Author: Babken Chilingarian

Armenia, Ukraine officials discuss prospects of bilateral cooperation

Babken Chilingarian

 19:57,

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 30, ARMENPRESS. The Secretary of the Security Council of Armenia Armen Grigoryan  and Ukrainian's President's Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak discussed the current state of bilateral relations between Armenia and Ukraine during a meeting held in Malta on October 28, the embassy of Armenia in Ukraine said in a statement on social media.

''During the meeting the importance of the first meeting of the Ukrainian President  Volodymyr Zelensky with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was underscored, which took place on October 5 in Granada, Spain within the framework of the summit of the European Political Community.

Andriy Yermak expressed his gratitude for the participation of Anna Hakobyan, the wife of the Armenian Prime Minister, at the First Ladies and Gentlemen's Summit held in Kyiv in early September and for providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainian schoolchildren. 

Ukrainian's President's Chief of Staff  confirmed the commitment of the Ukrainian side to strengthen cooperation with Armenia, particularly in European integration issues.

 The parties congratulated each other on the election of Armenia and Ukraine to the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and discussed the cooperation of the two countries within the framework of that organization and in the field of energy in general,'' reads the statement.

Armenpress: Argentina sends humanitarian aid to Armenia for forcibly displaced persons of Nagorno- Karabakh

Babken Chilingarian

 09:56,

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 23, ARMENPRESS. Argentina has sent humanitarian aid to Armenia to meet the needs of the forcibly displaced persons of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The plane carrying approximately 11 tons of humanitarian aid consisting of warm clothes, footwear, children’s hygiene products, towels, electric heaters and other items has landed in Zvartnots airport.

The flight from Buenos Aires was organized by the Argentinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship and its White Helmets agency, in collaboration with Enrique Piñeyro's Solidaire Foundation.

Photos by Hayk Manukyan




Armenian President signs into law Rome Statute ratification bill

Babken Chilingarian

 13:30,

YEREVAN, OCTOBER 14, ARMENPRESS. President Vahagn Khachaturyan has signed into law the bill on ratifying the Rome Statute (the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court), which was by parliament on October 3, the president's office said in a statement.

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1121976.html?fbclid=IwAR21uoIXaQdk1v5EiIVbl6L56ZkWTUojirEkY3A8vN9sK2Ao9hBfU8E2F3w

Economy in focus: Armenia

Babken Chilingarian
Oct 11 2023

Despite fears of a new war with neighbouring Azerbaijan, Armenia’s economy has performed remarkably well over the past year, with an influx of Russian migrants helping to drive exceptional growth.  

Home to 2.9 million people and nestled in the South Caucasus, Armenia has long benefitted from remittances from its large diaspora while suffering from geopolitical precarity.  

Devastated by a 1988 earthquake which destroyed 90 per cent of Spitak and half of Armenia’s second-largest city, Gyumri (at the time still known as Leninakan), Armenia then suffered further damage during the First Karabakh War with its neighbour Azerbaijan.   

  • Armenia, Georgia, and Tajikistan remain the top growth performers in CEE and Central Asia
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Today, Armenia is a member of the Eurasian Economic Union and Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO)—although its ties with Moscow have been increasingly strained after the CSTO failed to come to its defence amid clashes with Azerbaijan in 2022 and Russian peacekeepers failed to act against an Azerbaijani blockade on Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.  

Armenia struggles to balance favourable economic and political relations with its southern neighbour, Iran, and Western nations home to large Armenian diasporas such as France and the United States. The risk of further conflict with Azerbaijan over territory in southern Armenia, coveted by Baku as a land-bridge to its exclave of Nakhchivan, remains high. 

In addition, Armenia has is currently grappling with the arrival of over 100,000 displaced Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, posing a significant challenge for the nation.

Other geopolitical developments—namely the war in Ukraine—have proven more beneficial. Western sanctions on Russia and the mobilisation of many Russians to fight in Ukraine created a mass influx of Russians into the South Caucasus, with many settling in Tbilisi and Yerevan.  

Newly-arrived Russians brought capital and drove increases in consumption and services that in turn pushed gross domestic product (GDP) growth to a whopping 12.6 per cent in 2022. Inflows of money transfers increased reserve levels and reduced credit dollarisation.  

This positive momentum continued into the first half of 2023, with a double-digit GDP growth rate of 10.5 per cent (year-on-year) in real terms. As in 2022, the services sector, particularly in IT, trade, and transportation, played a significant role in driving this growth.

Increased inflation—8.6 per cent in 2022, up from 7.2 per cent in 2021—was mediated by active inflation targeting, and the country has been praised by the World Bank for its adherence to prudent fiscal policy, and sound financial sector oversight. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank have also praised Armenia’s recent transparency and anti-corruption reforms.  

“Recent economic shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted Armenia’s growth momentum, but the country has demonstrated a remarkable commitment to reforms that has allowed it to keep sustainable debt levels and macroeconomic management credibility,” said the Asian Development Bank’s director-general for Central and West Asia, Yevgeniy Zhukov. 

Nonetheless, low investment rates, weak attraction of foreign direct investment, limited human capital, insufficient diversification, and a narrow export base are serious structural challenges that limit the economy’s productivity. 

One of Armenia’s strongest sectors is its construction industry, which played a major role rebuilding cities after the Spitak quake. 

In 2005, the annual growth of the sector was about 40 per cent—significantly contributing overall GDP growth of 13.9 per cent that year. Construction accounted for 30 per cent of Armenia’s economy in 2009, but construction volumes fell that year by 37.4 per cent as what former Armenian prime minister Tigran Sargsyan termed a “construction bubble” burst.   

The sector then declined for a decade but has begun to grow again.  

Today, the outskirts of Yerevan are filled with new apartment buildings, and construction accounted for 7.2 per cent of GDP in 2022—which, while much lower than its share in 2009, is still the eighth largest national construction sector in Europe and Central Asia. In line with increases in public and private investment, construction expanded in 2022 by about sixfold to 18.8 per cent. 

Armenia’s construction sector is projected to grow at 17.6 per cent in 2023 before decreasing to 12.9 per cent growth in 2024. Increased government expenditure—including planned large public investments in the country’s north-south road—will drive this growth. 

However, overall GDP growth is expected to decrease from 2022’s exceptional rate to a still robust but less anomalous 6.5 per cent in 2023 and 5.5 per cent in 2024—still driven largely by growth in services. Lower growth, monetary tightening, and a smaller budget deficit will contribute to a decline in average inflation to seven per cent for 2023.  

“Uranium is found in granite rocks, and it is extracted in granite mines by block leaching, which significantly increases the cost of the extracted products. In other countries, uranium is found in soft soils, and it is mined using the less expensive method of underground leaching.”

After the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan is eyeing Armenia itself

Babken Chilingarian
The Globe and Mail
Canada – Oct 5 2023
NEIL HAUER
YEREVAN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Neil Hauer is a Canadian journalist reporting on Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus.

Ethnic cleansing was supposed to be a thing of the past. “Never again,” and all that.

Yet that’s exactly what we all watched take place last week in the South Caucasus. Following a military offensive on Sept. 19, Azerbaijan put an end to the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh, the local Armenian name for the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Most of its 120,000 people followed, fleeing to neighbouring Armenia. The territory is now empty: a one-day UN mission last week found as few as 50 people still there, while television crews showed the stark emptiness of the region’s once-vibrant capital, Stepanakert.

Azerbaijan moves to reaffirm control of Nagorno-Karabakh as the Armenian exodus slows to a trickle

The exodus itself was like a vision of a past age – or at least, one that we had hoped was past. Against the backdrop of the majestic Zangezur mountains, an endless line of refugees packed the only road from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, spending entire days in their cars as they waited to cross. In scenes reminiscent of 1990s Yugoslavia, the Karabakh Armenians fled in whatever vehicles could carry them – tiny sedans holding five or six people, in the backs of open-air lorries, on tractors and farm equipment. Most had only a few bags of clothes and memories with them.

Nagorno-Karabakh had never had an easy existence, its tenuous, de facto independence having been won in 1994 following the USSR’s collapse as the local Armenian population sought to avoid the pogroms and forced exile of their ethnic kin elsewhere in Azerbaijan. Defeat in another war in 2020 saw Azerbaijan conquer much of the territory and Russian peacekeepers introduced to safeguard the shaky ceasefire agreement.

That, too, did not last. In December of last year, Azerbaijan, in violation of the ceasefire agreement, blocked the only road from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, allowing traffic only from Red Cross aid vehicles. From June, those, too, were barred, leading to starvation conditions as Baku attempted to choke the local population into submission. Then, in yet another unprovoked act of violence, Azerbaijan launched a full-scale offensive on the starving populace on Sept. 19, killing and wounding hundreds in artillery and rocket strikes while displacing thousands to the capital. Nagorno-Karabakh’s government agreed to a full capitulation, and as soon as the road to Armenia was opened a few days later, the population fled.

Azerbaijan says that these people left voluntarily, and that it guarantees their rights and security should they return. A quick glance at the evidence, let alone testimony from Karabakh Armenians themselves, shows this is nonsense. Azerbaijan starved these people for months before bombing and killing them, all while refusing any outside observers or international aid to reach them. Azerbaijan itself is a hereditary dictatorship ruled by the same family for the past three decades, with conditions that Freedom House describes as one of “the worst of the worst” – amongst the most repressive regimes worldwide. Anti-Armenian ethnic hatred, meanwhile, has been established as the foundational pillar of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev’s autocratic rule. Perhaps nowhere was this on display more vividly than Azerbaijan’s “Victory Park” outdoor museum commemorating the country’s 2020 military victory, featuring grotesque caricatures of dead and dying Armenians with features that would not look out of place in a 1930s Der Stuermer antisemitic cartoon. To think that ethnic Armenians could be safe in such an environment is to defy reality.

The Armenian heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh is also under immense threat. This includes sites like the Amaras monastery, the first place in the world where the Armenian alphabet was taught in the fifth century. Azerbaijan has repeatedly destroyed all traces of Armenian history in its territory, most notable in Nakhchivan, where every single Armenian site was eradicated. Karabakh is likely next.

The question now is what comes next. Azerbaijan has made little effort to disguise its designs on Armenia itself, and its willingness to use force to achieve them. Azerbaijani officials regularly demand, with Turkish backing, that Armenia provide it with the Zangezur corridor, a land link between mainland Azerbaijan and its Nakhchivan exclave, and have stated that they have a ”plan B” to acquire it if Yerevan does not comply. Azerbaijani officials also regularly refer to all of Armenia as ”Western Azerbaijan,” with Mr. Aliyev repeatedly stating that these are Azerbaijan’s ”historic lands” and that “we will return there.” International alarm from the U.S., France, Canada and others has underscored the seriousness of a new war.

For the 120,000 people of Nagorno-Karabakh, meanwhile, their lives as they knew them are over. They must now start again, as the victims of the 21st century’s latest ethnic cleansing.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-after-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-nagorno-karabakh-azerbaijan-is-eyeing/



Humiliation fuels my fellow Azerbaijanis’ hate of Armenia. We must oppose it

Babken Chilingarian
Open Democracy
Oct 5 2023

I grew up in wartime Karabakh – I know the pain Armenians face. But I was attacked online for empathising with them

Rauf Azimov

When I posted a recent Twitter thread about Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, nothing could prepare me for the ruthless attacks I received from my fellow Azerbaijanis.

I am an Azerbaijani survivor of the same conflict. Writing on X (formerly Twitter), I told of my tragic childhood growing up in Karabakh in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the 1990s, and how my earliest memories are of fighting and devastation. How my 18-year-old uncle died after stepping on a landmine. How I slept to the sounds of gunshots and once choked on my food when a nearby bomb exploded as my mom was feeding me.

I also empathized with the Armenians in Karabakh who are now going through similar experiences. And I spoke of my exasperation at the endless cycle of hatred and violence and the repeated reliving of my early trauma, having barely healed from the retraumatization I lived through in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War just three years ago.

With only a handful of followers, mostly friends and colleagues, I did not expect many people to read what I wrote. Suddenly I found myself thrust into the spotlight, with my post getting hundreds of thousands of views. I was deeply touched by the empathy and acclaim I received from complete strangers, almost all of them Armenians and Westerners.

But the response from Azerbaijanis devastated me.

Obscene homophobic slurs were hurled at me and violent misogynistic ones at my mother. My real ethnicity was questioned. With a few notable exceptions, Azerbaijanis did not believe in my sincerity. They seemed to not care at all about my lived experiences as a victim of war. I was ridiculed and accused of only pretending to care about the Armenians to one or another cynical end.

On X, I wrote that I wished someone would have acknowledged all the pain my family went through at the time, affirmed it. Instead, our tragedy was laughed at, justified, ignored. The response showed me that nothing has changed.

After reflecting on this extreme reaction, I have come to the conclusion that Azerbaijani nationalists are not motivated by pain, but humiliation.

A victim empathizes with another victim. But macho humiliation is not a place where empathy and self-reflection can ever be found

Azerbaijan has a macho patriarchal culture. For many, when Armenia so overwhelmingly won the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, it meant that Azerbaijan, and more specifically Azerbaijani men, were not ‘strong’ or ‘man’ enough to protect the motherland and that they had been proven ‘weak’.

This thinking delivered us from the misery of the 1990s to the current ethnofascist strongman regime led by Ilham Aliyev. Hence symbols like ‘the iron fist’, the upside-down ‘A’ akin to the Russian ‘Z’, the heinous war crimes, and the renaming of the streets of Stepanakert, Karabakh’s capital, after people like Enver Pasha, the Turkish military leader who oversaw the Armenian Genocide.

A victim empathizes with another victim. But macho humiliation is not a place where empathy and self-reflection can ever be found. That is a place of only rage and violence with a single goal – revenge. One almost feels sorry for the Azerbaijani propagandists who work so hard and look so ridiculous trying to conceal this.

With the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan has doomed itself as a viable democratic and prosperous nation. That breaks my heart. How could anyone seriously believe Armenians can be integrated into Azerbaijan?

As I wrote on X, I watch in horror at what’s happening to them – the months of starvation in an inhumane blockade followed by fierce shelling. For decades, Armenians have been painted as the enemy, used as villains responsible for all our failures. Their history has been systemically erased and their tragedies denied, along with Azerbaijanis’ responsibility for them.

Any Azerbaijani who witnessed war and suffered ethnic cleansing must speak up against it, even if all our base instincts tell us otherwise. Or history will not forgive us.

To Armenians: I see your suffering and I'm sorry. You deserve to be free and you have a right to your identity. The response to your desire for self-determination should never have been pogroms and war.

I have no power to affect anything. But one day an Armenian child from Karabakh will wonder if any Azerbaijani spoke up for them or empathised with them when they lived through the unimaginable. Let them know that not all is lost.

Asbarez: UPDATED: Over 100,000 Displaced Artsakh Residents Enter Armenia; Experts Accuse Baku of War Crimes, Genocide

Babken Chilingarian
by Asbarez Staff

 

 

 

in Armenia, Artsakh, Featured Main, Latest, News, Top Stories

A caravan of vehicles on the road from Artsakh to Armenia (Photo by David Ghahramanyan for Reuters)As of 2 p.m. local time on Saturday 100,437 forcibly displaced persons from Artsakh have crossed into Armenia since the mass exodus began on Sunday, following Azerbaijan’s large-scale attack on Artsakh last week.

Artsakh’s former Human Rights Defender Artak Beglaryan said in a post on Saturday that only a few hundred people remained in Artsakh. “Artsakh is completely empty,” he warned.

“Artsakh is almost fully empty with at most a few hundred people remaining, who are also leaving,” Beglaryan said.

Legal experts are calling this forced exodus of Artsakh Armenians a war crime, while other international organizations are accusing world leaders of being complicit in Azerbaijan’s genocide of Armenians.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention criticized the United States for what it called Washington’s “reckless bothsideism” and its instance that the genocidal regime of President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan can engage in dialogue in good faith.

The Lemkin Institute reacted to State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller’s recent statement on Nagorno-Karabakh that the US has done its best “to find a diplomatic solution, but at the end of the day, we must not forget that there are two sides here that simply have differences.”

“Demonstrating that it has learned nothing from the genocide currently being committed by Azerbaijan against the Armenians of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh, the United States continues to enable the perpetrator with its reckless ‘bothsidesism’ and its delusional belief that the genocidal regime of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev can engage in good-faith talks or negotiations,” the Lemkin Institute said in a social media post on Thursday.

“Genocide is not a matter of ‘simply [having] differences.’ Furthermore, suggesting that the US has played no role in enabling Aliyev’s impunity to commit genocide is mendacious at best. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention warns world leaders that they are behaving in ways that leave them open not only to charges of complicity in genocide but also to charges of aiding and abetting the crime,” the post added.

Several international legal experts believe the mass flight fits the legal definition of a war crime.

The International Criminal Court’s founding documents say that, when referring to forcible transfer or deportation, “the term ‘forcibly’ is not restricted to physical force, but may include threat of force or coercion, such as that caused by fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression or abuse of power against such person or persons or another person, or by taking advantage of a coercive environment.”

Such a “coercive environment” was created in Nagorno-Karabakh before the offensive by Azerbaijan’s obstruction of essential supplies, international lawyer Priya Pillai and Melanie O’Brien, visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars told Reuters.

“So the fear/apprehension of the population – due to the coercive environment created by the months-long blockade and the recent armed attack – would meet the threshold for this crime,” Pillai said, adding that it would be a more severe ‘crime against humanity’ if considered to be part of a widespread attack.

O’Brien told Reuters that the blockade — which Baku claimed was needed to prevent weapons smuggling — was in effect the start of a genocide because it was implemented with the aim of “deliberately inflicting conditions of life designed to bring about the physical destruction of the targeted group.”

The first prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno Ocampo, agreed with O’Brien’s argumentation, noting that a ruling of genocide did not require mass killings.

“For me, it’s obviously a genocide,” he said.

Meanwhile Armenia’s Finance Ministry has established a treasury account for donations to meet the needs of the forcibly displaced persons Artsakh residents.

“Due to the crisis situation, numerous compatriots and organizations, both within Armenia and abroad, have expressed their willingness to offer assistance and donations to meet the basic needs of people who have been forcibly displaced from Nagorno Karabakh to the Republic of Armenia. A treasury account was opened in the Armenia’s Ministry of Finance in order to accept the donations and direct them to the socio-economic needs of the displaced persons,” an announcement on Friday said.

Individuals may make bank transfers in Armenian drams to the treasury account number 900005002762, or conduct online card transfers (in any currency) using an e-payment system. https://www.e-payments.am/en/state-duties/step3/service=5425/


Pashinyan extremely concerned over Azeri arbitrary arrests near Hakari Bridge checkpoint

Babken Chilingarian

 12:52,

YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 28, ARMENPRESS. State bodies must take appropriate measures to protect the rights of those arbitrarily arrested by Azerbaijan, PM Nikol Pashinyan has said.

“Azerbaijan is carrying out arbitrary arrests [of persons] outside the Hakari bridge checkpoint. This is an extremely concerning fact. Our state bodies must take appropriate steps in all such cases to protect the rights of arbitrarily arrested persons, including in international platforms,” the PM said.

This issue must be on the agenda of the Armenian government for as long as it’s not properly addressed, Pashinyan said.

Turkish nationalists call for stripping citizenship of scholars who warned of Azeri genocidal policy in Nagorno-Karabakh

Babken Chilingarian

 09:55,

YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 25, ARMENPRESS. Turkish nationalists are calling for stripping citizenship of the 123 Turkish scholars who issued a statement  last week warning about Azerbaijan’s genocidal policy in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Federation of Eurasian Turkic Associations chairman Ismail Cengiz labeled the Turkish scholars ‘Armenian-loving mankurts,’ according to Once Vatan news outlet.

“The 123 Armenian-loving mankurts must immediately be stripped of citizenship,” Cengiz said in a statement cited by Once Vatan. He said that after doing so the scholars must be sent to Armenia.

In the statement provided to ARMENPRESS on September 22 , the Turkish scholars said that the Azerbaijani regime, which has blockaded Nagorno-Karabakh for nine months, launched military operations in front of the whole world during the UN General Assembly.

“Azerbaijan carried out this attack with explicit support from Turkey and Israel, while the whole world was silently watching what was happening. There is a clear danger of ethnic cleansing and genocide,” the Turkish scholars said in the statement, emphasizing that former ICC chief prosecutor M. Ocampo’s warnings are turning into reality one by one.




Armenia’s territorial integrity is threatened, warns French President and vows support

Babken Chilingarian

 11:26,

YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 25, ARMENPRESS. France is highly vigilant in issues concerning Armenia’s territorial integrity and stands by the Armenian people, French President Emmanuel Macron has said.

In an interview for BFM channel, the French President spoke about the September 19-20 large-scale Azeri attack in Nagorno-Karabakh.

“In the past days we witnessed unacceptable crimes and hostilities taking place in Karabakh,” he said, adding that France will continue to mobilize around humanitarian issues in order to provide humanitarian aid to the population of Nagorno-Karabakh.

“We are providing political support, in order for it to be possible to reach lasting peace through negotiations,” President Macron said.

He warned that Armenia’s territorial integrity is now in danger.

“Today, France is highly vigilant in the issue of Armenia’s territorial integrity, because this is what’s threatened. We now have Russia, who is complicit with Azerbaijan, there’s Turkey, who has always supported its [Azerbaijan’s] actions,” Macron warned, adding that France stands by the Armenian people and international law.