Ani Kharatian – Page 31 – Armenian Directory & News

Armenpress: France concerned over opening of ”trophy park” in Baku, which is against reconciliation desire

May 9, 2021May 9, 2021 Ani Kharatian

France concerned over opening of ''trophy park'' in Baku, which is against reconciliation desire

18:01, 6 May, 2021

YEREVAN, MAY 6, ARMENPRESS. France is concerned over the opening of the ''trophy park'' by Azerbaijan in Baku, where Armenian military equipment taken as trophy and wax mannequins depicting Armenian soldiers are exhibited, a diplomatic source of ARMENPRESS at the Foreign Ministry of France said.

‘’As a Minsk Group Co-chair country, France is committed to the establishment of sustainable peace and prosperity in the region. France is concerned over the public exhibition during the opening of the park on dedicated to the military victory in the last war of Nagorno Karabakh. This deadly conflict has caused much grief and disaster in many families both in Armenia and Azerbaijan, and that opening ceremony goes against the reconciliation desire which in numerous occasions has been supported also by the Azerbaijani authorities’’, the diplomatic source said.

France will continue working together with the other Co-chairs for reaching the goals defined by the April 13 statement of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs. ‘’This is the demand of the President and Minister of the Republic’’, the source at the French Foreign Ministry said.

The April 13 statement runs as follows,

‘’ The Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group (Igor Popov of the Russian Federation, Stephane Visconti of France, and Andrew Schofer of the United States of America) released the following statement today:

The Co-Chairs note with satisfaction the consolidation of the ceasefire, and are closely monitoring the implementation of the agreement reached by the parties on 9 November 2020. The Co-Chairs welcome the significant achievements with regard to the return of the remains of the deceased, and the ongoing progress with regard to the resettlement of those displaced by the conflict, provision of humanitarian assistance and adequate living conditions, as well as constructive discussions aimed at unblocking transportation and communication lines throughout the region.

The Co-Chairs remind the sides that additional efforts are required to resolve remaining areas of concern and to create an atmosphere of mutual trust conducive to long-lasting peace. These include issues related to, inter alia: the return of all POWs and other detainees in accordance with the provisions of international humanitarian law, the exchange of all data necessary to conduct effective demining of conflict regions; the lifting of restrictions on access to Nagorno-Karabakh, including for representatives of international humanitarian organizations; the preservation and protection of religious and cultural heritage; and the fostering of direct contacts and co-operation between communities affected by the conflict as well as other people-to-people confidence building measures.

Having in mind the terms of their OSCE mandate and the aspirations of all the people of the region for a stable, peaceful, and prosperous future, the Co-Chairs stress that special attention should be paid to the achievement of a final comprehensive and sustainable settlement on the basis of the elements and principles well-known to the sides.

In this respect, the Co-Chairs call on the parties to resume high-level political dialogue under the auspices of the Co-Chairs at the earliest opportunity. They reiterate their proposal to organize direct bilateral consultations under their auspices, in order for the sides to review and agree jointly upon a structured agenda, reflecting their priorities, without preconditions.

The Co-Chairs also express their strong support for the continuing activities and possible expansion of the mission of the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chair-in-Office (PRCiO) and call on the sides to provide full access and support to its efforts. The Co-Chairs underscore their readiness to resume working visits to the region, including Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas, to carry out their assessment and mediation roles. In this regard, the Co-Chairs remind the sides of the requirement to provide unimpeded access and maximum flexibility of movement with regard to the Co-Chairs’ travel itineraries, in accordance with their mandate and previous practice'’.

Pashinyan made arrangement with Aliyev to return POWs, raise his popularity rating, says Armenia ex-official

May 9, 2021May 9, 2021 Ani Kharatian

News.am, Armenia

May 8 2021

14:47, 08.05.2021

YEREVAN. – I believe [acting PM] Nikol Pashinyan has made an arrangement with [Azerbaijani president] Aliyev to return a few more captives and raise his popularity rating in the [snap parliamentary] elections [slated for June 20]. Tatul Petrosyan, former head of the General Department of Supervision of the Investigative Committee of Armenia, told this to a press conference Saturday.

According to him, the actions of the current Armenian regime are based on lies, and now they are trying to extend their power and carry out the orders of their "clients."

As per Petrosyan, Pashinyan's recent remarks show that he has psychological problems; he began to attribute labels—such as “traitor” and “capitulator”—to the second and third presidents of Armenia, although such assessments are addressed to him. "Speaking about the fact that Shushi [town] and Artsakh [(Nagorno-Karabakh)] were handed over [to the Azerbaijanis] a long time ago, Pashinyan seems to be forgetting his words about starting negotiations from scratch, which led to a deadlock and disaster. In conditions when many Armenians are still in Azerbaijani captivity, he speaks of unblocking communications and peaceful coexistence with the Turks. During his last visit to Armenia, [Russian FM] Lavrov confirmed that there was and there is no pressure or demand on the issue of unblocking; that is, it is Pashinyan's free _expression_ of will," Petrosyan emphasized.

He added that the incumbent Armenian authorities managed to destroy almost the entire state system, except for the courts and the human rights defender.

Pobeda Airline announces more flights to Armenia

May 5, 2021May 5, 2021 Ani Kharatian

18:15, 4 May, 2021

YEREVAN, MAY 4, ARMENPRESS. The Russian Pobeda Airline announced it is increasing its flights to Armenia.

Starting June 1, the airline will operate 4 roundtrip flights a week to Armenia. On Thursdays it will operate the Moscow-Gyumri flight, the Sochi-Gyumri flight on Saturdays, Krasnodar-Gyumri on Fridays and from June 2 the Minvody-Gyumri flight on Sundays.

Biden’s Long-Overdue Recognition of the Armenian Genocide Could—but Probably Won’t—Produce a Foreign Policy Rethink

May 3, 2021May 3, 2021 Ani Kharatian

REASON

April 26 2021

MATT WELCH | 4.26.2021 3:35 PM

(MURAD SEZER/REUTERS/Newscom)

On Saturday, April 24, for the first time in 40 years, an American president summoned the courage to use the accurate term to describe a century-old war crime.

"Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring," President Joe Biden declared, in the White House's annual message marking the National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man.

Previous residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., most brazenly Biden's former boss Barack Obama, had shied away from using the word genocide to describe the organized Turkish slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians from 1915–1923, despite campaigning piously on the promise to call evil by its proper name. (Donald Trump never made that promise, though George W. Bush did.)

Why the cowardice? Because the subject is considered near taboo in Turkey, due to any whiff of suggestion that the sainted founder of the post-Ottoman country, Kemal Ataturk, might have his fingerprints near a crime scene. Over the years, Ankara has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on increasingly ineffective diplomatic efforts to prevent its fellow NATO members from using the g-word, implicitly threatening to revoke America's access to the strategically important Incirlik Air Base.

As former U.S. ambassador to Armenia John Marshall Evans—who was encouraged to resign from the State Department after publicly uttering the word "genocide" in conversation with the passionate Armenian-American diaspora—explained to me a decade ago, "Turkey is a hugely important ally, and little landlocked Armenia, population 3 million at best, is never going weigh in those scales in such a way as to even make a showing." From Washington's point of view, it was too much potential real-world pain for too little linguistic gain.

So what changed in 2021? Congressional impatience with the increasingly authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for one. The House and Senate in late 2019 each overwhelmingly passed, over Trump's objections, resolutions stating that "it is the policy of the United States to commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance."

Ankara and Washington have been at loggerheads over U.S. support for Syria Kurds (who Turkey regards as terrorist threats); Turkey's purchase of Russian missiles (which America believes could jeopardize NATO technology secrets), plus Erdoğan's human rights record, which Biden finds more appalling than his predecessor.

In a December 2019 interview with The New York Times, Biden called Erdoğan an "autocrat" and vowed to take "a very different approach to him now, making it clear that we support opposition leadership," helping them "to be able to take on and defeat Erdogan. Not by a coup but by the electoral process."

In a television address this weekend, Erdoğan called Biden's new wording "groundless and unfair," adding: "We believe that these comments were included in the declaration following pressure from radical Armenian groups and anti-Turkish circles." Erdoğan also advised his U.S. counterpart to "look in the mirror," since "we can also talk about what happened to Native Americans, Blacks and in Vietnam."

Many libertarians and other skeptics of U.S. military adventurism get tetchy when Washington escalates adjectives to describe faraway slaughter. For decades, "humanitarian interventionists" such as Madeleine Albright and Samantha Power and their neoconservative counterparts on the right have used the g-word, and in Power's case the Armenian genocide recognition explicitly, as a necessary precursor to the use of force. Obama, with Power's encouragement, used the spectre of a possible "massacre," "slaughter," and "mass graves" in Benghazi to justify his disastrous war of choice in Libya.

But the standard for language should be accuracy, not how words might be leveraged into disagreeable policy. One of the reasons that foreign policy "realism" has gotten such a bad name is that all too often it has been conflated (by practitioners as well as commentators) with realpolitik—with the situational ethics and conscience-straining two-facedness required by maneuvering through a fallen world.

In fact, it is interventionism that requires such grubby compromises, as I have argued when writing about Samantha Power and her ilk. We would care much less about the owners of Incirlik Air Base if we stopped using it so damned much. Using precise language undistorted by political necessities—which, to be fair, does not come naturally to the State Department—need not be a trigger to war. After all, Ronald Reagan, the last sitting U.S. president to use the phrase "Armenian genocide," was able to issue clear-eyed condemnations of several regimes he had zero intention of bombing.

The Biden administration could—but almost certainly won't—use America's long-overdue presidential recognition of the Armenian genocide to more firmly decouple language from interventionism, thus freeing up space for more blunt but less fraught international relations. As Thomas Jefferson said in the famous quote, whose overlooked emphasis is mine: "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none."

Armenian expert: Artsakh people first and foremost need security

May 3, 2021May 3, 2021 Ani Kharatian

Panorama, Armenia

April 30 2021

The people of Artsakh first and foremost need security, because without it development cannot be ensured and migration cannot be prevented, according to Armenian military expert Tigran Abrahamyan, the head of the analytical center Henaket and a former security advisor to the Artsakh president.

“There is great uncertainty, which can be dispelled, first of all, by introducing the necessary security mechanisms and providing an opportunity for the Artsakh people to earn their living,” the expert wrote on Facebook on Friday.

“Socio-economic issues, no matter how serious they are, can be overcome if security is ensured.

"We must create an optimistic outlook on tomorrow, not through promises and populist statements, but through actions and significant changes in line with priorities,” Abrahamyan said.

Armenian Genocide Warning by Far-Right Turkish Lawmaker Prompts Criminal Complaint

April 29, 2021April 29, 2021 Ani Kharatian

Newsweek

By Brendan Cole On 4/28/21 at 9:58 AM EDT

A criminal complaint has been filed against a far-right Turkish politician for tweets about the mass killings of Armenians, amid a heated debate over the topic in the days since President Joe Biden recognized the deaths as genocide.

The Human Rights Association in Turkey has filed the complaint against the independent lawmaker Ümit Özdağ, who engaged in a Twitter spat with Garo Paylan, a Turkish politician of Armenian descent.

On April 24, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, Biden said: "Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide."

The government in Yerevan celebrated the president's comments, but they sparked a rebuke from Ankara. On the same day, Paylan wrote on Twitter about his unhappiness that streets and schools in Turkey were still named after Talaat Pasha.

Pasha was an Ottoman politician and one of the leaders who ordered the exile of Ottoman Armenians in 1915. Armenia says around 1.5 million people died in a planned operation that constitutes genocide.

"After 106 years, we walk on streets named after Talaat Pasha, the architect of the Genocide," Paylan tweeted, according to a translation from Turkish. Germany, he pointed out, did not have streets or schools named after Adolf Hitler.

Özdağ replied, telling Paylan to "go to hell." He tweeted: "Talaat Pasha didn't expel patriotic Armenians but those who stabbed us in the back like you. When the time comes, you'll also have a Talaat Pasha experience and you should have it."

The pair then exchanged a flurry of tweets, with Paylan calling Özdağ a "fascist" and adding: "Those left behind never give up the struggle for justice."

Paylan, a member of parliament from the Peoples' Democratic Party—the only Turkish political party to recognize the killings as genocide—told the magazine Duvar: "Our country is in an atmosphere of hate and the political scene ignores these hate speeches."

Turkey's Erdogan Calls for History Panel After Biden 'Genocide' Statement
Armenians Hail Biden Genocide Declaration as Turkey Summons US Ambassador
Turkish Official Slams Biden for Statement on Armenian 'Genocide'

The Human Rights Association's criminal complaint requests that a lawsuit be filed against Özdağ under Articles 106 and 216 of the Turkish Penal Code, which cover threats and provoking public hatred.

The organisation is also seeking a discrimination charge under the European Convention on Human Rights, Turkish press agency Bianet reported.

Özdağ, who is described by Turkish news outlets as a far-right lawmaker, now sits as an independent member of parliament. He was previously removed from senior posts in the Nationalist Movement Party and the IYI Party.

Newsweek has contacted Özdağ and the Human Rights Association for comment.

Yerevan celebrated Biden's decision to go further than his predecessors in describing the massacre of Armenians in 1915 and 1916 as genocide.

Ankara acknowledges that deaths occurred, but rejects the idea that there was any systemic or organised effort—and the use of the term genocide. Biden's statement has strained U.S. ties with its NATO partner. Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, Turkey's foreign minister, said: "We will not be given lessons on our history from anyone."

Online lending to small and medium-sized businesses is now available on the Converse Bank website

April 28, 2021April 28, 2021 Ani Kharatian

09:44,

Converse Bank announces the launch of an online platform for lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): https://sme.conversebank.am/

The launch of the platform is another step towards comprehensive banking and consulting services for our SME clients.

Last year, after having assessed the requirements of the bank's corporate clients, Converse Bank established a designated center for financing small and medium-sized enterprises in Armenia, where entrepreneurs can not only use complex banking services, but also benefit from the consulting support to launch and develop their business.

At this stage, with the launch of an online platform for lending to small and medium-sized enterprises, Converse Bank invites entrepreneurs to fill out a loan application by following a few simple steps from the link above, thus saving time on visiting the bank.

At the moment, the platform also provides a complete turnaround of lending process within the framework of Converse Bank's product – Converse-Fast. The list of available lending products will be expanding in the future.

Converse Bank will continue to develop new solutions for SME clients. In the near future, the bank will launch new projects aimed at supporting business.

The oversight of the Bank is performed by the Central Bank of Armenia.

NY Armenian community leaders ‘cautiously optimistic’ as Biden reportedly signals he’ll recognize the Armenian genocide

April 24, 2021April 24, 2021 Ani Kharatian

Spectrum News NY1

NY Armenian community leaders 'cautiously optimistic' as Biden reportedly signals he'll recognize the Armenian genocide

By Kevin Frey

Washington, D.C.

PUBLISHED 7:00 AM ET Apr. 23, 2021

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is signaling that it will recognize the Armenian genocide. For some members of the Armenian community in New York, the news is being met with cautious optimism.

“We've been here before, we've been told before, and we've been disappointed before,” said Antranig Karageozian, Chairman of the Armenian National Committee of Albany.

The New York Times and other outlets are reporting Biden could make the designation in coming days. Saturday is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.

A century ago, in the midst of World War I, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deported and massacred at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Karageozian’s organization has long called for the U.S. to label the systematic killings genocide.

“My grandfather actually lost his first wife and two children in the massacres. They were burned alive in a church,” Karageozian said.

U.S. presidents have used a host of words to describe the atrocities, but have shied away from the term genocide itself, fearful of upsetting Turkey, a NATO ally.

“The reason the U.S. has not done this before is Turkey has always threatened all sorts of things,” said Hope Harrison, a professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University.

Harrison, who previously served as director of European and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council from 2000-2001, said Turkey has long been an important U.S. ally in the Middle East.

Turkey’s leaders reject that the atrocities amounted to genocide. Using the term, which indicates the Ottoman Empire’s intent was to annihilate the Armenian population, could upend that U.S.-Turkey relationship.

Historically, she said, “the balance between sort of justice and realpolitik kept falling toward the realpolitik side of things.” If the Biden administration recognizes the deaths as genocide, she said, it would be a “very big move.”

Other nations, including U.S. allies, have already labeled the killings genocide.

As for Armenian-Americans like Karageozian, he says that if Biden follows through, the declaration would amount to a step toward justice.

“This is embedded in every Armenian’s blood, and heart and soul that these atrocities happened,” he said. “We've lost our families and territories. The question becomes what would have happened if this genocide never occurred?”

The relationship between the Biden White House and Turkey is already shaky, especially compared with the Trump administration’s relationship with the country.

On the campaign trail, Biden called Turkey’s president an “autocrat,” and he pledged to label the killings a genocide.

In recent weeks, New York lawmakers have joined with the congressional colleagues in signing onto bipartisan letters to the to the president, urging him to use the term genocide. Those letters can be found here.

Biden’s bold move to recognize the Armenian genocide

April 23, 2021April 23, 2021 Ani Kharatian

Washington Post

Aaron Blake

at 5:43 p.m. UTC

President Biden is preparing to go where no president since Ronald Reagan has gone — and where many have been scared away from venturing: recognizing the Armenian genocide.

The Post’s John Hudson confirms that Biden is expected to become the first president in more than three decades to officially label as genocide the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

The move comes after plenty of fits and starts in the U.S. journey toward this moment. It also reflects an increasing boldness by the Biden administration both when it comes to human rights and the U.S. government’s relationship with Turkey — a complex alliance that has deteriorated in recent years but which still makes such a decision fraught.

The news also comes on the eve of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day on Friday — a date on which much of the world reflects on what it has deemed to be a genocide.

For decades, though, the United States has stopped short of that — and conspicuously so — for fear of angering Turkey and harming relations with a key ally in a vitally important region. Presidents have campaigned by declaring it a genocide and pledged to recognize it as such, but then failed to follow through. Congress has repeatedly sought to apply pressure to take that step, only to have it fall upon deaf ears.

George W. Bush wrote a letter during the 2000 campaign in which he said he would recognize the genocide, but then backed away from it as the United States once again became entangled in the Middle East and Turkey became important to the war effort in Iraq. By 2007, Bush urged Congress to reject a resolution recognizing the genocide.

Barack Obama too said during his 2008 campaign that he would recognize the genocide, but his administration never did so in his eight years. Some top foreign policy aides including Samantha Power have since expressed regret for not making good on that promise.

About the closest an administration has come to recognizing the genocide this century actually came, somewhat counterintuitively, during the presidency of Donald Trump. Trump otherwise sought a controversially close relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, even as Erdoğan drifted further toward authoritarianism. But in a news conference, then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at one point referred to the vandalism of an “Armenian Genocide Memorial.”

In a response that reflected how sensitive this topic is, Turkey objected to the use of the word even in that context, while acknowledging that it might simply have been a “slip of the tongue.” And it did indeed turn out to be an aberration. The Trump administration pushed back on a congressional attempt to recognize the genocide in 2019. Even when legislation passed overwhelmingly with huge bipartisan support, the State Department declared that it didn’t reflect the official position of the administration.

So why now? According to experts, the answer is a combination of the Biden administration getting bolder than its predecessors on human rights — it has also labeled the killing of Uyghur Muslims in China a genocide — and on Turkey in general, along with relations with Turkey deteriorating despite Trump’s efforts to cozy up to Erdoğan.

Previously, the Biden White House issued a statement calling Turkey’s decision to withdraw from a European convention on women’s rights and domestic abuse “deeply disappointing.” The administration also issued a tough verdict on Turkey in a report on human rights abuses around the world. Biden has flatly labeled Erdoğan an autocrat and promised to confront a “new moment of advancing authoritarianism” (while not explicitly tying the comment to Turkey). And Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in his confirmation hearing, referred to Turkey as “a strategic — so-called strategic — partner of ours” while criticizing its drift toward Russia.

“Biden has upended the traditional way in which U.S. presidents engage with Turkey,” said Aaron Stein, a Turkey expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “The way in which the U.S. traditionally has dealt with Turkey is to try and keep them enmeshed closely with the United States and Europe through sustained engagement and tight military ties.”

Stein added: “Biden has flipped this thinking and has pocketed the idea that Turkey has no interest in leaving groups like NATO, but that close cooperation with Washington is not something that Ankara can take for granted any longer. Instead, Erdoğan has to earn it. … His administration has made the relationship nakedly transactional and, in this way, his team has become much more Turkish in how they view bilateral relations.”

While the move to recognize the Armenian genocide would build upon that nascent effort to apply pressure, there’s a reason recent presidents have avoided it. Despite an uneasy alliance, Turkey has declared such a move to be completely unacceptable and an affront to it and its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Given Turkey’s strategic placement in the Middle East, it carries potential implications in a number of areas, depending upon the response — including Russia, Syria and Ukraine.

“If dramatic, which is possible, then the relationship could really break, with impact on our forces in Turkey, cooperation on Syria, Ukraine, Libya and Iran, leading to a U.S. counter-reaction and a downward spiral,” said James F. Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq who is now with the Wilson Center.

For one, experts say it could tempt Turkey to align even more closely with Russia. Turkey has been on the opposite side of Russia in a number of conflicts, including in Ukraine and Syria. It has also supported Armenia’s interests in the region. But Turkey and Russia have occasionally found their interests aligned when it comes to American influence. The Trump administration also sanctioned Turkey last year over its purchase of a Russian missile defense system.

“It would also be consistent with Putin’s MO,” said Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations. “He offers good ties to American partners who are having trouble with the United States.”

While very few expect the decision to have immediate and recognizable impact on Turkey’s human rights practices, some see potential benefits beyond simply doing what’s right by applying the “genocide” label. Turkey faces plenty of economic strain, has lost a number of allies in recent years, and public sentiment has turned against Erdoğan. Turkey’s large youth population poses an increasing threat to Erdoğan.

Jenny White of the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies says the United States increasingly has leverage in the relationship, which makes the Biden administration’s decision more practical.

“President Biden has made democracy and human rights a central tenet of his administration. At this point, the Biden administration has nothing to lose by acknowledging Turkey’s failure in these respects,” White said. “What could nudge Turkey to change? Turkey needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs Turkey right now.”

In other words, it makes sense to finally do what top American politicians have been threatening to do for a very long time. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a bold step that couldn’t reverberate in the region and in U.S. foreign policy. And it’s one of the biggest early subplots in Biden’s emerging foreign policy agenda.

Armenia premier is greeted with cursing, whistles in Meghri town

April 22, 2021April 22, 2021 Ani Kharatian

News.am, Armenia

13:02, 21.04.2021

Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was greeted with cursing and whistles in Meghri town of Syunik Province.

When Pashinyan left a building, the crowd that had assembled there started whistling and making hostile remarks at him

Nikol Pashinyan quickly got in his official car and left.

Armenian News-NEWS.am had reported Tuesday that the PM had left for Syunik Province in top secrecy.

And last night, Armenian News-NEWS.am learned that Pashinyan visited Shurnukh village at night.

There are press reports that the PM was received by the local residents indignantly and coldly.

To note, the Syunik Police chief, his deputy, and the Goris and Kapan town police chiefs were changed unexpectedly on Monday.

Also, except for one community, the leaders of all other Syunik communities have publicly demanded Pashinyan's resignation.