Tuesday,
Armenia Not Democracy, Says Ex-President
• Anush Mkrtchian
Armenia - Former President Serzh Sarkisian and his supporters visit the Komitas
Pantheon in Yerevan, March 25, 2022.
Former President Serzh Sarkisian on Tuesday brushed aside government claims that
Armenia became a democratic country after he was forced to resign during the
2018 “velvet revolution.”
“If this is democracy, then nobody needs it,” Sarkisian told reporters, citing
existential threats facing the country now.
“If there are more than 20 political prisoners now, if 150,000 people were
simply expelled from a part of our homeland [Nagorno-Karabakh], then what
democracy are you talking about?” he said.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, who swept to power as a result of the 2018 mass
protests, again claimed to have turned Armenia into a democracy when he
addressed the European Parliament earlier in the day. He said his country “would
have lost its independence and sovereignty had it not been democratic.”
Opposition groups, including Sarkisian’s Republican Party (HHK) accuse him of
jailing political opponents, suppressing judicial independence and issuing
political orders to law-enforcement bodies. The ex-president faced similar
accusations when he governed Armenia from 2008-2018.
The “political prisoners” mentioned by him presumably include individuals
arrested and prosecuted during last month’s anti-government protests in Yerevan
sparked by the Azerbaijani military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh. The
protesters accused Pashinian of selling out Karabakh and its ethnic Armenian
population that has fled the region. Sarkisian also held the Armenian premier
responsible for the fall of Karabakh.
Karabakh Leader ‘Forced To Dissolve Republic’
• Ruzanna Stepanian
Armenia - Ethnic Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabakh embrace upon their arrival
in the Armenian border village of Kornidzor, September 26, 2023.
Nagorno-Karabakh’s president accepted Azerbaijan’s demands to dissolve all
Karabakh government bodies to allow the region’s ethnic Armenian population to
safely flee its homeland, exiled Karabakh officials in Yerevan said on Tuesday.
Samvel Shahramanian signed a corresponding decree on September 28 just over a
week after a Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped an Azerbaijani military
offensive. Under the terms of that agreement, Karabakh disarmed and disbanded
its army, paving the way for the restoration of full Azerbaijani control over
the territory.
Shahramanian’s decree said that the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic,
set up in September 1991, will cease to exist on January 1. Some prominent
Karabakh Armenians challenged the legality of the decree, raising more questions
about the circumstances in which it was signed.
Shahramanian, one of the last ethnic Armenians to leave the region, has avoided
any contact with the press since arriving in Armenia along with more than
100,000 Karabakh residents.
Hunan Tadevosian, the spokesman for the Karabakh interior ministry, said his
decree was demanded by Azerbaijan and Shahramanian signed it in order to “save
human lives.” “There was no other option,” Tadevosian told RFE/RL’s Armenian
Service.
Aram Harutiunian, a lawmaker representing Karabakh’s largest party, confirmed
that. He said Baku warned that Azerbaijani troops will enter Stepanakert if
Shahramanian rejects the “ultimatum.”
The decree in question has still not been publicized in full. Some Karabakh
politicians and public figures have said that it must be declared null and void
now that Karabakh has been almost fully depopulated. Several opposition figures
in Armenia have echoed their calls.
The Armenian government is unlikely to back them. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian
pointedly declined to congratulate Shahramanian when he was elected president by
the Karabakh legislature in early September.
Pashinian Addresses EU Parliament, Blasts ‘Armenia’s Allies’
France - Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian addresses the European
Parliament in Strasbourg, .
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian denounced Russian peacekeepers for not preventing
the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh and seemingly accused Russia of using Armenia’s
conflict with Azerbaijan to try to topple him in a speech delivered at the
European Parliament on Tuesday.
Pashinian addressed the European Parliament’s legislative body amid Yerevan's
deepening rift with Moscow, its longtime ally locked in a geopolitical standoff
with the West.
“Democracy in Armenia … continues to receive strong blows that follow an almost
exactly repeated scenario: foreign aggression, then the inaction of Armenia's
security allies, then attempts to use the war or the humanitarian situation or
external security threats to subvert Armenia's democracy and sovereignty by
inciting internal instability with hybrid techniques directed by external
forces,” he said.
Pashinian pointed to Azerbaijan’s September 19-20 military offensive in Karabakh
which caused a mass exodus of the region’s ethnic Armenian population and
sparked renewed anti-government protests in Yerevan.
“As hundreds of thousands of Armenians were fleeing from Nagorno-Karabakh to the
Republic of Armenia, our security allies not only did not help us but also made
public calls for regime change in Armenia,” he said. “But the people of Armenia
united for their own independence, sovereignty, democracy, and another
conspiracy against our state failed.”
Pashinian already implicitly accused Moscow of fomenting the angry street
protests against his rule in the immediate aftermath of the Azerbaijani assault.
Their organizers and participants blamed him for Baku’s takeover of Karabakh,
saying that he precipitated it with his recognition of Azerbaijani sovereignty
over the region.
Pashinian again sought to shift the blame to Moscow, saying that the Karabakh
Armenians fled their homeland due to the “inaction of the Russian peacekeeping
contingent.” President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have defended
the peacekeepers.
The Russian Foreign Ministry accused Pashinian late last month of seeking to
ruin Russian-Armenian relations and reorient his country towards the West.
Earlier in September, it deplored “a series of unfriendly steps” taken by
Yerevan.
Moscow has also been critical of Western efforts to broker an
Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal, saying that their main purpose is to drive
Russia out of the South Caucasus. Putin offered last week to host fresh talks
between Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
Pashinian signaled on Tuesday that he still prefers the Western mediation and
hopes it will result in an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty soon. He noted that
he and Aliyev are due to meet in Brussels together with EU head Charles Michel
later this year.
Pashinian further stated that he wants to deepen Armenia’s ties with the EU “as
much as the European Union finds it possible.”
Reposted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
Copyright (c) 2023 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc.
1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
Author: Jane Topchian
Armenpress: Various countries, int’l organizations pledged additional €35 million for Armenia for crisis response measures
17:18,
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 14, ARMENPRESS. Various countries and international organizations have so far pledged a total of €35 million in assistance for Armenia through the ICRC to meet the needs of the forcibly displaced persons of Nagorno-Karabakh, Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Khachatryan has said.
Another €35 million has already been allocated, 15 million of which will be provided as budgetary support to the Armenian government. Development agencies will direct the rest of the funds through their representations to support the forcibly displaced persons.
Furthermore, over the course of the past two weeks Armenia received more than 100 tons of humanitarian aid for the forcibly displaced persons of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“The government is monitoring the issues of the forcibly displaced persons and continues to develop support programs accordingly. The past two weeks were used to solve the primary issues, but it’s already time to clarify the further assistance programs in the direction of mid-term and long-term tasks. Soon these programs will be presented to get opinions and adjust the decisions more appropriately,” Khachatryan, who is in charge of the Humanitarian Center responding to the crisis, said at a press conference.
President of the Senate of France accuses Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing in Nagorno- Karabakh
15:18, 4 October 2023
YEREVAN, OCTOBER 4, ARMENPRESS. President of the Senate of France Gérard Larcher has accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Regarding Armenia, I am expressing my solidarity and I am asking, are we going to sacrifice this country at the altar of the energy deal with Azerbaijan? We must display courage from time to time. All of us must stand with Armenia and the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. They were forced to leave a land which was theirs. If that’s not ethnic cleansing, then I don’t know what else it is,” Larcher said in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper.
Azerbaijan rabbi to Armenian Jews: ‘Leave before it’s too late’
Jerusalem Post
Oct 6 2023
By ZVIKA KLEIN
Rabbi Zamir Isayev, a prominent figure in the Jewish community of Azerbaijan, issued an immediate and dire warning on Thursday over the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh: "I repeat my call to the Jews in Armenia: Leave, and if you need help, I'll take care of it. Leave before it's too late…"
The Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in Azerbaijan, historically inhabited by ethnic Armenian Christians, has been at the center of a longstanding conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
"A few weeks ago I warned that staying in Armenia is dangerous for Jews."
Rabbi Zamir Isayev
Isayev's plea, via a video and tweet on X (formerly Twitter), resonates with urgency and fear, a sentiment that has been building over the past few weeks. As the director of the Baku Jewish school and of the Georgian-Sephardic Jewish community in Azerbaijan, Isayev urged Armenian Jews to leave their country, in order for them to stay safe.
In the tweet, Isayev added: "A few weeks ago I warned that staying in Armenia is dangerous for Jews. Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry raised the possibility of violence against Jews twice during the last month. The reason is Israel's close relations with Azerbaijan, and also the fact that we, rabbis, oppose the usage of the Holocaust topic for propaganda purposes."
The rabbi's warnings materialized tragically when he revealed: "Unfortunately, in the middle of the Sukkot holiday there [was] an attack on the synagogue in Yerevan. But this was expected – hate speech provokes violence and intolerance. Desecration of a synagogue anywhere in the world is a serious crime. We reject with disgust any threat to damage the holy places of the people of Israel."
Earlier this week, the World Jewish Center in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, was vandalized in an act thought to be directly related to Israel’s growing relations with neighboring adversary Azerbaijan.
According to the estimates of the local Jewish community and the World Jewish Congress, Armenia is home to around 500-1000 Jews, mostly of Ashkenazi origin with some Mizrahi and Georgian Jews, localized in the capital, Yerevan.
The European Union on Thursday invited the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan for talks to try to revive a peace process thrown into crisis by an Azerbaijani military operation that prompted more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee Nagorno-Karabakh.
Charles Michel, the president of the European Council of EU leaders, said he had invited Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to meet in Brussels by the end of October.
"We believe in diplomacy. We believe in political dialog," Michel told reporters as he announced the meeting at a summit in the Spanish city of Granada of the European Political Community, a forum of more than 40 countries.
Aliyev snubbed a proposed meeting with Pashinyan, Michel, and the leaders of France and Germany at the summit. But Michel said he expected both sides to attend the Brussels talks, noting Baku had said it would take part in future EU-mediated meetings.
At the summit, leaders also pledged support for Armenia as it grapples with the fallout of the Azerbaijani military operation last month to seize control of the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, mainly populated by ethnic Armenians.
MSF offers mental health support to people displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh
MSF.org – Doctors Without Borders
Oct 6 2023
On Tuesday 19 September, Azerbaijan launched an attack on various areas in Nagorno-Karabakh. The region is a self-proclaimed republic internationally recognised as belonging to Azerbaijan, but which has traditionally been home to many ethnic Armenians.
After a ceasefire agreement was reached 24 hours later, more than 100,000 residents from the region made their way to neighbouring Armenia through the Lachin corridor, located between the region and the border, which had been closed for 10 months.
We are dealing with people who have lost everything.NARINE DANIELYAN, MSF MEDICAL TEAM LEADER IN GORIS
The displaced people have an urgent need for mental health support, alongside their other social and medical requirements. On Thursday 28 September, a medical team from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) began receiving patients at the registration centre in Goris, in Syunik province, southern Armenia.
Two psychologists have provided mental health consultations and psychological first aid to over 200 people in just a few days.
“We are dealing with people who have lost everything,” says Narine Danielyan, MSF’s medical team leader in Goris.
“Our approach involves several steps, including building trust, ensuring well-being, stabilising those in acute distress, providing practical assistance, rebuilding social connections, offering coping strategies, and connecting them to additional resources and care.”
The people our teams meet are often exhausted from carrying multiple bags; they are often looking for specific support or just someone to listen to their stories and concerns.
Most suffer from mental health issues. Our medical staff have observed stress, uncertainty about the future, shock, denial, fear, anger, grief, sleep disturbances and physical symptoms, such as stomach aches and headaches, among the patients we see. But this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the long-term suffering that people can endure.
“A woman came to us, repeatedly expressing her desire to return home immediately and asking for our help,” says Danielyan.
“Almost everyone we talk to tells us they have lost a loved one or a distant family member. Most of them are devastated and severely psychologically affected.”
Our mental health teams continue to follow up with patients who have been accommodated in some of the hotels or centres near the reception point in Goris by providing mental health sessions.
Meanwhile, we remain actively engaged in assessing evolving needs, with a specific focus on general healthcare, continuity of care for patients with non-communicable diseases, and addressing respiratory infections, among other illnesses.
https://www.msf.org/armenia-msf-offers-mental-health-support-people-displaced-nagorno-karabakh
Voices: Abandoned by their Soviet ‘peacekeepers’, Armenia is crying out for our help
Oct 3 2023
The Independent
Opinion
What is happening now, at an astonishing rate, in Nagorno-Karabakh is effectively ethnic cleansing on a mass scale.
A formerly autonomous province of Azerbaijan, populated overwhelmingly by people of Armenian ancestry, Nagorno-Karabakh has simply emptied itself out, after a short clash between the rival Caucasian states. It has created another humanitarian crisis and another wave of refugees in a world with no shortage of either.
Karabakh has led a precarious existence since the end of the Soviet Union, which once encompassed Armenia and Azerbaijan and mostly smothered such tensions. With the Russians gone, the area has been the subject of a succession of bloody struggles for supremacy over the succeeding decades. Before the latest outbreak of hostilities, about 120,000 of Karabakh’s residents remained, from around 200,000 at the end of the Soviet era in 1991.
By September, the population had dwindled to 65,000. Now it is thought that somewhere between only 50 and 1,000 ethnic Armenians remain. It is an exodus of historic proportions. It has not been achieved, quite, at the end of a gun or by gangs clearing families from their homesteads; but folk memories of past persecutions have forced the people to flee for their lives, carrying as much of their belongings as their cars will hold.
The proximate cause of the mass movement was the proclamation by the Azeri government that the province will no longer enjoy its “autonomous” status – a fatal breach of trust. As a self-governing oblast in Soviet times and after, its status as an Orthodox Armenian region within Azerbaijan at least gave it some minimal legal protractions against fear of domination by the Turkic and Muslim population that surrounded it.
As an exclave, it was always vulnerable to menace, and such fears sometimes turned to reality, but the people could cling to the hope that the international community, and the powers that interfered in the region so freely, Russia and Turkey, might honour it. Now it has gone.
Nagorno-Karabakh has been anything but stable for many years, and often close to disaster. Now, for all the tragically wrong reasons, the central cause of the volatility – the people of the province – has literally melted away across the borders on the move to Armenia. Western nations often complain about the scale of irregular migration and the numbers of refugees seeking asylum; well, here are about 100,000 hopeless souls arriving over a matter of days in a country, Armenia, which is poor and ill-equipped to accommodate them.
For a whole variety of reasons, the West has a vested interest in providing sufficient humanitarian aid to prevent the present crisis provoking further trouble. There are also geopolitical reasons to offer Armenia friendly assistance. Traditionally, Russia was the ally and protector of Armenia and its minority population within Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani governments looked to Ankara for support.
To an extent, and like other proxy wars such as the Yemeni conflict played out between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the fortunes of Armenia and Azerbaijan mirrored those of their regional superpower mentors. Yet since a soft revolution in Yerevan a few years ago, Armenia has tilted towards the West.
Vladimir Putin has grown more impatient towards his former loyal junior partner, and basically acquiesced in Azeri aggressions, despite having brokered a peace accord a few years ago. Now President Putin finds himself having to deal with more pressing issues than Armenia.
This does represent for the West a rare opportunity to acquire influence in the region, protect Armenia and its people from further abuses, and, in partnership with Turkey, ensure that the war in Ukraine doesn’t somehow spill over into the Caucasus, and potentially drag Georgia and Turkey itself into a wider conflict.
One immediate priority, which would also help ease delivery of aid, is the opening of the border between Armenia and Turkey.
In the words of one Armenian crossing the border into a safer but uncertain future, for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, “it’s over, and everything is lost”. It is now too late for the West to save their original homeland, and Nagorno-Karabakh no longer exists in the meaningful sense it once did. It is not too late to save its hungry and homeless former inhabitants.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/voices-abandoned-soviet-peacekeepers-armenia-192007846.html
Exodus and ethnic cleansing? The sudden end of a decadeslong dream in the Caucasus
NBC News
Sept 28 2023
The dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh as a breakaway state is a seminal point — a rare supernova among the constellation of ethnic conflicts left by the implosion of the USSR.
After more than half the population of an ethnic Armenian enclave fled their homes in a mountainous pocket of land south of Russia, the breakaway republic’s leaders said it would soon “cease to exist.”
In what amounted to a formal capitulation to Azerbaijan, which surrounds it, the Armenian leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh said the self-declared Republic of Artsakh would be dismantled by the end of the year.
This would end three decades of intermittent conflict in and around the enclave, break a 10-month blockade of the region in the South Caucasus that residents said had starved them into submission, and dash hopes of an independent state in territory claimed by Azerbaijan.
The dissolution of Nagorno-Karabakh as a breakaway state is a seminal point — a rare supernova among the constellation of ethnic conflicts left by the implosion of the then-Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The conflict’s abrupt halt reflects how the geopolitical reach of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced realignments far beyond that war.
In an official decree, the region’s separatist President Samvel Shakhramanyan said that residents of Nagorno-Karabakh must now “familiarize themselves with the conditions of reintegration” into Azerbaijan and make “an independent and individual decision about the possibility of staying (or returning) in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
An Armenian family fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh arrives at Yerevan airport in 1991 after being evacuated by a Soviet army helicopter.Wojtek Druszcz / AFP via Getty Images
The announcement came as around 70,000 of the enclave’s population of about 120,000 fled from the region, which sits within Azerbaijan’s borders, to neighboring Armenia, according to Armenia’s government, with more still arriving.
Many residents hauled what few personal belongings they could gather into packed cars, trucks, buses and tractors, some pockmarked with shrapnel after days of Azerbaijani attacks.
Armenia’s leadership has accused Azerbaijan of instigating a refugee crisis by launching a swift invasion this week. Azerbaijan has denied allegations of “ethnic cleansing,” saying it is not forcing people to leave, and would peacefully reintegrate the region and guarantee rights of ethnic Armenians.
Holding a wealth of monasteries, mosques and other religious sites, Nagorno-Karabakh is culturally significant for both Muslim Azeris and what was an overwhelming Christian Armenian population. Armenians in Azerbaijan have been victims of pogroms, while Azerbaijanis claim discrimination and violence at the hands of Armenians.
“Azerbaijan has won a comprehensive military victory and what we’re looking at now is the prospect of Nagorno-Karabakh without Armenians or with very few Armenians remaining,” said Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with the London-based Carnegie Europe think tank. “So in that sense, Azerbaijan has won.”
For those fleeing, the despair of losing their homes was made worse by losing their homeland.
“Many of them are from villages which were taken by the Azerbaijani army, so they really lost their homes already,” said Astrig Agopian, a French Armenian journalist who has been reporting this week on the refugee crisis from Armenia’s border. “There is really this feeling that this time is different. It’s another war, but it’s a war that is definitely lost this time.”
Were that the case, it would bring to an end decades of violence in the region, which has been at the center of geopolitical interests between Eastern and Western nations for centuries.
The political dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh began as the then-Soviet Union weakened in the late 1980s, and Armenians demanded that the majority-Armenian region be incorporated into the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.
After the USSR collapsed in 1991, the conflict erupted into a full-scale war that persisted until a Russian-brokered peace deal in 1994. About 30,000 people were killed and more than a million people displaced.
“My husband died in the first war. He was 30, I was 26. Our children were 3 and 4 years old. It is the fourth war that I went through,” Narine Shakaryan, a grandmother of four, told the Reuters news agency after she arrived in Armenia. “My husband died back then, he was 30 in 1994. That’s the cursed life that we live.”
The fighting continued intermittently for several more decades, leaving an indelible mark on generations of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian residents. A recent war in 2020 saw the more powerful Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, reclaim much of the land surrounding the area, as well as part of the region itself.
Russia negotiated an end to that flare-up and even deployed peacekeepers to ensure security along the Lachin Corridor, the single mountain road that connected Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh.
But the events of the past year show how Moscow, which has historically played the role of both peacekeeper and ally to Armenia — which shares its Christian roots and hosts a Russian military base — has adjusted its allegiances following its invasion of Ukraine and its conflicts with the West.
“The pivotal factor was that Azerbaijan was talking separately to the Russians, and had a joint agenda with the Russians, to pressure Armenia and also to keep the West out of the Caucasus,” de Waal said. “This is why when the Azerbaijani assault happened, Russian peacekeepers who could have actually stopped it stood down. And then Russia failed to condemn the attack.”
After its invasion of Ukraine left Russia isolated, Moscow may feel it has more to gain from cozying up to Azerbaijan than Armenia, particularly after the latter made a public display of cozying up to the West and provided humanitarian aid to Kyiv.
Earlier this month, the country conducted joint exercises with the U.S. military and the Armenian Parliament is set to vote next week on whether to accede to the International Criminal Court, which classifies Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal — a move the Kremlin characterized Thursday as “extremely hostile.”
Inside Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s government has assured the region’s Armenian population that they will be treated humanely and afforded equal rights.
But after months of blockades and blistering fighting, few ethnic Armenians believe it and many feel they have no choice but to flee.
Armenia would prefer former Nagorno-Karabakh servicemembers to join the military
12:09,
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 29, ARMENPRESS. Armenia would like the former servicemembers of the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army – who are now among the forcibly displaced persons arriving to Armenia – to join the Armed Forces of Armenia for military service, the Deputy Minister of Defense Arman Sargsyan has said.
“We would really like the [former] servicemen of the Defense Army to join the Ministry of Defense of Armenia for military service, because they are our compatriots, and they can serve their experience and military knowledge for the Armed Forces of Armenia,” Sargsyan said when asked on the matter.
He said the Ministry of Defense must conduct a study in this regard.
Employment for the forcibly displaced persons from NK is among the priority humanitarian tasks, he added.
‘The world is seeing the true face of evil’: Patterson calls for action in Armenia
Sept 26 2023
Story by Stephene Price
FRESNO, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) – Assemblyman Jim Patterson joins the tens of thousands of Armenians in the Central Valley and across California condemning the continued horrific violations of the ceasefire in the Artsakh region at the hands of Azerbaijan – calling on immediate federal action for Armenia.
Patterson says these acts of violence over the past many months have left 120,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh struggling to survive as they are critically low on food, fuel, and medicine, adding that countless lives are being needlessly lost in the wake of Azerbaijan’s latest full-scale military assaults in this region.
Fresno’s Medical Mission to Armenia: Treating the scars of 2020
“Right now, the World is seeing the true face of evil in Artsakh,” said Assemblyman Jim Patterson. “We, as a Nation, must stand with the Armenian people and, with a unified voice, call on Azerbaijan to stop its attacks and put an end to this bloodshed.”
In a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Assemblyman Patterson is urging the Biden Administration to fully condemn these acts of genocide and pledge to send critical aid to the people of Armenia.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-world-is-seeing-the-true-face-of-evil-patterson-calls-for-action-in-armenia/ar-AA1hj7de