, according to ArmenPress.

“The reports about the alleged meeting came as a big surprise and
I think they were concocted by Turks to disrupt the planned meeting
,” Barseghian, who was supposed to be one of the two Armenian
scientists to visit Vienna, told Armenpress, adding that none of the
two was in Vienna on July 16.
Barseghian said he will travel to Vienna later and will take
documents from German and Austrian archives who were Turkey’s allies
in W I, which he said prove that the massacre of Armenians had been
planned and carried out by then Turkish government. He added that the
fact of the Genocide cannot be subject of discussions, as it is an
undeniable fact and “once Turks try to raise it we shall walk out of
the meeting.”

I can’t find anything on this Professor Bihl from Vienna. Sounds very odd.

US Ambassador John Ordway has made his farewell speech in Yerevan, at the end of his 3 year term. He has learnt Armenian (though to what degree is not mentioned).

Daily Azg says “Only bad roads made ambassador’s stay in Armenia uncomfortable.”

Arminfo reports that Ordway thanked Armenia for help in its “War on Terrorism”.

Bilateral military cooperation has also been developing successfully
during his tenure as a US ambassador to Armenia, he said, citing US
military assistance to Armenia, Armenia’s corporation with the state
of Kansas in the area of civil defence, Armenian peacekeepers’
participation in Kosovo operations and Armenia’s successful
cooperation with NATO. “As a member of NATO we can only welcome
that. In the future, Armenian peacekeepers’ participation in the Iraq
mission cannot be ruled out,” Ordway said.

It also reports that Ordway denied working against Iran while the US Ambassador. “However, I did
not perform any anti-Iranian task in Armenia during my tenure,” John
Ordway said.

RFE/RL in this week’s Armenia report reports on Armenian newspapers’ coverage of the rise of the Dram against the Dollar, apparently without reason.

“The groundless strengthening of the Armenian national currency, the
dram, is a negative phenomenon,” former Prime Minister Armen Darbinian
says in an interview with “Hayots Ashkharh.” “And its negative influence
on the economy, on financial market, on expectations, on consumer supply
and demand, etc. is obvious.” The former premier believes that the
current exchange rates are the result of quasi-market factors and the
policy adopted by Armenia’s Central Bank and banking system. He argues
that the strengthening of the dram is not the result of strengthening of
country’s economy.

ArmenPress reports that Vladimir Badalian, the chairman of the Union of Armenian Banks, has predicted that the Euro will grab a bigger place in Armenia’s markets, forcing the Dollar further into decline against the Dram.