Pashinyan has called on his opponents to stop protesting and invited them to hold talks to discuss the political crisis earlier on Thursday, after the military called on Pashinyan and his government to resign.
Author: Garnik Tadevosian
Armenian president refuses order to dismiss army chief as political crisis worsens
Lawyer on army chief’s dismissal: Armenia’s president has ‘only two choices’ at this point
Lawyer Robert Hayrapetyan touched upon the powers of Armenia’s President Armen Sarkissian in connection with the proposed dismissal of Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces Onik Gasparyan.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s order to sack the General Staff chief is subject to approval by the country’s president, who has three days to decide.
“According to Article 133 of the Constitution, upon recommendation of the prime minister, the president appoints and dismisses the supreme command of the armed forces and of other troops. The Constitution envisages a 3-day period for the president to sign such decrees,” he wrote on Facebook.
“The president received Pashinyan's proposal on 25 February, hence 28 February is the deadline for the president to sign the decree on Gasparyan’s dismissal.
“What can the president of the country do at this point, other than signing the decree? Article 139 of the Constitution authorizes the president to return the relevant act with his objections to Pashinyan within a period of three days. The president is not entitled to apply to the Constitutional Court at this stage. He must either sign the relevant decree or return it [to the competent authority, ed.] with his objections.
“If the premier does not accept the objections, the president either has to sign the decree to dismiss Gasparyan as General Staff chief or apply to the Constitutional Court.
“The president's powers to apply to the Constitutional Court arise only if Pashinyan does not accept the objections submitted by him. By the deadline, , President Armen Sarkissian has only two choices; to sign the decree on the dismissal of Onik Gasparyan or to return it to Nikol Pashinyan,” Hayrapetyan said.
Gagham Manukyan about Ara Saghatelyan’s arrest: Who is capable to arrest the enemy of the Turk?
Member of ARF Dashnaktsutyun Gegham Manukyan addressed the opposition rally at Baghramyan Avenue, speaking of the ongoing days in Armenia, which, per him, would be considered as remembrance and memorable days in the future.
"Today marks the anniversary of the 1988 Sumgait pogroms. In 1988, Azerbaijan showed its real face exactly on this day. Yesterday was another memorable day. On February 26, 1992, the operation of removing the Turkish barrier connecting Stepanakert to Askeran region started. Khojalu was liberated on February 26-27, becoming the key to liberation of all settlements in the territory of Artsakh. It was the liberation of Khojalu that secured the liberation of Shushi," Manukyan stated.
He next voiced regret that Armenia's current leaders are not able to perceive and remember the importance of those historic days, noting over the past years a viable team had been formed in Armenia which actively countered Azerbaijani propaganda and anti-Armenian rhetoric.
"Those people were the enemies of Azerbaijani officials, because they were able to confront to Azeris on the foreign arena. Ara Saghatelyan was one of them, who is currently imprisoned. The other was Karen Bekaryan, who spent one day behind the bars and was freed only through a court decision. Angela Elibekova was detained by the officers of the National Security Service, likewise Gohar Meloyan. Is it possible for any Armenian leader to arrest those who are so hatred by Azeris? Who is capable to arrest the enemy of the Turks? That is our message that we need Armenia without Turks," said Manukyan, speaking of the ruling force in Armenia.
To remind, former chief of staff of the National Assembly, Ara Saghatelyan was detained by the National Security Service (NSS) last week along with co-founder of Qaryak Media Karen Bekaryan, a manager for International Center on Development of Parliamentarism. Saghatelyan was charged with allegedly provoking racial, religious or ethnic hostility, public calls for violence and justifying or propagating violence and violation of the rules of publishing or spreading information during the martial law. Saghatelyan's arrest is widely seen as political persecution for his opposition views by the public and rights organizations.
Artsakh reports 1 new case of COVID-19 in past day
12:07,
STEPANAKERT, FEBRUARY 24, ARMENPRESS. 1 new case of COVID-19 has been confirmed in Artsakh over the past one day, the ministry of healthcare reported.
50 COVID-19 tests were conducted on February 23.
2 infected patients receive treatment in a hospital, the other confirmed cases continue treatment at home.
The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Artsakh has reached 2381.
Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
Russian parliamentarian slams Pashinyan’s remarks about Iskander missile system
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan hinted at the inoperability of the Russian Iskander operational-tactical missile systems (OTRK) in his recent interview. Russian State Duma member Viktor Zavarzin commented on the Armenian PM's remarks in an interview with "Govorit Moskva" radio station. To remind, Pashinyan declared on Tuesday that Iskander system 'did not explode or exploded by 10%' in the recent Artsakh war.
In the words of the Russian MP, Pashinyan thus tries "to absolve himself from guilt for the Nagorno Karabakh war outcomes."
"If a person tries to clear himself from the blame, he would speculate about Inskanders, likewise blame the Armenian people and the military. That is not true, of course. The Iskander systems have high accuracy in hitting the targets, proved in numerous military exercises. That [ed. Pashinyan's statement] is an absolute lie. They were used in Syria with high accuracy," said the parliamentarian.
CivilNet: Culture, Branding and the Importance of Negative Identities
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Paul Gauguin
Our culture is grounded in its history, comfortable in its identity, and one in which its relative peacefulness comes from a thousand unwritten norms of acceptable behavior and not from legal mandates or laws.
Culture is the most functional part of our country and the collective Armenian nation. It is also the glue that kept this county functional despite all her other failings over the past 30 years.
In this historic moment we need to weaponize our culture to build a competent state, a functional economy and a modern military. In order to make our culture usable for these purposes, we need to learn to brand our culture in a way that will redefine what it means to be Armenian both for our purposes and on how the country and culture are viewed internationally.
Cultures like ours, precisely because of their groundedness are at a great disadvantage in branding themselves. The primary feature of the world we live in is “Liquid Modernity”, a concept developed by the great Polish Philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, which argued that endless change and disintegration are the primary features of modern cultures, economies and societies.
If we are going to brand ourselves internationally it is important to understand how the world sees us.
The reality is that very few people in the world think about us or have any opinion of us. We currently don’t matter in any meaningful way to the world. Secondly, to the extent that the world knows about us, it is only because of the Genocide and the unresolved Artsakh issue.
On the first issue, regardless of what they say publicly, it either proves their stereotypes of Turks as Asiatic savages, or of us as another group of small and irrelevant people too obsessed with history from which more “sophisticated” people like themselves have moved on from.
The Artsakh issue is for the most part viewed as another “ancient” dispute between two groups of small brown people. No one cares about the specifics, the rightness of any one’s cause, or what some local Soviet committee decided in the 1920s.
For all practical purposes as far as the world is concerned we are a blank slate, so what should be the brand of a new Armenia?
Internationally, our brand should be freedom. In fact, it is more so our willingness to fight for freedom and not to accept tyrannies of any kind, and for being a small island of freedom in a sea of tyrannies all around us. We need to define ourselves as much with who and what we are against as who and what we are for.
These are not hyperbolic points; you can draw a straight line between Armenia and South Korea and not show another country that enjoys the freedoms we enjoy here. And as far as our willingness to fight for freedom, at a time in which most Europeans have literally become the Nietzchean last man, willing to sacrifice their history and freedoms for today’s peace and comfort, we are still a people willing to fight for the ashes of our fathers and the temples of our Gods. We are the ghosts of their own past, ghosts that they both admire and despise at the same time, thereby explaining their ambivalence towards us.
If we are to brand ourselves with who our enemies are, we could not be blessed with a better antagonist than Azerbaijan – an oriental despotism and the longest-running family dictatorship outside of North Korea. A country of literal slaves owned by two families, a state in which the first lady is also the Vice President, where “election results” are announced a day before the “election” by mistake on national television, and a state where the official national hero is an axe murderer.
A successful branding effort for our purposes is essentially an act of public relations jiu-jitsu, in which we utilize the negative realities of our region, and our heroic defiance of those realities, as our narrative to the world. We, unlike most peoples around us, have never accepted geography as an excuse for either tyranny or subservience. We have paid a terrible price for this, a price only a few are willing to pay.
If we are marketing ourselves to the world as a stronghold of freedom we need to comprehend what that word really means. The universal concept of freedom now is a Western one, defined by individual rights and structured, well-established and fair legal systems. There is much that is admirable about the Western notion of freedom, which has become the ideal for so many people in the world.
However, that concept which is based on the idea of freedom “from” things is different from our cultural norms and experiences. We need to put our stamp on what freedom means. Yes, individual rights are important as are solid legal systems protecting those rights, but those are starting points and not the endpoint. Freedom in our culture is also one that is enjoyed in solidarity and community and one in which lonely alienation is not mistaken for freedom.
Our approach to this concept could be our greatest contribution to the world around us. Because our culture is one that is as Asian as it is European, social and family-oriented yet almost anarchistically individualistic. We have threaded the needle between an un-free yet socially coherent East and a free and socially incoherent West; on this front, we are an example for others to follow. In our region where freedom is the exception, we must open our doors to dissidents, free thinkers and everyone willing to be constructive members of a free society. We should become what Amsterdam represented to dissidents in the 17th Century, an island of freedom in a sea of tyrannies.
What should be the culture of the new Armenian man? The ideal new Armenian man is competent, despises mediocrity, excels in science, business, culture and warfare. The new Armenian man is more PicsArt, TUMO and KRISP and other such future centers of excellence rather than one who wallows in our painful history. In short, the new Armenian is a winner and a stoic figure who above all despises being pitied.
We have failed in telling our story in the post Genocide period because we have not acknowledged that the crucifixion of unimportant peoples is the way of the world. Crucifixions happen every day, only resurrections are miracles, and we are that miracle.
Expert: US sanctions against Armenia not ruled out due to Boeing 737-related issue
Expert in international studies Suren Sargsyan says the U.S. may impose sanctions on Armenia after U.S.-made Boeing 737 aircraft, which was bound for Yerevan, ended up in Iran under yet unclear circumstances.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Civil Aviation Committee of Armenia said it has not received any confirmed information that the aircraft registered in Armenia “has been hijacked halfway”, as some reports suggest.
“The aircraft may have been hijacked but the committee is not aware of it,” Sargsyan wrote on Facebook, adding a probe into the circumstance of the incident is underway.
“Clear actions by the U.S. against Armenia, including sanctions, are not ruled out in the wake of the incident,” he said.
Sargsyan suggested returning the plane to Armenia and holding those responsible to account to avoid the possible negative consequences.
"In general, we should not interfere in confrontations of the superpowers at all and should maintain neutrality, especially when both are friendly states,” the expert said.
Karabakh to not hold elections of local self-government elections until March 1, 2022 due to martial law
President of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) Arayik Harutyunyan today signed a decree stating that elections of local self-government bodies won’t be held in the communities of the country until March 1, 2022 due to martial law.
The decree states that the term of powers of the existing local self-government bodies shall be extended until the first session of the newly elected local self-government bodies, and in case of early termination of the powers of head of community or member of council of elders, acting head of community and members shall be appointed to those positions, in rural communities — upon the decision of the head of administration of the relevant district, in the municipal community of Stepanakert — upon submission by the state body in the field of territorial administration, and in other municipal communities — upon submission by the head of administration of the relevant district, upon the decision of the government.
Spokesperson of Turkey’s ruling party: We will turn the dreams of Greece and Cyprus into a nightmare
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was denounced by the spokesperson of Turkey’s ruling AKP party Ömer Çelik for not inviting the pseudo-state of occupied northern Cyprus to the Philia Forum, while he also threatened Greece and Cyprus.
Speaking after a meeting of his party’s central committee, Çelik said:
“Mitsotakis presenting the Turkish army as occupying and then organizing a conference called the ‘Philia Forum,’ attended by the Foreign Ministers of Greece, Egypt, France, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and the [Republic of] Cyprus, the question is: Why was the Turkish Republic, a Mediterranean country and a country at the center of these issues, not invited to this forum?”
Ömer Çelik.
“In a meeting that was attended by the Greek Cypriot side, why was not the [unrecognized so-called] Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus [TRNC] invited? No meeting can be a friendship forum excluding the TRNC,” he said.
Çelik said that “if the Greece and Cyprus dreams of taking with them those countries that have problems for other reasons with Turkey to achieve their maximalist goals, we would like to guarantee that we will turn this into a nightmare.”
“We are not going to let this dream come true. They will not imagine such a thing, they will not take a step with such dreams, they will not even go crazy. They will not escape the nightmare if they take a step,” he added.
Turkey is immensely frustrated as the Philia Forum, the brainchild of Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias, completely isolated Turkey in the East Mediterranean region, while boosting Greece’s relations with Arab states in the Persian Gulf.
Effectively, as Turkey continues to act outside of international law and continues its threats and provocations against neighbouring countries, Greece has successfully sidelined Ankara as the key country of the East Mediterranean.