Author: Hagop Kamalian

President of the Republic of Armenia, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Serzh Sargsyan visited the Ministry of Defense today.

Serzh Sargsyan was briefed on the steps the Armenian Armed Forces are taking. The President gave corresponding instructions.

Photo: Getty Images

 

Turkey has illegally forced thousands of refugees to return to Syria, a report by Amnesty International says, the BBC reports.

The group says about 100 Syrians have been sent back to their war-torn country every day since mid-January in breach of international law.

Amnesty says its report exposes the flaws in a recent deal between the EU and Turkey aimed at stemming the flow of refugees arriving in Greece.

Turkey has denied sending back any refugees against their will.

The Amnesty report comes just days before Turkey is expected to receive the first migrants returned from Greece under the deal with the EU.

The group says its research in southern Turkey suggested that authorities had been rounding up and expelling groups of about 100 Syrian men, women and children almost daily since the middle of January.

Under the “non-refoulement” principle of international humanitarian law, a state is prohibited from deporting individuals to a war zone.

Amnesty said one case involved three young children forced back into Syria without their parents, while another saw the forced return of an eight-months’ pregnant woman.

It said many of those returned appeared to be unregistered refugees but it had also documented cases of registered Syrian refugees being sent back while not carrying their papers.

The Hrant Dink Foundation has established a research library specialized on Armenian Studies and minorities in Turkey within the Anarad Hığutyun Building.

The Library aims to serve researchers, students and the Armenian community by providing systematic knowledge and scientific information with particular focus on Armenian culture and history.

With the capacity of 20,000 volumes, and currently featuring books, periodicals, photographs, DVDs, tapes and maps, the Library and its archive will be expanded further thanks to the exclusively donated private archives and collections.

With the use of Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system, the library offers a research capacity with international standards.

Library’s collection of books and the resources will continue to improve with the suggestion of the members of the Library. In case the literature needed for their research is not available at the Library, researchers will be able recommend resources and they will be incorporated in the Library collection if considered relevant.

The Library catalogue can be accessed online at webpage.

Armenia and Belarus played a goalless draw in a friendly match held in Yerevan’s Republican Stadium.

The fixture was a farewell match for Armenia’s long-time goalkeeper Roman Berezovsky.

“There was some tension in the first half, but we played more attacking football in the second half and created more chances,” Armenia head coach Varuzhan Sukiasyan said after the match.

The Chair of the NSW Australia Armenia Parliamentary Friendship Group, Jonathan O’Dea MP has remembered the Sumgait Massacres of Armenians by Azerbaijan in a Private Members’ Statement in the NSW State Parliament.

After acknowledging the upcoming 101^st Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, which will be commemorated next month, O’Dea said: “In a similar vein, but of more recent memory, many people mourn and honour the victims of the ant-Armenian Azerbaijani attacks in Sumgait and Baku from 1988 to 1990.”

“The February 1988 anti-Armenian rallies through Azerbaijan gave way to waves of ethnically motivated violence, death and destruction.”

“Consequently, Azerbaijan’s Armenian community all but disappeared, with thousands displaced, culminating in a war involving the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, otherwise known as Artsakh”, added O’Dea when referring to the Sumgait and Baku Pogroms, while recognising that tensions and border skirmishes are still a reality today despite a ceasefire from 1994.

O’Dea continued: “I am proud to support the Armenian-Australian community… in remembrance of such tragic events. While it is important to promote tolerance, justice, and democratic freedom, recognising and remembering the past will also help ensure that dark historic events are not repeated.”

To conclude his speech, O’Dea paid tribute to those contributing towards more positive outcomes for the future, specifically mentioning the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC Australia) and Baroness Caroline Cox from the UK’s House of Lords.

ANC Australia’s Executive Administrator, Arin Markarian said: “We thank Mr. O’Dea for highlighting those matters of importance to the Armenian-Australian community, including the Sumgait and Baku pogroms, while also remembering the victims of the Armenian Genocide, and those Armenians and other minorities who suffer persecution in Syria.”

Markarian added: “As Chair of the NSW Australia-Armenia Parliamentary Friendship Group, Mr. O’Dea continues to be a great advocate for the moral truths that come with Armenian history and a wonderful supporter of our Armenian community. For this, he should be greatly commended.”

A small restaurant in West Bengal is baking Armenian lavash in traditional tonirs. “This restaurant is my small effort to tell a story as beautiful and age-old as Armenia, rather than the history of Armenians in West Bengal,” chief Sabyasachi Gorai says, the reports.

In the chef’s own words, the restaurant is the “fruit of his lost nostalgic past.”

“Lavash (the bread) is a word that has found a permanent spot in UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list (incidentally the only food item to make it to that list from around the world). A word that goes so deep not just into the food history of the world, but also the culture that Armenia had to offer. Till date, we are baking lavash at Kashmir in traditional tonirs after so many centuries. This restaurant is my small effort to tell a story as beautiful and age-old as Armenia, rather the history of Armenians in West Bengal,” Saby says.

Saby grew up in Asansol, a small town steeped in Armenian influence, around the then-thriving bakeries, the churches and the graveyards, playing with the Armenian boys, under the tutelage of the elegant and well-spoken principal of AG Church School, Mrs Aedinnangze. Those memories came flooding back when Saby picked up a book written by his father Sakti Gorai, a scholar and researcher, called 100 years of Coal Mining History. The twin towns of Asansol and Durgapur, and neighbouring suburbs Kulty and Raniganj, came back to Saby, and with them the whiff of the many Armenian dishes. The idea of Lavaash germinated thus. The year was 2015, the centenary year of the Armenian genocide.

“While assimilating the Armenian story I have also taken influences of other foreign settlers in Bengal like the Portuguese and the French. My grandmom’s cook book from 1938 passed on to my mom and my mom’s hand-written recipe notes have also done their bit in finalising the Lavaash menu. Traditional Armenian food is not available anywhere and it took me a lot of research to get this right,” says Saby.

The Armenian St. Mary Church in Sinjar (Iraq) has been completely destroyed, reports, quoting its sources in Erbil.

According to the reports, tens of skeletons, thought to be those of Yazidi residents of the region, were recently found in the vicinities of the church.

The Armenian population had left the region before it was invaded by the Islamic State. The city of Sinjar in the north of Iraq is considered the main center of the Yazidi community.

The dreaded Islamic State miltant group has made life threats to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a new video which shows their photos riddled with digitally added bullet holes, mocking the social media websites’ attempts to block terrorist content from their platforms.

In the 25-minute video, the IS claim they are fighting back against efforts by the social media giants to wipe their platforms of accounts promoting terrorism.

The video includes a direct threat to the tech entrepreneurs, branding them allies of the American “Crusader government”.

Pictures of Zuckerberg and Dorsey can be seen being blasted with a hail of bullets in the amateur footage which emerged. The video, titled “Flames of the Supporters” and released by a group calling themselves “the sons of the Caliphate army”, ends with a direct threat to the two men, ‘The Sun’ reported.

A slide toward the end of the video reads, in English: “To Mark and Jack, founders of Twitter and Facebook and to their Crusader government. You announce daily that you suspended many of our accounts and to you we say: is that all you can do? you are not in our league. If you close one account we will take 10 in return and soon your names will be erased after we delete you sites, #Sons_Caliphate_Army”.

In a separate slide, they also claim to have hacked more than 10,000 Facebook accounts, 150 Facebook groups, and more than 5,000 Twitter accounts.