Author: Alex Jidarian

From his grandmother beginning at an early age, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Balakian heard occasional hints of a darker family history set in Armenia. And he began to explore a past that remains fought over to this day, the expulsion and killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. Many members of Balakian’s family died. Others, like his grandmother and aunts, survived after a horrific flight on foot.

Balakian would write about these events in history titled “The Burning Tigris” and in a family memoir, “Black Dog of Fate.”

“One of the reasons for my writing “Black Dog of Fate” was to try to make sense of growing up in a family in which a traumatic history was really repressed. It wasn’t spoken about. It was silenced. And yet the leakages that I experienced as a kid growing up in affluent suburbia were beguiling and weird and strange, and they stayed with me,” Peter Balakian said in an interview with

“I began writing poems with a kind of passion, and I never stopped. I was working my way as a young guy in his 20s writing lyric poems. And around the mid to late 1970s, for various reasons, the news of history started percolating in me,” Balakian said.

“And I started understanding more of the big picture of my own family’s historical experience as genocide survivors. The poem in its unique form, its form of compressed language and particular kinds of probe images, I like to call them, or incisive, compressed image language, is capable of going to history and its aftermath in ways that no other literary form can,” the poet added.

“Who drowned waiting in the reeds of the Ararat plain? There, the sky is cochineal. There, the chapel windows open to raw umber and twisted goats. There, the obsidian glistens and the hawks eat out your eyes.”

Many Armenians, including Balakian’s grandmother, fled into what is today Syria. Most were killed or starved to death along the way. In 2009, just before the civil war began, Balakian joined a “60 Minutes” crew in Syria for a report on their fate.

“It was extraordinary then to be there. Looking back at it now, I feel like it’s a dream. But for me, it was also exciting to be there, because there’s a very rich Armenian culture and community in Aleppo and a gorgeous church. And so all that was a kind of connecting with a diasporan culture,” Peter Balakian said.

“And then when the war started, when the war began to just destroy all of this, I would look on, on the screens and on the TV images and the computer images with pain and disbelief that, just in the little case of Armenian cultural life there, churches that were hundreds of years old were gone. Whole communities were disbanded. And if that was true just for the smaller Armenian population of Syria, we all knew what was happening to the broad Syrian population,” he added.

Throughout his career in the NBA, Steve Kerr has achieved great success winning five NBA titles as a player and one as a head coach. But tucked behind all of the glory Kerr has achieved on the hardwood is his grandparents’ incredible story providing relief in the Middle East for Armenians during the first genocide of the 20th century.

Kerr’s grandparents, Stanley and Elsa, settled in the Middle East in the 1920s and established the Near East Relief, which helped provide aid to Armenian women and children trying to escape marauding officials in the Turkish Ottoman Empire, Uproxx reveals. They also established an orphanage for Armenian children.

The Kerrs were on the frontline of American relief after World War I. Stanley Kerr arrived in Aleppo in 1919 and began photographing, documenting, and rescuing Armenian women and orphans. He then transferred to Marash to take charge of an American mission. His memoir, The Lions of Marash, is set at this location and describes how the armies of Mustafa Kemal eradicated the Armenians from the new Turkish republic.

Private American charity reached the Armenians first. In response to the massacre of over 1.5 million Armenians, philanthropist Cleveland Dodge formed the Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. Former president Theodore Roosevelt advocated intervention, saying, “All Americans worthy of the name feel their deepest indignation aroused by the dreadful Armenian atrocities[a].”

As a junior at Occidental College, Ann left to study abroad in Lebanon. Three days a week, she taught at a Catholic Armenian girls’ school — the Immaculate Conception. She met Malcolm at AUB while he completed his Master’s, and they were soon married in Santa Monica in 1956. Today, Ann continues her work with Fulbright to engage the Middle East with American higher education.

On February 10, 1920, the French garrison at Marash withdrew abruptly, and thus abandoned more than 20,000 Armenians to the marauding insurgents of Mustafa Kemal. The Turks threw kerosene-doused rags on Armenian homes, and churches were put to flame. Sickened missionaries like Stanley Kerr could only observe helplessly through binoculars[b].

The “Marash Affair” gave rise to an irreversible tide that swept Kemal to power; for the Armenians of Cilicia, it marked the onset of a new round of devastation and the final exodus from their ancestral homeland into permanent exile.

Unlike Armenians in Beirut, Steve Kerr was not raised on stories of genocide, but he was aware of his forefather’s humanity in the face of atrocity. “I was aware of my grandparents running an orphanage in Marash and eventually finding Beirut through their travels,” Kerr says. “I have a great deal of pride in knowing how much they helped.”

Susan van de Ven, the daughter of Ann and Malcolm, has an exchange of letters with her grandparents about their experiences, which she used for her thesis at Oberlin College, and later presented at the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem in 1986 for the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Her grandmother, Elsa Reckman, volunteered as a schoolteacher in Constantinople, and later met Stanley Kerr while working in Marash.

Elsa and Stanley ran an orphanage for Armenian children in Lebanon in the 1920s after leaving Marash until an outbreak of typhoid forced the orphanage to close. Elsa lost an unborn child when she contracted typhoid. They eventually married in Beirut in 1922, and Stanley became the chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at AUB, while Elsa served as dean of women. Following 40 years of faculty service, they retired in 1965.

The American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, later known as the Near East Relief, is credited with helping preserve the Armenians in the face of the genocide that sought to destroy them. They pioneered the idea that all Americans, regardless of age, income or background, could help others.

The Near East Relief campaign raised a staggering $19.5 million from private donations by 1919, and $117 million by 1930 — over $1.6 billion today when adjusted for inflation[c].

Despite the monumental efforts of the Near East Relief, the Armenian Genocide is not recognized by the United States.

“Everybody learns about the Jewish Holocaust, but very few know about the Armenian Genocide,” Kerr says solemnly. “It’s not taught in schools, and obviously there are still the political issues of whether Turkey is willing to use the word ‘genocide.’”

After Game 3 of the first round of the 2015 NBA Playoffs last April, Dr. Douglas Kerr, Malcolm’s younger brother, gave a presentation in Cleveland entitled “Witnessing the Genocide,” based on Stanley’s book. In May, after Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals, several members of the Kerr family received a posthumous award in Washington, D.C. on behalf of Elsa and Stanley during a national commemoration of the centennial of the genocide.

In 1965, Antranig Chalabian uncovered a box at AUB containing Stanley’s copies of The New York Times, which eventually inspired Stanley to write his memoir. “Lots of Armenian names in my family history,” Kerr says before retelling when family friend, Vahe Simonian, called him and broke the news of his father’s assassination.

“We’ve had so many Armenians at our house over the years. I felt like an honorary member of the Armenian community through my family.”

Bundesliga’s Player of the Season Henrikh Mkhitaryan has thanked all Bundesliga professionals for the votes.

“Truly honored to be voted Best Player of the Season! Thanks to all the‪ ‎Bundesliga professionals  for this amazing recognition!” Mkhitaryan said in a Facebook post.

Borussia Dortmund’s Armenian midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan was named the footballer of the Bundesliga 2015-16, according to a poll conducted by German magazine

Mkhitaryan topped the list with 31.1 percent of the votes, followed by Bayern Munich’s Polish striker Robert Lewandowski with 22.1 percent, reports Efe.

Bayern’s Thomas Muller came third with 13.6 percent, ahead of Dortmund’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang with 13.2 percent.

The best goalkeeper of the season was Bayern’s Manuel Neuer with 23.8 percent, followed by Mainz’s Loris Karius with 13.6 percent and Bayer Leverkusen’s Bernd Leno with 12.8 percent.

Two Armenian Christian leaders from Syria have been in the UK to remind of the realities facing a country where half the population are either refugees or have been internally displaced, reports.

Bishop Armash Nalbandian, the Armenian Orthodox Bishop of Damascus, and Reverend Harout Selimian, a pastor of the Armenian Armenian Evangelical Church in Aleppo met with Church leaders in England, Scotland and Wales – including the Chair of our International Affairs department Bishop Declan Lang.

The Armenian clerics discussed the challenges they are facing both from the established political institutions on the one hand and terrorist organisations on the other. They asked that the Christian communities in the UK hold the people of Syria in their prayers and actions.

 

 

 

Armenia should set two precondition for the resumption on Karabakh talks – respect for ceasefire and Artsakh’s return to the negotiating table, Head of the ARF faction Armen Rustamyan told a parliamentary briefing.

According to him, meetings do not mean negotiations as long as Artsakh is not involved in talks.

“Speaking about concessions would be a crude mistake at a time, when Azerbaijan is not speaking about any concessions at all,” he said.

Levon Zurabyan, Head of the Armenian National Congression faction, said, in turn, that the most important at this point is to achieve peace rather than discuss the issue of territories.

The Grand Final of the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest takes place tonight, 14th of May, live from the Globe Arena in Stockholm, Sweden, from 21:00 CET ( 23:00 Yerevan time).

May 8 marks one of the most significant victories in the history of the Armenian nation. Shushi was liberated on this day 24 years ago.

During the Karabakh liberation war of early 1990s, Shushi became one of Azerbaijan’s main military strongholds in Nagorno-Karabakh.  From this strategic location, the Azeri army would bombard Karabakh’s capital Stepanakert and adjacent Armenian village.

The liberation of Shushi in May, 1992, however, became a turning point.

About 3,800 volunteers participated in the operation of liberation of Shushi the night of May 8. The operation was led by Arkady Ter-Tadevosyan, the Commander of the self-defense forces of Artsakh.

Arkady Ter-Tadevosyan declared early on May 9 that all groupings of the rival had left Shushi.

Ceylan Yeginsu

The Turkish government has seized the historic Armenian Surp Giragos Church, a number of other churches and large swaths of property in the heavily damaged Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, saying it wants to restore the area but alarming residents who fear the government is secretly aiming to drive them out.

The city, in the heart of Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, has been the scene of heavy fighting for nearly a year, since the Turkish military began a counterinsurgency campaign against militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which ended a two-year cease-fire in July. Many neighborhoods have been left in ruins, and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes. Surp Giragos, one of the largest Armenian churches in the Middle East, was damaged in the fighting and forced to shut its doors.

Both the Armenians, for whom Surp Giragos is an important cultural touchstone, and the Kurds have discerned a hidden agenda in the expropriations. They say the government plans to replace the destroyed neighborhoods they shared with other minorities with luxury rentals and condominiums affordable only to a wealthier, presumably nonminority class of residents.

Some analysts agree, saying even some of the better-off Syrian refugees in Turkey could end up there.

“Solving ethnic and religious strife through demographic engineering is a policy of the Turkish government that goes back well over a century,” said Taner Akcam, a prominent Turkish historian. “The latest developments in Sur,” he added, referring to the historic heart of Diyarbakir, “need to be viewed through this framework.”

Indeed, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party has displayed a predilection for sweeping projects. It was a proposal to build a shopping mall in place of a razed central park in Istanbul that set off mass antigovernment demonstrations in 2013.

Mr. Erdogan announced the government’s urban renewal plans for Diyarbakir in 2011, saying they would “make the city into an international tourism destination.”

Shortly after that speech, the local housing administration started tearing down decrepit residential buildings in Sur, but opposition soon brought a halt to the demolition. Many of the buildings in Sur are protected, prohibiting big restoration projects. Mass construction can be carried out only if the government declares an urgent expropriation, as it has done now.

 

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said recently that the government would rebuild Sur to look like the scenic Spanish city of Toledo. “Everyone will want to come and appreciate its architectural texture,” he said.

Yet for the Armenians and the Kurds, distrust of Turkey’s intentions runs deep. Armenians still have vivid memories of what historians now call the World War I genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks, in which 1.5 million of their countrymen died, and the Kurds have fought the Turkish government on and off for generations.

Diyarbakir is a polyglot city that is home to small Christian congregations of Assyrians, Chaldeans and Turkish converts, as well as to Armenians and Kurds.

Surp Giragos (“Surp” means saint in Armenian), which stands in Sur, closed in the 1960s for lack of parishioners but was renovated and reopened in 2011, part of a reconciliation process begun by the Erdogan government that has returned dozens of properties that the Ottoman Turks confiscated during World War I.

To many Armenians in the area, who lost touch with their family histories after the genocide and were often raised as Muslims by Kurdish families, the church has served as an anchor as they rediscovered their identities.

These “hidden Armenians” emerged as Turkey relaxed its restrictions on minorities, but now they say they again feel threatened.

That helps explain why the government’s seizure of the church struck a particularly raw nerve with the Armenian diaspora and rights groups, who say the expropriation of religious properties and 6,300 plots of land in Diyarbakir is a blatant violation of international law.

“This is reminiscent of the events leading up to the start of the Armenian genocide on April 24, 1915, when properties were illegally confiscated and the population was displaced under the false guise of temporary relocation for its own protection,” said Nora Hovsepian, the chairwoman of the Western Region of the Armenian National Committee of America.

“That temporary relocation,” she added, “turned out to be death marches and a permanent disenfranchisement of two million from their ancestral homeland.”

The Turkish government denies that those killings amounted to genocide, saying thousands of people — many of them Turks — died as a result of civil war.

The local governor’s office defended the decision to expropriate the property in Diyarbakir, saying in a written statement that the main aim was to bring Sur’s potential as a historic quarter to light by restoring registered buildings and replacing irregular structures with new ones that fit the city’s historical fabric. Local officials have said the properties will be returned once they are restored.

But many communities in the area have lost trust in the government, and official statements have been dismissed as insincere.

“The government wants to seize the heart of Diyarbakir and singularize it, ridding it of its rich multifaith and multicultural structure,” Abdullah Demirbas, a former mayor of Diyarbakir, said in a telephone interview.

A video distributed by the prime minister’s office to illustrate the government’s vision for the project has also been criticized for its focus on mosques and residential areas over other prominent religious establishments in the area.

One line of narration in particular drew the attention of religious minorities: “The call to prayer that rises from Diyarbakir’s minarets will not be quieted down.”

The Diyarbakir Bar Association has sued the government, claiming that the project is a work of “military and security reconstruction” and that it will not benefit Sur. The Surp Giragos Church is also preparing to take legal action against the order.

The developments in Sur have marred the steps taken by the Turkish government in recent years toward reconciliation with the nation’s Armenian population.

Last year, a historic Armenian orphanage, built by dozens of descendants of people who survived the genocide, was returned by the government to the Gedikpasa Armenian Protestant Church Foundation, after months of campaigning and the intervention of Mr. Davutoglu.

At the time, Armenians worldwide hailed the decision as an example of how activism by Turkish Armenians could bear fruit.

But critics argued that the restitution of the land just before important elections was politically motivated, and said they doubted that other confiscated properties would be returned in a timely fashion.

“How can we have any trust left when the government backtracks on every positive step taken?” asked Anita Acun, a leader in the Armenian community in Istanbul. “But even so, the situation in Sur came as a surprise. We never imagined history would repeat itself.”

That history, and the traumas associated with those bloody events, have been passed down through generations, and continue to reverberate among Armenians.

“We haven’t been able to go to the church for months, and it’s devastating to hear that it has been damaged in the fighting,” said Onur Kayikci, a Kurdish resident of Sur, who recently became aware of his Armenian ancestry. “For us, it’s not just a building or a place of worship. It’s where we would come to put together the pieces of our history and identity together.”

Amenia’s Nazik Avdalyan won the European Weightlifting Championship in the women’s 69 kg category with a total result of 237 kg.

Nazik lifted 105 kg in the snatch and 132 kg in the clean & jerk.

She dedicated the victory to the all Armenian soldiers fighting in Karabakh.

Two other Armenian weightlifters Andranik Karapetyan and Tigran Martirosyan won gold and silver respectively in an all-Armenian competition for the European title.

The European Weightlifting Championships are under way in Norway.

 

After a successful flight test on Calspan’s variable-stability Learjet aircraft last year, an L1 adaptive flight control system is being modified for the U.S. Air Force’s VISTA F-16 aircraft by Professor Naira Hovakimyan and her graduate students, Kasey Ackerman and Javier Puig-Navarro. Hovakimyan, a W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professor in MechSE, has been developing the L1 adaptive control theory since 2005, accoridng to the 

The VISTA flight test, conducted by the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, is expected to take place in September of this year at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

The progression from testing on the Learjet to the VISTA F-16 was a natural one, said Puig-Navarro, and the next steps will be crucial. The Learjet testing itself was a huge milestone, but only certain aspects of the L1 system were tested on the Learjet aircraft. The Learjet was chosen for the first test at Edwards Air force base because it is less expensive to operate and allowed the researchers to collect over 18 hours of flight data.

“The Learjet is a slower aircraft with inherently stable dynamics, while the F-16 is more maneuverable, with faster dynamics,” Puig-Navarro explained. “The Learjet was definitely very challenging, and a necessary step on the way to the F-16. As a result, all the experience acquired from the Learjet tests was very important to move on to a faster and more dynamically challenging aircraft.”

After the September flight tests, Hovakimyan and her team hope to be one step closer to incorporating an L1 control system on more advanced aircraft, leading (in the distant future) to implementation on commercial aircraft. L1 adaptive control has the potential to make flights much safer, Ackerman said. In the event of a failure, it allows the pilot to focus on landing the airplane and getting the passengers out safely. Additionally, since the L1 system can compensate for undesirable dynamics, it may result in a more pleasant flight experience for passengers, said Puig-Navarro.

L1 adaptive control has been in development for only 10 years, and many more test flights and extended research are required before it can be considered for commercial use.

“Every new opportunity is extremely precious, and we value our relationship with Edwards Air Force Base Test Pilot School students and instructors for helping us to test our methods on a new platform every year,” said Hovakimyan. “The benefits to humanity will be safer aviation, fewer crashes, and more robust and stable flight.”

The first flight tests resulting from Hovakimyan’s research in L1 adaptive control started when NASA, Boeing, and the Air Force were researching methods for improving aviation safety from 2005 to 2010. According to Hovakimyan, previous adaptive methods for controlling aircraft under dangerous conditions needed improvements.

“It was clear that the conventional approach to adaptive control aiming for complete compensation of uncertainties, irrespective of their frequency range, achieved only asymptotic results without any quantification of the transient performance bounds, and it is during the transients resulting from unpredictable circumstances that crashes happen,” she said.

During the first tests on NASA’s AirSTAR’s Generic Transport Model remotely piloted aircraft, the L1 adaptive flight control system was the only research flight controller cleared by NASA test pilots for the unpredictable, highly uncertain stall and post-stall flight regimes, and it consistently delivered predictable performance, rendering the aircraft controllable for the pilots.

Ackerman and Puig-Navarro are looking forward to how their work will continue to unfold. The team believes that the VISTA flight tests will build upon the success of the NASA AirSTAR and Learjet projects and continue to demonstrate the efficacy of L1 adaptive control in aviation safety.

Mathematician Naira Hovakimian was born in Yerevan, Armenia. In 1988 she gratuated from the Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Mechanics Yerevan State University and did her  Ph.Dat the  Russian Academy of Sciences in 1992.