Narek, Bambir, Stop Club, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia

Well, it has to be said. Last night’s Bambir (II) gig at the Stop Club was quite simply amazing. Firstly, this band has a hell of a lot of charisma and musically, they’re fantastic. Secondly, it was encouraging to see so many young Armenians get together and party. It’s also encouraging to see a place like the Stop Club appear which caters for a much nicer crowd than many other places in Yerevan.

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Armenia Now has two very interesting articles of specific interest this week. The first is on youth in Armenia and government attempts to prevent the emergance of an active student movement by controlling the sphere themselves through the Baze Pan-Armenian student and youth festival.

I blogged about this earlier in the week and I’m glad to see that Eleonora Manadyan, one of the leaders of the student movement in 1996 and now probably Armenia’s most impressive activist as head of the New Armenia organization, is quoted in the article.

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Squat, Shengavit, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia

Emil Danielyan, the English language editor for RFE/RL’s Armenia Service web site, writes for Eurasianet that western donors are upbeat on economic growth in the country. Emil writes that “A consensus is building among economic experts that the tiny South Caucasus state is finally emerging from its post-Soviet doldrums.”

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The Noyan Tapan news agency reports that there over 20,000 registered drug addicts in Armenia. However, the report as carried by Red Nova, says that 95 percent of them are considered as such because they use cannabis. Only the remainder are intravenous drug users.

The BBC web site has an interesting article on attempts to clean up Georgia’s thoroughly rotten educational system. Unfortunately, almost everything is available for “sale” in former soviet republics like Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

As thousands of Georgian high school students prepare for their university admission exams, many here remember an old Soviet joke about a man who visits a college professor.

“My son has an exam with you tomorrow, but he is not well prepared,” he says, “I am afraid that he will fail.”

Without raising his head the professor replies: “I bet you $500 your son will pass.”

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Manic Depressive Psychosis (MDP), perhaps Armenia’s most “underground” rock band, have redesigned their web site. Very dark and was a bit of a shock when visiting for the first time after seeing the old version.

Talking of which, ran into Ed from MDP last night at a jazz gig at the Stop Club. Also there was Narek, the young and dynamic guitarist from Bambir (II). The young rock band from Gyumri will be playing at the Stop Club tonight if any of you are in town.

According to RFE/RL’s Armenia Service, the Prime Minister Andranik Markarian has forbidden state officials from taking their holidays in Turkey.

Representatives of several private travel agencies who spoke on the condition of anonymity told RFE/RL that their clients working in the government have had to cancel plans to travel to the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya with their families as a result.

“Some state officials already booked air tickets and hotel rooms in Turkey and then cancelled those reservations and asked us for other travel destinations where they are free to go,” said one of them. “They said such a decision was taken by the prime minister and they have no right to go there now.”

Turkey is increasingly becoming a popular destination for Armenians despite the closed border and disagreements over whether the massacre and cultural absorption of approximately 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 onwards constituted Genocide.

Flights operate between the two countries although road communication is via Georgia. The full news item can be read online here.

The UK’s The Guardian newspaper reports that Georgian police and the American FBI have discovered “dangerous substances” in the cellar of Vladimir Arutyunyan, a Georgian citizen of Armenian descent arrested last week after a shootout that claimed the life of one senior Georgian policeman. He has been charged in connection with the 10 May attempted grenade attack on a rally addressed by US President George Bush and his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Saakashvili in Tbilisi’s Liberty Square.

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YEREVAN, Armenia – Mane Tonoyan might seem a little too young to concern herself with the problem of violence against children in Armenia but this 16-year old is somehow “different.” A member of the Manana Youth-Cultural non-governmental organization, she has already made a one-minute-film on the subject, and at the beginning of July, was one of 25 child participants at the regional consultation for the UN Study on Violence Against Children in Europe and Central Asia.

The consultation held from 5-7 July 2005 was hosted in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, and organized by UNICEF as well as other UN agencies. It was one of nine such consultations that will eventually contribute to a major study of the problem by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan next year. Accompanying Mane was Naira Avetisyan, UNICEF’s Child Protection Officer in Armenia, and three representatives of various government agencies.

The full article can be read online here.

Moving my main site, http://www.oneworld.am, to a new server should now be complete although it’s possible some pages have been missed because in Armenia it’s not quite as simple as dragging 80 megabytes of files from one window to another in an FTP package. Anyway, I will thoroughly check the site over the next few days but if anyone experiences any missing files or other problems please let me. Incidentally, the site is hosted by Xter.net, a local ISP in Yerevan. Very impressed with their customer service so far.

Hopefull, blogging can now get back to normal.

From October 1998 when I arrived in Yerevan until today, I never had a mobile phone in Armenia. Until recently, coverage was poor and ArmenTel’s so-called Easy Cards were only available on the black market for up to ten times their official price. Recently, however, with the arrival of VivaCell as Yerevan’s second mobile phone operator, times have changed and today, I picked up a Siemens handset and the VivaCell equivalent of an Easycard for less than many people paid for just an Easycard without a phone.

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