Author: Christine Harutyunian

Cristiano Ronaldo beats Lionel Messi to win Fifa best player award

Christine Harutyunian

Cristiano Ronaldo has been named the world’s best player at the inaugural Best Fifa Football Awards in Zurich, the BBC reports.

Real Madrid and Portugal forward Ronaldo, 31, beat Barcelona’s Lionel Messi and Atletico Madrid’s Antoine Griezmann to the prize.

Ronaldo also with both honours recognition for success in the Champions League with Real and Euro 2016 with Portugal.

Carli Lloyd of the United States was named the world’s best female player.

Leicester’s Claudio Ranieri was named best men’s coach, ex-Germany boss Silvia Neid won the female coach award, while Penang’s Mohd Faiz Subri received the Puskas award for the best goal of 2016.

1988 Armenian tragedy plays out in ‘Earthquake’

Christine Harutyunian

“Earthquake” proves an earnest, deeply felt drama set against the 1988 calamity that devastated a large swath of northern Armenia (then part of the Soviet Union) and caused more than 25,000 deaths, Gary Goldstein writes in the

According to the author, what the film lacks in high-octane disaster-movie thrills it makes up for with its focus on personal relationships, acts of heroism and a capable visual sense.

The script by Hrant Barsegyan, Arsen Danielyan, Aleksey Gravitskiy and Sergey Yudakov reflects true stories of rescue and survival culled from documentation and the accounts of eyewitnesses. The result is a crisscross of credible characters whose life-and-death journeys help frame the film’s gripping, often grim narrative.

These vivid folks include a vengeful young man reunited with the driver who caused the car crash that, years ago, killed his parents; an older couple at odds over their unmarried pregnant daughter, a gravely injured mother searching for her missing child, an unruly band of looters, a selfless Russian truck driver and other desperate souls.

“Director Sarik Andreasyan confidently juggles the demands of his large cast, the precarious action scenes and a clear commitment to veracity. The earthquake and its ruin, although set in the Armenian city of Leninakan (now called Gyumri), were effectively re-created on an abandoned Moscow factory site. (Pre-earthquake scenes were shot in Gyumri.),” the article reads.

“Sporadic dips into melodrama, some on-the-nose dialogue and acting, and an occasionally intrusive score hinder but don’t negate this ambitious film’s power and conviction,” the author concludes.

Chapecoense plane crash: Bolivia arrests LaMia airline boss

Christine Harutyunian 
Photo: Getty Images

 

The authorities in Bolivia have arrested the head of the airline involved in a crash last week that killed 71 people, including most of the Brazilian football team, Chapecoense, the BBC reports.

Gustavo Vargas, a retired air force general, has been detained as part of an investigation into the crash.

The plane, operated by the tiny LaMia airline, was taking the team to Colombia when it ran out of fuel.

A Bolivian official says she warned the pilot of the problem before departure.

The official, Celia Castedo, has now sought asylum in Brazil, saying she suffered threats and abuse.

Chapecoense were travelling to the city of Medellin to play the first leg of the Sudamericana Cup final against Atletico Nacional.

The British-made Avro RJ85 aircraft ran out of fuel as it approached the airport in Medellin on 28 November.

In a leaked tape, the pilot, Miguel Quiroga, can be heard warning of a “total electric failure” and “lack of fuel”.

Henrikh Mkhitaryan starts for Manchester United v Feyenoord

Christine Harutyunian

Henrikh Mkhitaryan has been handed a chance to impress Jose Mourinho as Manchester United take on Feyenoord in the Europa League.

The Armenian has only made one start for the club this season.

His only start came against Manchester City in a 2-1 loss and he was hooked off at half-time.

Mourinho named a strong team with Paul Pogba, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Juan Mata all starting.

Man Utd: Romero, Valencia, Jones, Blind, Shaw, Carrick, Pogba, Mata, Rooney, Mkhitaryan, Ibrahimovic

Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Kosovo meet in Antananarivo

Christine Harutyunian

Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian had a meeting with the Foreign Minister of Kosovo Enver Hoxhaj on the sidelines of the Ministerial Conference of the International Organisation of la Francophonie held in Antananarivo.

The parties attached importance to the conduct of periodic meetings for getting to know each other’s approaches and continue the cooperation on a number of issues.

Turkish Foreign Minister accuses Germany of supporting militant groups

Christine Harutyunian 
Photo:  REUTERS/Vincent Kessler

 

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu accused Berlin on Tuesday of allowing the Kurdish militant PKK and far-leftist DHKP-C, both of which have carried out armed attacks in Turkey, to operate on German soil with impunity, reports.

“The DHKP-C and PKK are carrying out activities in Germany, but they support those because they are against Turkey. Germany is the country that supports terrorist organizations against Turkey the most,” Cavusoglu told a news conference in Ankara.

“Germany thinks that they are a first class country, a first class democracy, and that Turkey is second class. We want them to treat us as equal partners,” he said.

Chris Bohjalian: Putting a face on the refugee crisis

Christine Harutyunian

By Chris Bohjalian

For most of America, the heartbreaking faces of Syrian refugees this year have belonged to children. We have seen them drowned and we have seen them stunned into silence by warfare and covered in blood. (We’ve also seen them likened to Skittles, but that appalling analogy belongs only to the Trumps.)

At the moment, however, when I put a real face on the refugee crisis I see a balding 50-year-old man with gentle green eyes and a salt and pepper mustache. I met him on the second to last day in August in Ishkhanadzor, a modest village in Nagorno-Karabakh, the fledgling Armenian republic in the Caucasus that is still struggling for recognition. Ishkhanadzor is about 15 miles north of the Araxes River and the border with Iran. Among the town’s 360 residents is one physician, Haig Khatchadourian, a soft-spoken neuropathologist who now works as a general practitioner in the village’s seven-room clinic. He is also a refugee.

In the summer of 2014, ISIS fighters from Tunisia, Libya, and Iraq came to his summer home in Tal Hmedy, a town in northeastern Syria, and took him by force to their administrative building and court. Khatchadourian does not recall the date, but he remembers it was two in the afternoon and his three daughters — all between 12 and 14 years old then — were present. He told the girls that if he did not return home that night, they should take the bus to their relatives in the city of Al-Qamishli. At the court, ISIS administrators demanded that he renounce his Christianity, telling him that he would be brought to the center of the village and executed if he didn’t.

“I expected to be beheaded,” he told me as we chatted together in the shade from a small copse of trees outside his apartment in Ishkhanadzor. “I refused to convert. I was prepared to die a Christian because life has no meaning if you give up your faith.”

After four hours before the court, however, the ISIS tribunal released him. He has absolutely no idea why and they never gave him a reason. Two days earlier he had witnessed ISIS fighters executing a Muslim in the village center for saying something negative about the prophet Muhammad. The man’s executioner was his own nephew.

At the time, Khatchadourian and his three daughters were dividing their time between their primary residence in Al-Qamishli and Tal Hmedy. Al-Qamishli technically was never under ISIS control and the doctor and his family could have remained there. But the Syrian conflict was all around them and Khatchadourian feared everyday for the safety of his daughters — and lived with the prospect that he might not be alive to raise them.

And so in 2015 he and his girls emigrated north to Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, Armenian-populated enclave lodged between Iran, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. In the village and the surrounding area, they joined 200 other Syrian and Lebanese Armenian refugees. He says he and his family are very happy here: “We like that we are surrounded by Armenians. And we like that everyone here has recognized us as human beings.”

Here in the United States, of course, “refugee” and “immigrant” are frightening words in some people’s opinion. This is especially true if the refugees are from Syria. So far, the U.S. has welcomed roughly 12,000 Syrian refugees, a number that has made barely a dent into the crisis brought on by the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. To put this in perspective, Canada has taken in over 50,000 refugees, Germany has welcomed 600,000, and even tiny Belgium has accepted 16,000. And then, of course, there are the Middle Eastern countries that have taken in quite literally millions, including Lebanon, which is home to well over 1.25 million Syrian refugees.

I have met refugee children from Syria in schools in Lebanon, Armenia, and Canada, and their resilience and good cheer has left me awed.

The reality is that I am the grandson of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, which means that I am a grandson of immigrants from the Middle East. In the wake of the Hamidian Massacre in the 1890s and then the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of 1.5 million of my ancestors during the First World War, the U.S. welcomed easily 75,000 Armenian immigrants. It’s why today there are such large Armenian-American communities in Massachusetts, New Jersey and California.

And so when I travel to places such as Ishkhanadzor, I’m ashamed of the way the U.S. has turned “refugee” and “immigrant” into synonyms for “terrorist.” (Even here in Vermont, the mayor of Rutland has been pilloried because he is bringing 100 refugees to his municipality.) It’s not merely that we are a nation of immigrants or that the bedrock of our national identity is our historical willingness to welcome the tired and homeless and poor, those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (thank you, Emma Lazarus). It’s that we have the resources that a struggling, largely unrecognized republic such as Nagorno-Karabakh can only dream of. The roads around Ishkhanadzor are dirt and have a diabolical predilection to flatten car tires. (On my journey there at the end of the summer, my small caravan of three SUVs suffered two flats in a morning.) Khatchadourian’s clinic only has hot water sporadically, because the boiler is an antique. Likewise, there are hours (and days) when it is without electricity.

But he insists he has found happiness there that he never had in Syria. “Everyone here is my daughters’ friend — and mine,” he said. “We are part of the community.”

I realize that a refugee such as Khatchadourian is less threatening to some Americans because he’s a Christian, not a Muslim. But like all refugees he is – as he put it when we spoke in the shade of those trees – first and foremost a human being. And that’s a reality that Americans should come to embrace.

Protection and justice for all: Armenia’s PM presents Government program to Parliament

Christine Harutyunian

The government of the Republic of Armenia aims to ensure protection, dignity, improved living conditions, justice for its citizens, Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan said as he presented the government program to the National Assembly today. The government is obliged to reveal the obstacles on the way of reaching the goals and find optimal solutions, he added.

“We have entered a new stage of regional developments, which envisages low paces of economic growth with our immediate economic partners, thus restricting the opportunities of rapid growth due to common trends. In this environment the current structure of the Armenian economy will not be able to ensure the pace of progress, which goes in line with our challenges, if standard approaches of development are applied,” the Prime Minister said.

“Today the government is tasked with obtaining a precise diagnosis of the system of governance and the state of economy, analyzing the most important issues and proposing both short-term measures and long-term reform programs,” he added. He informed that a “Center for Strategic Initiatives” comprising the leading specialists and experts from Armenia, Diaspora and abroad has been set up under the government to address the strategic questions.

Speaking about the strategic issues, PM Karen Karapetyan stressed that “defense and security” is number one challenge. “The military threats facing our country require an efficient, permanently improving and modernizing defense system enjoying the rust and support of the society.” He assured that the government would spare no means and efforts to neutralize the military threats facing Armenia and Artsakh, creating sufficient military capacities and maintaining military balance in the region.

Among other important issues the Prime Minister emphasized the implementation of the Constitution amended in 2015. He attached importance to measures ensuring to the development of democratic institutions, creation of confidence-building measures to raise the trust in political process and institutions. The Prime Minister said “the reforms should start from the government.”

According to him, elimination of corruption is the primary condition for the effectiveness of the state governance system. “We’ll promote the state-private cooperation to ensure better governance at the local level and reduce the corruption risks,” he added.

The Prime Minister said “the government pursues the ideology of liberalized economy and sees the perspectives of economic development in the growth of exports.” “Our primary goal is to ensure a free and fair competitive environment for business,” he added.

Karen Karapetyan noted that “the improvement of the business environment is a permanent process.” In this respect he attached importance to the monitoring, exposure and elimination of legal norms and practices hindering the economic activity.

The Prime Minister said tourism, development of modem infrastructures will also be in the spotlight. “The government will pursue the deepening of cooperation with the Nagorno Karabakh Republic,” he added.

PM Karapetyan stressed that “stable economic growth is the fundamental means for fighting poverty and unemployment.” “This is the reason why we emphasize the importance of forming free, fair and competitive economic conditions,” he added.

In the field of education and science, the government will aim to ensure high-quality education and an opportunity for obtaining practical knowledge for all. Special attention will be paid to children in rural areas.

According to the Prime Minister, the government will also pursue the maintenance of national cultural values, at the same time ensuring openness for adopting the best values of other cultures. It will also strive to maintain the unique nature of Armenia.

“Together we have to undertake the honored task of creating strong grounds for the long-term development of the country. Every day we’ll work together to take steps that will bring us closer to having a competitive, economically strong and fair Motherland based on national values,” the Prime Minister concluded.

Armenian delegate calls PACE attention to Olympic injustice

Christine Harutyunian

Addressing the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), member of the Armenain delegation Naira Karapetyan raised the issue of Mihran Harutyunyan’s deprivation of a gold medal at the Olympic Games. The full text of the speech is provided below:

“The report relates to an issue, which at first sight seems not so far important, but it is, and it unites societies, nations, and people. Indeed, Sport is universally seen as the most popular activity in the world. And it supposed to be free and far from politics, from injustice, from inequality, from any form of unbalancing. Sport supposed to be clear and strict. For every sportsman the greatest and most desirable is the winning of the highest competition – The World Olympic Games.

This year was the year that we have had Rio Games, and many of our member states got honour of having Olympic Champions. My country has gold medal as well, so ones more I want to congratulate from here the Olympic Champion of Greco-Roman Wrestling Armenian Arthur Alexanyan.

But unfortunately, even in sports we see a number of injustice cases; we see referees that sometimes judge not by conscience and rules but quite opposite, trying to serve some good turn to some powerful persons. During this Rio Games another Armenian Sportsman, Greco-Roman Wrestler Mihran Harutyunyan was deprived of gold and got silver medal only because of injustice and misjudging. It’s not mandatory to be an expert to see that it is true; all the people who were present were surprised; they were just whistling to the so-called winner and applauding only to the Armenian guy, to Mihran. And this vivid example is not the single one. In boxing we met the same – Narek Abgaryan and Hovhannes Bachkov are also victims of misjudgments.

Dear Colleagues, I call on the Parliamentary Assembly not to turn a blind eye and take proper steps and call on the various international sports federations, the Greco-Roman Federation and the United World Wrestling to pursue this kind of issues. Every single injustice in sports overshadows not only Olympics, but the aim and nature of sports, the faith and willingness to go ahead.

After all, as the father of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, once said: “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.” Let me add to this quotation, that if there is a loss of hope, examples of injustice, unfair judgment, one cannot have enough strength of will to take part and go ahead with deep faith in sports.

So, Dear Colleagues, let’s return the faith and strengthen it together.”