Author: Andranik Taslakhchian

Russia to deliver large batch of medical aid to India soon

Andranik Taslakhchian

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 14:16,

YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. Russia will soon supply a large batch of medical aid to India to help it combat the novel coronavirus, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement, reports TASS.

“The Russian leadership has made a decision in the spirit of friendship and especially privileged strategic partnership between Russia and India and with the goal of combating a surge in the coronavirus incidence. A large batch of assistance will be sent to India on an urgent flight of the Russian Emergencies Ministry, which includes oxygen concentrators, lung ventilators, anti-COVID drugs and other necessary medical supplies and drugs”, the ministry said.

The medical aid will be delivered in the coming days, the ministry stated.

Over the past day, India confirmed 323,100 COVID-19 cases. The total case tally in the country has hit 17.6 mln.

Armenpress: Organizations representing various nationalities issue statement on Armenian Genocide anniversary

Andranik Taslakhchian

Organizations representing various nationalities issue statement on Armenian Genocide anniversary

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 20:24,

YEREVAN, APRIL 27, ARMENPRESS. Organizations representing Armenians, Assyrians, Syriacs, Yazidis, Chaldeans, and Greeks in different countries have issued a joint statement on the occasion of the remembrance day of the Armenian Genocide victims. ARMENPRESS reports the statement issues in yazda.org website runs as follows,

''On the eve of the first official United States presidential recognition of the Armenian Genocide, as community organizations representing Armenians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and other organizations who are advocating for victims, we wish to share a recognition of our own.

April 24, 1915, marked the day intellectuals and leaders of the Armenian community were killed, initiating a program against the Armenian people. On this day, we must remember the lives lost to genocide. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed.

We must also remember that genocide creates a culture of impunity setting a fertile ground for future atrocities and crimes against humanity. Precedence is legitimized when justice is not promptly and fully realized. This is true in the case of the Armenians, as it is true in the cases of other genocides, including the Da’esh genocide against the Yazidis, Christians, and others.

As genocide by Da’esh continues in Sinjar, safety and security are also under severe threat as military airstrikes by the Turkish Air Forces continue to bomb villages inhabited by the Assyrians and Yazidis. Insecurity is now a chronic ailment, giving no capacity to initiate policies to rebuild Sinjar and return the more than 300,000 people displaced since the start of the genocide. The Yazidis, Christians, and other religious minorities continue to face the threats of further atrocities and even community extermination. Our communities are evidence of how humanity pays the most severe of consequences when justice is not served.

The recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the President of the United States Joseph Biden, following that of U.S. Congress, is a critical milestone. On the occasion of this commemoration, we call for the full, all-inclusive recognition of all acts of genocide that deserve equal honor. However, it cannot stop at words. It is indispensable that policies and actions preventing and responding to genocide be grounded in comprehensive approaches that ensure accountability and justice for all survivors, families of victims, and communities''.

List of co-signatories:

Yazda- Yazidi Global Organization (USA)

The Zovighian Partnership (Lebanon)

Shams Humanitarian NGO (Armenia)

Coalition for Genocide Response (U.K)

Emma Organization for Human Development

Assyrian Policy Institute (USA)

Masarat MCMD (Iraq)

Acting President of Supreme Judicial Council hosts Defense Minister

Andranik Taslakhchian

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 10:37, 21 April, 2021

YEREVAN, APRIL 21, ARMENPRESS. Acting President of the Supreme Judicial Council of Armenia Gagik Jhangiryan hosted on April 20 Minister of Defense Vagharshak Harutyunyan, the SJC told Armenpress.

The officials discussed the need for maintaining reasonable timeframes of the investigation of military cases in the courts, as well as a number of other issues.

They agreed to continue the discussions of issues of mutual interest.

 

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan

Biden Could Call The Massacres Of Armenians Genocide. Here’s What That Means : NPR

Andranik Taslakhchian
National Public Radio – NPR
8:11 AM ET

Peter Kenyon

Krishnadev Calamur

Armenian refugees on the deck of a French cruiser that rescued them in 1915 during the massacre of the Armenian populations in the Ottoman Empire. Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images hide caption

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Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

For decades, U.S. presidents have avoided calling the World War I-era mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces an act of genocide.

Now, U.S. lawmakers expect President Biden to make that declaration on Saturday as Armenians mark the anniversary of the atrocities. News reports indicate that while the move is likely, Biden has not made a final decision.

The possible declaration would be hailed by Armenian communities, lawmakers and human rights advocates who have lobbied for it. But it would also damage already strained ties with Turkey.

Although some Turkish leaders have at times voiced regret for the killings, Turkey denies that they constitute genocide and fiercely opposes anyone using the term to describe the period.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a statement Thursday in anticipation of Biden's announcement, said Turkey "will continue to defend truths against the so-called Armenian genocide lie and those who support this slander with political motivations."

Many historians, however, agree that what the Ottoman Turkish forces did to Armenians amounts to genocide.

People hold portraits of Armenian intellectuals who were detained and deported in 1915 during an April 24, 2018, rally in Istanbul commemorating the anniversary of those atrocities against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images

Dueling commemorations

This much is known: Up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed or deported in the violence unleashed by Ottoman Turks starting on April 24, 1915.

Biden Could Call The Massacres Of Armenians Genocide. Here's What That Means : NPR

Armenians, along with many historians and European countries, have called it the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey suppressed accounts of the killings for decades, and to this day staunchly rejects the label of genocide.

In the Military Museum in Istanbul, the room devoted to "Turkish-Armenian relations" is filled with historical photographs, not one of which depicts a slain Armenian — only the bodies of Turkish soldiers that Turkey says were tortured and killed by "Armenian gangs."

Modern Turkey, which emerged following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, has never accepted the general consensus about the Armenian genocide. It prefers to celebrate a different event that took place a day later, on April 25,1915: the victory over Allied forces at World War I's Battle of Gallipoli.

Biden Could Call The Massacres Of Armenians Genocide. Here's What That Means : NPR

In 2015, Turkey moved up a huge centennial celebration of the Gallipoli victory to April 24 in what looked to critics like a transparent effort to drown out ceremonies focused on the Armenian killings.

The background

The Ottoman Empire once covered parts of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East and was home to Turks, Kurds, Armenians and many others. But by the start of World War I in 1914, it was crumbling. A few years earlier, a group of young army officers — named the Young Turks — seized power. And in World War I, they sided with the Central Powers — Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire — against the Allies, Britain, France and Russia.

Biden Could Call The Massacres Of Armenians Genocide. Here's What That Means : NPR

Historian Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of the Ottomans, told NPR's Steve Inskeep in 2015 that the Ottomans crossed into Russia thinking they might be able to strike a blow. Instead, they lost. There had been massacres of Armenians in the past, but with the loss to the Russians, he said, the Ottomans began to question the loyalties of the Armenians.

He added: "What happened was a small number of [Armenian] militants who did cross over to the Russian side, who did actively try and recruit Armenians to support the Russian cause, made life extremely dangerous for the majority of Armenian civilians who basically had no fight with anyone, did not wish to be drawn into any war and found themselves under tremendous pressure; soldiers who, suspected by their Turkish comrades, begin to get shot down."

The Ottomans' ruling Committee of Union and Progress and government officials planned to relocate the Armenians forcibly from Anatolia, where they lived, bordering Russia, to the Arab parts of the empire, where they were deemed to be less of a threat. But Rogan said the plans for the Armenians went beyond those that were written down. He added:

"It was through testimony presented in trials the Ottomans convened after the war that we now know that the Committee of Union and Progress agreed to give, orally, orders for the extermination of Armenians: that men and women would be separated at the moment of departing their villages, that the men would be massacred and that the women would be marched under conditions in which only a fraction of them would survive.

"And the theory that most Turkish scholars of the genocide are putting forward was that the Ottoman plan was to reduce the demographic profile of the Armenians so that they would not exceed 5% to 10% in any given province. It wasn't … to try and eliminate the Armenians in their entirety, but it was to make sure that the Armenians would never constitute a critical mass to seek separation for the Ottoman Empire as an independent Armenian state."

Earlier violence against Armenians

Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were targeted even in the 19th century, but historians don't call those events a genocide. The reason, writer Peter Balakian told NPR's Robert Siegel in 2015, was that the earlier killings were "putative — they were punishments for Armenian progressive reform movement. They weren't designed to exterminate the entire population or rid the Ottoman Empire of its Armenian population, but they begin a very important process of devaluing and dehumanizing this ethnic minority group."

Here's what he said was different about the events of 1915:

"I think that the Ottoman government's final solution for the Armenian people of Turkey represented a shift in organized, state-planned mass killing. The Ottoman government was able to expedite its mass killing of a targeted minority population in a concentrated period of time. So it's important to realize that the Ottoman government murdered more than a million Armenians between 1915 and 1916 alone — perhaps 1.2 million is the number you come to by the end of the summer of 1916."

The U.S. view

The U.S., an ally of Turkey, has historically called the World War I-era killings an atrocity despite years of lobbying by the Armenian community in the United States.

Although former President Ronald Reagan referred to "the genocide of the Armenians" in a 1981 proclamation remembering victims of the Nazi Holocaust, his predecessors and successors have fallen short of that description.

Then in late 2019, Congress passed a resolution that lawmakers said "recognizes the Armenian genocide on behalf of the U.S. government," although the Trump administration refused to support the policy change.

Biden pledged his support for that recognition when he was a candidate last year, and he pushed for it as a senator.

Under U.S. law — including legislation introduced in 1987 by Biden, then a senator — genocide refers to killing, injury, torture or other acts "with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group."

The term wasn't around at the time of the killings by Ottoman Turks. It was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, who combined the Greek word genos, meaning race or family, with the suffix "-cide," which comes from the Latin for killing, to describe the events of the Holocaust and previous instances in history.

As a teenager, Lemkin was drawn to the story of what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire after reading about a survivor of the atrocities. And in interviews in the 1940s he described the events as the Armenian genocide.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which describes the events as a genocide, sees Lemkin's "early exposure to the history of Ottoman attacks against Armenians, anti-Semitic pogroms, and other cases of targeted violence as key to his beliefs about the need for the protection of groups under international law. Inspired by the murder of his own family during the Holocaust, Lemkin tirelessly championed this legal concept until it was codified in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948."

A previous version of this story, written by Krishnadev Calamur in Washington, was published on April 24, 2015, with the headline: "A Century After Atrocities Against Armenians, An Unresolved Wound." Peter Kenyon, reporting from Istanbul, wrote this update to reflect developments, including expectation that President Biden could recognize the massacres as genocide.

US President Tells Erdogan He Will Use Term "Armenian Genocide"

Andranik Taslakhchian
Greek Reporter

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<img alt='' src=”'https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c076d5cde1280304054e177b005bd4c3?s=96&d=mm&r=g'” srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c076d5cde1280304054e177b005bd4c3?s=192&d=mm&r=g 2x' class='avatar avatar-96 photo' height='96' width='96' />

By Patricia Claus
<img class="wp-image-727740 size-full" src=”"https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/armenian-genocide-publid-domain.jpg" alt="Armenian Genocide Biden" width="700" height="425" srcset="https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/armenian-genocide-publid-domain.jpg 700w, https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/armenian-genocide-publid-domain-300×182.jpg 300w, https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/armenian-genocide-publid-domain-150×91.jpg 150w, https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/armenian-genocide-publid-domain-600×364.jpg 600w, https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/armenian-genocide-publid-domain-696×423.jpg 696w, https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/armenian-genocide-publid-domain-1392×845.jpg 1392w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" /> The city of Adana after it was ravaged by Ottoman Turkish forces during the Armenian Genocide. Public domain

In a surprise move on Friday, US President Biden said that he had told Turkish President Erdogan that he was going to use the term “Armenian Genocide” — marking the first time in forty years that an American president has used that explosive term.

Usually referring to the atrocity as a disaster or a massacre, previous presidents have sidestepped actually terming what happened to the Armenians prior to World War I a “genocide,” the systematic killing of an entire people.

<img width="1080" height="150" src=”"https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GRD-1664WebAd1080x150-4-min-1.jpg" alt="Grecian Delight supports Greece" >

Ronald Reagan was the last American president to call the atrocities committed against the Armenians a “genocide,” back in 1981. However, he quickly backtracked under pressure from Turkey, and no other President since that time has dared to tread on Turkey’s feet by sing that emotion-laden term.

Erdogan has in the past rebuked other countries that have labeled the atrocities against  the Armenians a genocide, and Biden’s declaration, which he telegraphed several days ago, will likely strain relations with the difficult NATO ally, which frequently locks horns with Greece over oil and gas rights sovereignty in the Mediterranean.

Tomorrow, April 24, marks the anniversary of the Armenian genocide, when Christian Armenians were massacred, raped, enslaved and driven from their ancestral homelands in what is now Turkey.

In other news emerging on Friday, the Greek government stated that the European Union is not giving Turkey a “blank check” in the Eastern Mediterranean in the measures adopted by EU leaders in a virtual meeting on Friday.

According to reports, the EU is calling on Turkey to refrain from any renewed provocations or unilateral actions in violation of international law, and is also offering Ankara a “phased, proportionate and reversible” way to enhance collaboration between the countries.

The sources said that Turkey “will have to show consistency and continuity and will continue to be evaluated,” and any decisions made along the way  will be referred to the European Council in June.

 

The White House issued a press release confirming that the American President had spoken with Erdogan earlier today, saying only that “President Joseph R. Biden spoke today with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, conveying his interest in a constructive bilateral relationship with expanded areas of cooperation and effective management of disagreements.

“The leaders agreed to hold a bilateral meeting on the margins of the NATO Summit in June to discuss the full range of bilateral and regional issues.”

No mention was made in that release of the Armenian genocide.

This is a developing story.

WCC urges US government to recognize Armenian Genocide

Andranik Taslakhchian
ICN – Independent Catholic News
  • Apr 22nd, 2021

WCC representatives at Armenian Genocide memorial, Yerevan, 100th anniversary of Armenian Genocide. Photo: Marianne Ejdersten/WCC

Source: WCC

"Recognition of the Armenian Genocide is a matter of fundamental principle, an essential step towards healing, reconciliation and reparation, and – most importantly – a vital measure for the prevention of genocide today and in the future," wrote Rev Prof Dr Ioan Sauca, acting general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in a letter to United States President Joe Biden on 21 April.

This year marks the 106th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, carried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923, resulting in the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians. Sauca's letter to Biden stresses that this tragedy has still not been officially recognized by many world authorities, including the United States.

The WCC is requesting official recognition by Biden of the Armenian Genocide "as a sign of your commitment and your leadership for human rights, justice and peace in the world," reads the letter.

Read the full letter HERE. https://www.oikoumene.org/resources/documents/wcc-acting-general-secretary-letter-to-us-president-on-the-recognition-of-the-armenian-genocide

Demonstrator to Armenia PM: Your time is almost up, you are damned by the people

Andranik Taslakhchian
News.am, Armenia
21:30, 21.04.2021

Nikol left the residents of Syunik Province alone with the Turks, and I call on our sisters and brothers to not leave them alone. This is what member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation-Dashnaktsutyun political party Gegham Manukyan said during today’s demonstration in support of the residents of Syunik Province near the governmental mansion.

At this moment, a large number of police officers are patrolling the demonstration, the participants of which are chanting “Nikol, traitor”.

“Today the residents of Syunik Province showed that they won’t forgive, that they have dignity and showed that they will fight and achieve victory. The traitor won’t be able to take a step anymore. The Armenian people haven’t forgiven and won’t forgive him. What happened in Syunik today showed once again that the public support that Nikol Pashinyan talks about is a myth,” one of the demonstrators said, stating that both entrances to the governmental mansion are blocked.

Another demonstrator addressed Nikol and said his term of office is drawing to an end since he is damned by the people, adding that he and his political team are the number one threat to the country.

Armenia ready to provide platform for producing 100,000 doses of Russian Sputnik V vaccine monthly

Andranik Taslakhchian

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 17:01,

YEREVAN, APRIL 16, ARMENPRESS. Discussions on organizing a joint production of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19 in Armenia continue, Artak Kamalyan, Member of the Board – Minister in charge of Industry and Agroindustrial Complex at the Eurasian Economic Commission, said during an online discussion, adding that Armenia is ready to provide platform for producing nearly 100,000 doses monthly.

“I know that these discussions have been going on since last December and continue now as well. As far as I know, Armenia is ready to provide platform for producing nearly 100,000 doses a month. I hope the talks will end soon, and we will start concrete actions”, he said.  

COVID-19 vaccinations have started in Armenia from April 13. 24,000 doses of the British AstraZeneca vaccine and 15,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine have already been supplied to Armenia.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan

Pashinyan denies having ordered re-take of “Lalatapa” height lost in 2016

Andranik Taslakhchian

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 12:50,

YEREVAN, APRIL 14, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is denying the claims that he ordered the military to re-take the Varazatumb, aka Lalatapa height during the 2020 war which had been captured by Azeri forces during the 2016 April war.

“They say I had made a decision, that I said ‘go and capture it’, Serzh Sargsyan surrendered it, and in this context we took 700 casualties. This is complete nonsense,” Pashinyan said in parliament when asked on the accusations by MP Taguhi Tovmasyan.

“The recommendation of this operation was made by a general, the operation was found acceptable by a general, the assessment of the possibility for carrying it out was made by a general and the decision was made by the kind of generals who at that moment had the possibility for making that decision. I moderated the conversation and didn’t even express my own opinion. I asked the senior-most [official], he said it is a good idea after which the situation was assessed and he briefed me that indeed it can and should be done.”

Pashinyan noted that all episodes of the war must be investigated.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan