The California
Courier Online, September 29, 2022
1- The
Short-Lived Fake Republic of
“West Azerbaijan Goycha-Zangezur”
By Harut
Sassounian
Publisher,
The California
Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com
2- Commentary: Armenia is being brutalized by its
neighbors
3- Sarian’s
American Healthcare Systems
takes over
operations at South
City Hospital
4- Parents of
Killed Soldiers ‘Savagely’ Hauled Off by Armenian Police
5- Armenia Continues Fight Against
COVID-19
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The
Short-Lived Fake Republic of
“West Azerbaijan Goycha-Zangezur”
By Harut
Sassounian
Publisher,
The California
Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com
Last week, two Azeris arrogantly declared themselves to be
the leaders of the fake “West Azerbaijan Goycha-Zangezur
Republic,” which claimed to include Lake Sevan
and the Syunik province of the Republic
of Armenia. This
announcement was made a few days after the barbaric attack on the eastern
border of Armenia by Azerbaijan!
President of Azerbaijan,
Ilham Aliyev, has frequently referred to large areas of the Republic of Armenia
as part of Azerbaijan,
giving them fake Azeri names. Here is what he said in September 2013: “Azerbaijan’s
state flag should be waved in Shusha [Shushi], Khankendi [Stepanakert], and
Azerbaijanis should live in their historical lands in the future. Our
historical lands are Irevan [Yerevan] khanate,
Goyce [Lake Sevan] and Zangezur regions. There will
be times; we will live in these lands. I believe it, I am sure. Everyone should
put their efforts in order to achieve it.” Furthermore, Aliyev stated in March
2015: “Azerbaijan will restore historical justice and reclaim not only the
breakaway Nagorno Karabakh region and areas around it, which are currently held
by Armenians, but also parts of present-day Armenia.” He boastfully envisaged
that after “liberating Karabakh, we, Azerbaijanis, will return to our ancient
lands — Yerevan, Goyca [Lake
Sevan], Zangezur [Armenia’s
Syunik region], etc. The younger generation must know that our lands are not
limited to the current territories of independent Azerbaijan. We must go back to
those lands as well and we will.”
If the President of Azerbaijan makes such outrageous
statements, it is not surprising that other Azeris parrot his baseless claims.
Last week, two Azeris, Rizvan Talibov and Mehmet Ali Arslan,
proclaimed themselves to be the “President and Vice President” of “West Azerbaijan
Goycha-Zangezur Republic”
and declared its independence, with its capital in Ghapan or Vardenis, Armenia.
These Azeris attended the inauguration of the first
representative office of this fake Republic in Ankara,
claiming that Turkey
was the first country to recognize it. “President” Talibov declared that Turkey and
“West Azerbaijan Goycha-Zangezur” are “one nation, two states.” He must have
forgotten about the Republic
of Azerbaijan which uses
the same slogan.
Regrettably for the Azeris, their euphoria was short-lived.
Eurasianet.org published an article on Sept. 22, titled, “The rise and fall of Azerbaijan’s ‘Goycha-Zangezur Republic.’”
This “Republic” lasted for three days, even though Azerbaijan’s pro-government
initially publicized this fake news. Tural Ganjali, a member of Azerbaijan’s
parliament had immediately endorsed the non-existent “Republic.” However,
Ganjali deleted his Facebook post within hours and most Azeri websites removed
all references to this “Republic.” The pro-government media discredited not
only the “Republic” but also its equally fake “President” Talibov who had been
appointing ministers and adopting decisions.
Azerbaijan’s
news agency, APA, condemned Talibov, stating that he “actually has no
scientific knowledge about or research on “Western
Azerbaijan. He knows neither the history nor the geography of Western Azerbaijan. It is impossible to find a single
serious person around him, and most of the people he named, appointed, and
included in the structures do not even know about it. Talibov ‘appoints’ and
gives ‘authority’ of the highest positions to anyone, regardless of their
identity or political views in return for flattery or a meal or 5-10 manats [a
few dollars].”
A member of Azerbaijan’s
parliament Hikmat Babaoghlu wrote on Sept. 21: “The so-called ‘Goycha-Zangezur Republic’
is a political-ideological terror against Azerbaijan.” Babaoghlu continued:
“Such a political hypocrite [Talibov] has no moral right neither to create the
‘Goycha-Zangezur Republic’ nor even to pronounce these
holy names. Because this idea, while Azerbaijan
is insisting on the issue of the Zangezur corridor, creates the impression that
Azerbaijan
does not intend to open a corridor in Zangezur, but to create a state there.
This is a real provocation against the opening of the corridor.”
This is not the first time that such a lame-brained idea has
been floated by someone in Azerbaijan,
according to Eurasianet.org. “In 2020, an Azerbaijani academic in Turkey, Gafar Chahmagli, formed what he called
the Republic of Western Azerbaijan (Irevan), which would
have had an even larger territorial reach. That project (which also was called
the Irevan Turkish
Republic) was connected to another
group with apparent government links, the West Azerbaijan Community (WAC), but
it did not get the (brief) level of state endorsement as the Goycha-Zangezur Republic.”
Greatly disillusioned, “President” Talibov wrote on his
Facebook page: “While we were expecting attacks from Armenians, some of
‘ourselves’ attacked us with an unseen aggression, full of slander!!”
All those Azeris who condemned Talibov and Arslan must not
have realized that they were indirectly also condemning President Aliyev who
has made similar baseless statements about territories of the sovereign Republic of Armenia.
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2- Commentary: Armenia is being brutalized by its
neighbors
By Kapil Komireddi
(Telegraph UK)—“The
EU is turning to trustworthy energy suppliers. Azerbaijan is one of them,” Ursula
von der Leyen declared in July. Over the past week, the EU’s “trustworthy
partner” — a phenomenally corrupt hereditary dictatorship in the Caucasus — has
slaughtered more than two hundred people in unrelenting attacks on its
democratic neighbor Armenia.
The carnage in the Caucasus can seem startling because Ilham
Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s
ruler, has been engaged in talks with Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan
since Armenia’s
defeat in the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh. The two men shook hands just over
a fortnight ago in Brussels.
But so little about Azerbaijan’s
attack, which goes beyond the disputed territory
of Karabakh and targets Armenia proper,
is surprising. Emboldened by Europe’s deepening dependency upon Baku — and by
the weakened state of Russia, which has a security treaty with Armenia and has
traditionally brokered peace in the region — Azerbaijan views this as the
perfect moment to coerce Armenia into total submission. The West is as
distracted today as it was in the autumn of 2020 when Azerbaijan and Turkey —
bound by a “two states, one nation” policy — launched a joint military
operation against Armenia at the height of the pandemic in which Syrian
mercenaries on Ankara’s payroll were deployed alongside regular soldiers.
Travelling through the region in the aftermath of that war,
it was impossible not to notice that Azerbaijan’s
animus against Armenia,
the world’s oldest Christian state, was founded on more than territorial
disagreements over Karabakh. It was animated by something much more sinister: a
chauvinistic belief in the superiority of the Turkic peoples over Armenians. It
was a continuation of history. In April 1915, Ottoman Turkey inaugurated a
methodical campaign to exterminate its Armenian population. A community of two
million Armenians lived under Turkish rule at the time. Four years later, fewer
than 200,000 remained. The rest were either massacred, marched into death
camps, or starved to death. Countless women and children were forced to
relinquish their faith and submit to the religion of their overlords. The
Armenian diaspora, one of the largest in the world, is a result of the
dispersal triggered by the genocide. The word “genocide” was in fact neologized
by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the Armenian tragedy. Every
Armenian heart is a repository of inextinguishable grief and loss. (To its
enduring shame, Britain
refuses to confer official recognition on the Armenian genocide.)
More than a century after that protracted atrocity, there is
a resurgence of the same homicidal rage against the Armenians, a people shaped
by the harrowing memory of death, dispossession, and displacement. On the eve
of the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in April, for instance, Turkey’s
foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, taunted Armenians mourning their tragic
past by making a “grey wolf” sign with his fingers — the gesture devised by
unrepentant Turkish ultranationalists. The Armenian Genocide is clearly a
source of mirth and gratification for Turkey
and its client in the Caucasus.
Among the hundreds of murder reels circulating in the Caucasus, the horror of one, which I saw on the phone of
a refugee from Karabakh, continues to stalk me. It shows Azeri soldiers
decapitating an elderly Armenian civilian with a knife and then mounting his
head on the carcass of a pig. The gruesomeness of it all — the beheading, the
pig — is soaked in religious symbolism.
Human Rights Watch has verified numerous videos of Armenians
being tortured by Azeri authorities. New horrors are being added to old. A
video now circulating in the region, filmed by an Azeri soldier mocking the
dead, shows the mutilated corpse of a female Armenian soldier: her body has
been stripped naked, her eyes have been gouged out and replaced with stones,
and her head is half decapitated.
Lest anybody should doubt its intent, Azerbaijan has expended considerable labor to
raze Armenia’s
ancient religious heritage in areas it has seized. In any other context, we
could call this murderous imperialism by its name. But in this context, we
resort to polite euphemisms. Imperialism is clearly imperialism only when
Europeans do it; when the Turks do it, it’s a cultural exchange program.
Armenia
is crippled also by the absence of a strong leadership. Petty domestic
political machinations prompted Armen
Sarkissian, Armenia’s
fourth president and its most respected statesman on the international stage,
to resign earlier this year. The poverty of political talent has been on
glaring display ever since. At a time when Armenia needs desperately to
generate international solidarity, Sarkissian’s successor as president, Vahagn
Khachaturyan, handpicked by the government to rubberstamp legislation,
succeeded in reducing his country to a joke by having his staff take an
unauthorized photo of him in front of Queen Elizabeth’s coffin. His clownish
conduct in London managed to overshadow the trip
to Armenia
over the weekend by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of
Representatives.
Pelosi’s visit, precipitated by the upcoming elections in US
where the Armenian diaspora forms an important voting bloc, is difficult to
reconcile with Europe’s squalid deal with Azerbaijan. The embrace of Aliyev
doesn’t merely encourage Azerbaijan
to pursue its expansionist ambitions. It also negates the West’s much
advertised “values”. Every sin that can be attributed to Vladimir Putin’s Russia can also be ascribed to Aliyev’s Azerbaijan. The
fortunes amassed by Azerbaijan’s
ruling dynasty make many Russian oligarchs appear like demure amateurs: their
property empire in the UK
alone is estimated by the NGO OCCRP to be worth nearly $700 million. Aliyev’s Azerbaijan is also measurably more politically
repressive than Putin’s Russia:
on Freedom House’s index of civil and political liberties, it sits ten places
behind Russia.
And the militant nationalism espoused by the regime, steeped in ethnic hatred
of the Armenians, makes its Russian counterpart appear tame in comparison.
Aliyev used to maintain a museum in Baku,
the Azeri capital, in which the chief exhibits were the helmets of Armenian
soldiers slain by Azeri forces.
Azerbaijan,
equipped and supervised by Nato member Turkey,
has now butchered its way into the sovereign territory of Armenia.
One of the unlikeliest democracies in Russia’s neighborhood is not merely
being brutalized. It is being forced to accede to its own extinction. The
pitifully ironic thing about all this is that Europe is not going to gain much
from its commercial partnership with Azerbaijan. Baku,
itself dependent on imports of natural gas from Iran
and Turkmenistan,
is struggling to meet domestic energy demands. Besides, the Azeri gas field
that is supposed to be the source of Baku’s
future supplies to Europe is owned partly by Russia’s Lukoil. By paying Azerbaijan, Europe is indirectly putting wealth
in Russia’s
hands. Europe has fostered the illusion of energy independence from Russia. The
Armenians are paying the price of its self-deception.
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3- Sarian’s American Healthcare
Systems
takes over
operations at South
City Hospital
By Annika Merrilees
ST. LOUIS (St. Louis
Post-Dispatch)—A California-based company has taken over operations of South City
Hospital, and the 190-bed
facility is headed toward yet another sale. Should the sale be finalized, the
new owners would become the fourth in as many years for the South City Hospital, formerly known as St. Alexius
Hospital.
The company, American Healthcare Systems, is operating South City
Hospital under an interim
management agreement, according to Mayer Klein, a Clayton-based lawyer listed
in court records as representing the hospital’s current owners, SA Hospital
Acquisition Group.
The companies also entered into an asset purchase agreement
a few months ago. But the sale, which was first reported by the St. Louis
Business Journal, is still “in process,” Klein said.
Michael Sarian, chairman and CEO of American Healthcare
Systems, said the company is just waiting on the transfer of the hospital’s
license, and the receipt of its Medicare and Medicaid numbers.
The new buyer, American Healthcare Systems, is a Glendale,
California-based health care company that Sarian started after 10 years as
president of hospital operations at Prime Healthcare Management.
Sarian said he left Prime two years ago to form American
Healthcare Systems. The company’s first acquisition was Randolph
Health Hospital
in Asheboro, North Carolina. The company also plans to
acquire a 350-bed hospital in Illinois.
“We want to take over hospitals that are in distress, and
save those hospitals, break them into profitability, give them new life, and
let them serve the community,” Sarian said.
When Sarian first took over South City Hospital, he said he was surprised at
the shape it was in. He said paychecks were bouncing. Paramedics were bypassing
the hospital. The patient census was 22.
“I said, ‘This is going to make me bankrupt,’” Sarian said.
But, he said, things are improving. He said he made
much-needed additions to the physician pool, including an orthopedic surgeon
and a gastrointestinal specialist.
On Monday, he said, the patient census was 55. The hospital
turned a small profit of just over $100,000 in August.
He said the facility today has about 600 employees and is
hiring more.
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4- Parents of Killed Soldiers
‘Savagely’ Hauled Off by Armenian Police
YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Around four dozen Angry parents of
Armenian soldiers killed in the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh were detained on
Wednesday as they tried to prevent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan from laying
flowers at Armenia’s main military ceremony.
Pashinyan, other senior officials and members of his
political team visited the Yerablur Military Pantheon in Yerevan
as part of official ceremonies to mark the 31st anniversary of the country’s
declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.
The several dozen parents of fallen soldiers gathered at the
main entrance to Yerablur overnight to try to disrupt the wreath-laying
ceremony. They blame Pashinyan for the deaths of their sons as well as at least
3,800 other Armenian soldiers killed in action. Many of those soldiers were
buried at Yerablur.
Riot police dispersed the protesters shortly before the
officials led by Pashinyan arrived at the pantheon. The grief-stricken men and
women mostly wearing black clothes were dragged away, forced into police
vehicles and driven away. They all were set free after the ceremony.
“You all saw how savagely they attacked us,” said one of the
protesting mothers. “They didn’t just drag us. They also hit us.”
Videos of the incident caused uproar on social media. The
Armenian police issued a statement defending their actions and saying that they
must not be “used for political purposes.” The statement said at the same time
that the national police chief, Vahe Ghazarian, has ordered an internal inquiry
into the use of force.
Vahan Hovannisyan, a lawyer representing the parents,
condemned “the illegal actions of police officers.” An Armenian civic group,
the Union of Informed Citizens, likewise accused the police of using excessive
force.
The same group of parents has protested regularly in Yerevan since April. The
protests were sparked by Pashinyan’s remarks made in response to continuing
opposition criticism of his handling of the devastating war.
“They [critics] say now, ‘Could they have averted the war?’”
Pashinyan told the Armenian parliament on April 13. “They could have averted
the war, as a result of which we would have had the same situation, but of
course without the casualties.”
The protesting families say Pashinyan thus publicly admitted
sacrificing thousands of lives. They submitted a relevant “crime report” to Armenia’s
Office of the Prosecutor-General on April 18. The office instructed other
law-enforcement agencies to question Pashinyan and decide whether to launch
criminal proceedings against the prime minister. The latter has still not been
summoned by them for questioning.
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5- Armenia Continues Fight Against
COVID-19
More than 2.2 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine have
been administered in Armenia
since commencing the vaccination program a year ago, authorities said on
September 26. COVID-19 has deeply affected Armenia's economy. Armenia has
recorded 441,444 coronavirus cases as of September .
Armenia
has recorded 8,679 deaths.; 428,059 have recovered.
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