Author: Arbi Tashjian

The State Youth Orchestra of Armenia, under the baton of maestro Sergey Smbatyan, performed on the same stage with world-renowned violinist Ara Malikian, who was nominated for “Latin Grammy.”

The concerts took place on September 25, in “Mozart” Concert Hall in Zaragoza, and on September 26 in Royal Theatre of Madrid.

Works by Khachaturian, Mendelssohn, Paganini, Tchaikovsky and others, works from “Led Zeppelin” repertoire were performed. M Ara Malikian’s  “1915”, dedicated to the victims of the Armenian Genocide, specially written for these concerts, was also presented.

Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the State Youth Orchestra of Armenia Sergey Smbatyan said it was interesting for the Orchestra and for himself to work with a unique musician like Ara Malikian.

Ara Malikian was born in Beirut, studied in London and lives in Madrid. He is a virtuoso violinist with bright expressiveness, an author of a dozen albums. The sound of his violin is the most original and innovative in the contemporary music world. Malikian participates in numerous prestigious international competitions, performing more than 450 concerts in 40 countries around the world every year.

Sergey Smbatyan noted also that in 2016 they will try to invite Ara Malikian to Armenia. “We are always looking for Armenians in other nations but we forget that we have real Armenian heroes that affect the formation of the image of Armenia abroad,” Smbatyan added.

Pope Francis has begun his tour of the US, where he is expected to greet millions of American Catholics and address thorny issues like climate change and income inequality, the BBC reports.

US President Barack Obama welcomed the pope as he landed on Tuesday – a rare honour for a foreign dignitary.

The pontiff will visit Washington DC, New York and Philadelphia.

Before he departed Cuba on Tuesday, he called on its people to live a “revolution of tenderness”.

In the final Mass of his four-day visit to the island, with President Raul Castro attending, he urged thousands of Cubans to serve one another and not an ideology.

 

 

 

The performance of young jazz musicians and a press conference at Charles Aznavour Square marked the start of the Yerevan Jazz Fest 2015. The festival held at the initiative of the Armenian Jazz Association and the Mezzo Production Company will consist of three concerts scheduled for September 17, 18 and 19. The event will feature both Armenian and foreign jazzmen, including famous American jazz musician Richard Bona

Jazz festival was held in Yerevan in 2006. One of Armenian jazz legends Armen Tutunjyan (Chiko) hopes the event will become continuous.

“This is an event Yerevan needs as a city that has lived and breathed with jazz rhythms for years,” singer Erna Yuzbashyan says.

“Armenia has had great jazzmen and has a huge potential today,” she told a press conference today.

The Armenian Government approved a draft decision today on the sale of the 100% of shares of the Electric Networks of Armenia CJSC to Liormand Holding Limited.

The Government has assigned the Ministers of Energy and Natural Resources, Justice, Finance and Economy to study all documents and present a conclusion.

INTER RAO Holding B.V. had earlier informed the Armenian Government about the intention to expropriate 100% of its shares of the Electric Networks of Armenia.

Ukraine has closed its airspace to Syria-bound Russian planes with humanitarian aid, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Thursday, RIA Novosti reports.

Yatsenyuk said during a meeting with his Slovak counterpart Robert Fico that Ukraine would not let Russian aircraft with humanitarian supplies to war-torn Syria use the country’s airspace.

He said that he ordered a Ukrainian state company that services the country’s airtraffic to strengthen control over any flights of Russian aircraft to Syria.

A total of eight people were killed in the floods that affected the Black Sea province of Artvin on Aug. 24, with one child still remained missing, the Hurriyet Daily News reports.

According to initial reports, Hacer Kara, 56, Altan Kara, 60, Funda Toksoy, 41, Sabri Acıbadem, 41, Nermin Demir, 59, Emniyet Gedik, 55, Ünsal Gedik, 41, and Erdal Eren Gedik, 17, were killed in the floods that hit the Hopa district after heavy rainfall.

Rescue work is ongoing to find the missing five-year old child.

Akunq.net reports that the region. is populated mainly by Hamshen Armenians.

 

The 300-year-old Armenian monastery of Surp Astvatsatsin (Tomarza Monastery) has completely deteriorated in the Tomarza district of Turkey’s Kayseri province, with merely a few ruined walls remaining, the reports.

The monastery, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, is situated in Kayseri’s Cumhuriyet neighborhood.

An important location for pilgrimage, the monastery also hosted famous British traveler and archaeologist Gertrude Bell in 1909.

Unfortunately, the monastery was looted and abandoned in 1915 (the Armenian Genocide).

A group of Armenian priests tried to use the monastery after the end of World War I, despite the severe damage the building had endured. However, they later had to abandon the monastery to its fate.

In the monastery’s ruins lie the Gregorian Armenian School, which had previously hosted the annual Festival of the Assumption with the attendance of central Anatolian and Lycian Armenians.

100 years after Germany gave up its colonial rule in Southwest Africa, there have been fresh calls for the German government to admit that genocide was committed against the Hereros and Nama in what is now Namibia, reports.

Representatives of six German NGOs and a Namibian politician personally handed in a petition to the residence of Germany’s president, Joachim Gauck, calling for the German government to admit culpability for genocide in an early 20th century war in Germany’s former colony of Southwest Africa, today’s Namibia. While the German president did not receive the group, the president of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, expressed agreement with them that the acts amounted to genocide.

“Just as the Turkish government carries responsibility for the way in which it deals with the genocide against the Armenians, we are also responsible for addressing this history [with Namibia],” Lammert wrote in an opinion piece published on Wednesday in the German newspaper “Die Zeit.”

NGOs responded cautiously to the news and reiterated their demands in the face of what appears to be a change in government policy.

“We are asking that the government recognize the colonial war against the Nama and Herero as genocide,” Christian Kopp of NGO Berlin Postkolonial told DW. “We are also demanding an apology from the highest levels of government – the president, the chancellor’s office, ideally the Bundestag, as well as the return of all human remains.”

The human remains issue has become highly emotive. During the war, which took place from 1904-1908, German eugenics researchers requested that colonial troops collect and send to Berlin skulls and other human remains of several thousand of the 80,000 vanquished Nama and Herero peoples. Some of the remains were used in research while others were sold as collectors’ items throughout Europe.

On 3 June Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan met in Yerevan with OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dačić.

A range of issues related to the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict settlement and regional processes were discussed during the meeting.

President Sahakyan noted that official Stepanakert remains a proponent of peaceful settlement of the conflict under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group and emphasized the need of restoring the full-fledged negotiation format, considering it among the most pivotal constituents of the process.

The President also outlined the highly destructive policy of Azerbaijan, qualifying Baku’s behavior as a threat to the maintenance of stability and peace in the region, an offence against international norms and principles.

Foreign Minister Karen Mirzoyan, personal representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Ambassador Andrzej Kasprzyk and other officials were present at the meeting.

By Andranik Israyelyan

In March 2003, Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the Prime Minister of Turkey, replacing Abdullah Gul; the latter took the post of the Foreign Minister. Meanwhile, Ahmet Davutoglu was invited to become the Prime Minister’s chief foreign policy adviser. This triumvirate would shape Turkish foreign policy for the next decade. The “Armenian opening” was one of the most challenging tasks for these foreign policy makers of Ankara.

Erdogan, a graduate of the religious Imam Hatip School and a former semi—professional football player, was the trio’s most powerful figure, yet he had a relatively passive role in shaping Turkish foreign policy. This is best explained by his narrow worldview. His chief adviser, Ibrahim Kalin, would later describe Erdogan as a politician rather than a diplomat, and one with a poor understanding of international relations. In Kalin’s words, Erdogan “passionately believes in such values as justice” and equates such values with Islam. In hosting Sudan’s President, Omar al Bashir, in 2008, Erdogan brushed off the International Criminal Court indictment against al Bashir for genocide, claiming Muslims cannot commit genocide. Indeed, when it comes to mending fences, Erdogan is not the best candidate for the job. His tirades and hate speeches have even led to a breakdown in Turkey’s relations with Israel, Egypt, and Syria.

Abdullah Gul, a graduate of the UK’s University of Exeter, has always been a man of integrity. When in 2003 Foreign Minister Gul met with his Armenian counterpart Vartan Oskanian and expressed his readiness to start a normalization process free from preconditions, it was music to the ears for Armenia’s top diplomat. Yet months later, Gul confessed to Oskanian that intense debate within the inner cycle of Turkish leadership had concluded that Azerbaijan’s interests could not be sidestepped. This, perhaps, was the first row between the ideologues and pragmatists on the “Armenian opening.”

Already serving as President in 2008, Gul accepted the invitation from his Armenian counterpart Serzh Sargsyan to visit Yerevan. This was the start of what has become known among foreign policy circles as “football diplomacy.” As Gul had been the driving force behind the Armenian opening in Turkey, his Foreign Minister, Ali Babacan, was an excellent candidate for the routine work. An economist educated in the US, Babacan is a pragmatist, and according to a senior Armenian diplomat, “open to new ideas.” This Gul—Babacan duo appeared to be the key to moving forward the process of normalization.

As these pragmatists pushed the process forward, Turkey’s ideologues did not hesitate to jump in and wreak havoc. And they did it quickly. In May 2009, Babacan was replaced by Ahmet Davutoglu. A historian who refrained from studying in the West and preferred the Islamic world, Davutoglu had extensively written on the problems of Turkey and the Islamic world. Those familiar with hisworks viewed him as a man who deeply believes in civilizational differences and sees the world through a religious prism.

Upon taking the office of Foreign Minister, Davutoglu, according to senior US diplomat David Phillips, rushed to scratch the Protocols between Armenia and Turkey. The man who had noted in his book Strategic Depth that the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh was Turkey’s greatest territorial loss since the Cold War intended to push Armenia to make unilateral concessions. A few days later after Davutoglu’s appointment, Erdogan went to Baku to allay Azerbaijani fears about normalizing Turkish-Armenian relations. What happened next was unimaginable for Gul and for Davutoglu.Ignoring the briefings by the Foreign Ministry, Erdogan declared that borders with Armenia will not open until Armenian troops withdraw from all “occupied territories of Azerbaijan.” In a moment of irony, the “football diplomacy” was obliterated by none other than a former footballer because of his aversion to diplomacy.

In 2010, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan had to suspend the ratification of the Protocols due to this Turkish policy of linkage. Sargsyan expressed gratitude to President Gul “for political correctness displayed throughout the period and the positive relationship” that had developed between them. As Gul left the office in 2014, Armenia lost the last pragmatist in Turkey’s political elite, while Babacan, in the position of deputy Prime Minister, continues to struggle with Erdogan’s disastrous economic policies. Davutoglu, the former academic, is now Turkey’s Prime Minister and has been gradually developing polarizing vocabulary for domestic politics. Erdogan, for his part, has set his sights on turning Turkey into a presidential republic so as to remain at the helm of Turkish politics. Whenever someone speaks of the “Armenian opening,” it is to blame Gul for “giving Armenia an upper hand in relations with Turkey.” Within this context, the new Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, is left with no other option but to fault Armenia for stalling the normalization process, and to lay the blame for Turkey’s tarnished image abroad with the Armenian Diaspora.

Andranik Israyelyan is an International Relations scholar. He holds a PhD degree in World History and defended his thesis on Turkish foreign policy under the AK Party (2002-12) at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Armenia. He works at the Diplomatic School of Armenia.