Letter to London Mayor Boris Johnson

17 June 2008
Mr Boris Johnson, Mayor of London
City Hall, London SE1
Dear Mayor Johnson
You are starting to fulfil your pre-election pledge by immediately cancelling the London-Caracas agreement. But the question remains: How cancelling an obviously advantageous foreign trade agreement might be beneficial to the poor of London and of Caracas, knowing quite well, as I am sure you do, that over 130,000 Londoners received half-price bus travel because of that agreement, while London provided expertise to Venezuela on:
a) urban development plan,
b) an air quality strategy for the entire country,
c) city planning.
The latter were all subsidised via cheap Venezuelan oil. I fail to appreciate like you how the poor of Venezuela will not be beneficially affected by the expertise, high quality strategies of the agreement, not forgetting our many thousand Londoners benefiting from the same. Hence it would indeed be wise and noble of you to revoke your flawed decision, for the sake of the poor of London and of Venezuela.
With all good wishes
Khatchatur I. Pilikian
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Khatchatur I. Pilikian. Sometime university professor of music (USA), Pilikian is a performing musician, painter and writer. He has studied art and music at the Fine Art and Music Academies in Rome and Siena. “Leonardo da Vinci on voice, music and stage design” was the title of his research as a Fulbright scholar at I.U. School of Music. In 1976, he designed and directed, at Wayne State University, the public radio WDET-FM series HARC-The Heritage of Armenian Culture. In 1984, he published Refuting Terrorism – Seven Epistles From Diaspora (in English and Armenian). He has contributed the entry Music and Turner in the Oxford University Press (2001) encyclopaedic publication titled THE TURNER COMPANION. The Spokesman for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation published his paper for the 2005 European Network for Peace and Human Rights Conference, The Spectre of Genocide as Collateral Damage is Haunting the World. His most recent book is UNESCO Laureates: Nazim Hikmet & Aram Khatchaturian (Garod Books of the Gomidas Institute).
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