Author: Jirair Kafian

[1] Edmond Y. Azadian is Advisor to the Alex and Marie Manoogian Museum in Detroit, Michigan, Advisor from the Diaspora to the Ministry of Culture in Armenia, and member of the Republic of Armenia's Academy of Sciences. He served as assistant editor of the Armenian daily Zartonk and editor-in-chief of the daily Arev in Cairo, Egypt, and is a leader of the Armenian Democratic Liberal Party. He has authored several books in Armenian and English, including Portraits and Profiles, Observations and Criticisms, and History on the Move; and has edited more than 21 books and published over 1,500 articles, book reviews, and essays in daily newspapers and literary magazines. His latest publication, a bilingual one, is dedicated to the famous Armenian poet, Vahan Tekeyan. He has been associated with the Mirror-Spectator for the last 45 years. Source: Mirrorspectator.com/author/edmond-azadian.

[2] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 8886, Armenia-Azerbaijan Tensions – Moscow-Based Expert Krylov: 'The Turkish Military Presence In Azerbaijan Has Become Permanent' And Strives For Constant Expansion; Erdoğan's Policy Aims To Increase Turkey's Influence – From North Africa To China's Borders, August 10, 2020; MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 8875, Russian Military Expert Pavel Felgenhauer: Russia Will Defend Armenia From The Turks; If Necessary, Russia Will Save Armenia With A Nuclear Strike, August 3, 2020; MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 8864, Kommersant Columnist Yusin: Erdogan Is Pouring Kerosene On The Territorial Dispute Between Armenia And Azerbaijan, July 27, 2020; and MEMRI Daily Brief No. 226, Where Will Erdoğan Strike Next?, by Alberto M. Fernandez, August 4, 2020.

[3] On July 14, during a cabinet meeting, Erdoğan stated: "Undoubtedly, this attack is an event that goes beyond Armenia… The aim is to block the process of the solution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with a provocative approach and to reveal new conflict areas in the region." See Erdoğan condemns Armenia border clash with Azerbaijan, July 14, 2020; Son dakika haberi: Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan'dan önemli açıklamalar, Hurriyet.com.tr, July 14, 2020.

[4] On July 23, after the Armenian-Azerbaijani border clashes on July 12-14, Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan put forward the following seven points:

First: The common security system of Armenia and Artsakh needs to be further strengthened. In this regard, I attach an ultimate importance to our close cooperation with the Republic of Artsakh and bringing a new content to this cooperation proportionate to the existing threat.

Second: The Republic of Artsakh should become a full party of negotiations.

Third: Azerbaijan must publicly renounce the use of force and take credible steps towards refraining from the anti-Armenian rhetoric.

Fourth: The negotiations must be meaningful. Azerbaijan's position that the negotiations are the continuation of war and they should help to address military objectives at the negotiation table undermines the meaning of the whole peace process. Negotiations can be meaningful if Azerbaijan is willing to pull back from its maximalist position and is ready for compromise. The recognition of the right to self-determination of the people of Artsakh without any limitation and the security of the people of Armenia and Artsakh cannot be conceded under any circumstances.

Fifth: In recent days, Azerbaijan has targeted the civilian population and infrastructures of several border settlements in the Tavush region. The countries, supplying weapons to Azerbaijan, must clearly realize that the use of those weapons against the civilian population constitutes a crime. It creates an impression that it is not Azerbaijan that is fighting against the Armenian Armed Forces and civilian population, but rather those international corporations that are supplying high-precision lethal weapons along with their specialists. This thirty-years-long conflict has severely damaged Armenia's borderline settlements and lives of people living thereon and in Artsakh, violating their political, economic, environmental rights, their right to free movement, among others. The approach that these rights can be exercised only after the settlement of the conflict is not acceptable. The needs of people, living in the conflict zone, must be a priority in the peace process.

Sixth: The ceasefire monitoring, that existed before the pandemic, has been in fact very limited. It is necessary to introduce effective international monitoring, which would be permanent and would have verification mechanisms in place to identify the side who committed ceasefire violations. Such monitoring activities can be implemented by the Office of the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, which accumulated years of experience in the region and can ensure the permanent presence of the OSCE observers along the state border and the line of contact.

The direct line between the militaries on the ground is an effective tool for preventing and responding to incidents.

Seventh: Armenia will continue working with the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs toward the peaceful settlement of the conflict. We have decisively rejected and will continue to reject Turkey's attempts to destabilize the region through the manipulation of this conflict. See Primeminister.am/en/statements-and-messages/item/2020/07/23/Cabinet-meeting-Speech.

[5] Armenian defense minister Davit Tonoyan commented on the statement of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, who said: "Liberate our territories before it's too late." Armenian defense minister spokesperson Shushan Stepanyan posted a video on Facebook in which the defense minister asks when "too late" is; stating: "First of all, given the fact that our Prime Minister, the President of Artsakh are always making peaceful statements, always call for continuing the negotiations, we cannot understand such statements [i.e. by the Azerbaijani president]. As defense minister, I would like to understand when this 'too late' is." He added that such statements are typical also of the Azerbaijani military leadership, saying: "Their military leadership states that they are ready to start military operations, they are just waiting for an order. Firstly, it's not as if we are not waiting for such an order. Secondly, the military operations in Tavush were vivid evidence of the fact that the adversary, despite using latest equipment, has failed in a short period of time, suffering numerous losses." Armenpress.am, July 31, 2020.

[6] See .

To mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Sèvres Treaty, the Armenian Cause Foundation on Monday released the recently updated study entitled “On the Validity of the Treaty of Sèvres and the Arbitral Award of Woodrow Wilson” by Dr. Aida Avanessian a legal expert with a concentration on international law.

From a purely legal perspective, Avanessian’s study concluded that it is impossible to separate President Wilson’s Arbitral Award from the Treaty of Sèvres. She also advances several legal theories that allow her to conclude the following:

a. The issue of validity of the Treaty of Sèvres must be separated from the issue of its enforceability;
b. The Treaty of Sèvres was a valid legal document at the time that President Wilson’s Award was issued; and
c. As a result, the Arbitral Award, having been issued under the authority of jurisdiction granted by a valid legal document, itself was and remains a valid legal document.

The publication also includes defining excerpts from the Sèvres Treaty, culls materials from papers relating to U.S. foreign relations in 1920 and presents Wilson’s letter to the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers in which the U.S. president delineates the borders between Armenia and Turkey and expands on his arbitral award.

Avanessian first published the article in 2017, in the “Armenian Yearbook of International and Comparative Law.” She revised the document on May 1, 2020.

Read Avanessian’s “On the Validity of the Treaty of Sèvres and the Arbitral Award of Woodrow Wilson.” 

BY SHAHEN ARABOGHLIAN
From The Armenian Weekly

The most beautiful sunset I’d seen over the Beirut horizon was only yesterday. It was a magnificent fusion of smooth, peachy orange; pink cotton candy; with a bright blue backdrop—all full of toxic nitrates released from the traumatic explosion in Beirut. I write these sentences out of rage—a dominant feeling—with a pinch of numbness. Numbness that pushed me awake through the night, writing this piece.

It was almost power-cut o’clock in Lebanon, which is almost every hour, on a calm Tuesday afternoon. When I say calm, it’s very relative. It’s calm because no company or institution made hundreds of employee layoffs today; it’s calm because the internet still worked until 6:00 p.m.; it’s calm because I haven’t heard of a suicide attempt today; it’s calm because the exchange rate has stabilized, albeit at unimaginable heights. It was calm but at a cost.

A short shake startles me on the hilltop of my home in Mezher. Easy, earthquake. We’ve been over this Jumanji stage before. And then, a tiny boom. Something nearby blew up, I think. And then, a proper shake, which takes me stumbling over to my room door, in confusion. This has become a dangerous earthquake; we need to take cover. I look out my window to see the Homenetmen Stadium’s large window panes blow into pieces, and then, a deafening boom.
For a moment, I was sure we were getting bombed. For a moment, I was confident that all I was hearing were airstrikes approaching us from afar, and in the next few milliseconds, we would be next. I froze. I didn’t run. You can’t run from an airstrike. I stood there and accepted death.

Spoiler alert: it never came. I had to shuffle passports and paperwork and laptops into a backpack in case the third strike gave me a chance to run to the building basement. But the third strike never came, because it was never a strike. It was an explosion, and mom knew, because the Civil War still lingers in the daily memory of my parents’ generation. They can differentiate between airstrikes, missiles, mortars and bombs.

Whatever was left of Beirut vanished within minutes. The bars that squeezed their last pennies out in Mar Mkhayel, the almost-empty stores in Gemmayze, and the rest of already-suffering Beirut were all heavily hit. You forget about your fresh trauma and start calling around to check if your loved ones are fine, and hopefully alive, begging the “calling” screen to turn into “00:01.”

Over the next few hours, you see it all, and then some. You see the movie scenes of the exploding mushroom cloud, perishing all in its way. You see the Instagram page set up for the 200+ souls who haven’t been found yet and wonder how their families’ sleeplessness is so different from yours. You see underfunded Red Cross volunteers, scrambling to pull dead-or-alive bodies out of burning debris. You see homes, shelters and buildings—unlivable. You see doctors performing surgeries with smartphone flashlights, open-air, because our hospitals are underfunded and at full capacity. You see videos of children screaming that they don’t want to die.

And you count your blessings.

You read all about Lebanese resilience, everywhere. We party through pain; we’re happy through hardships; we conquer calamities and catastrophes. But not anymore.

You’re asked to close your windows to limit toxin inhalation, but my window is in pieces on the floor. You’re expected to rebuild what is broken, but my money has been confiscated by the bank.

It kicks in. You realize, this is it. This isn’t the Lebanon I grew up in anymore. This Lebanon hosts poverty, disease, anger, frustration, hunger, anxiety and depression. This Lebanon spits in the faces of the underprivileged, of the foreign worker, of minorities. You decide you want nothing to do with this Lebanon anymore. The Lebanon I know can only be reconstructed in dreams and memories. The Lebanon I know no longer wants to be reconstructed because it is unable to. The phoenix can only rise from the ashes so many times.

And in those ashes, there is another Lebanon:

The Lebanon I know stands in line to donate blood, less than half an hour after the shambles.

The Lebanon I know selflessly helps the wounded.

The Lebanon I know creates donation links and shares tweets and Instagram stories and Facebook posts, asking the diaspora—and the world—for assistance.

The Lebanon I know always finds its way out of the dust and rubble.
But the people of Lebanon can only handle so much.

I write these sentences in rage, but in them too is love for this nation and for her people. Eventually, the rage will subside, making way for total numbness. The Lebanon I know is at a tipping point, and the Paris of the Middle East is a tale of bygones.

BY LIEUTENANT GENERAL (RETIRED) HAYK KOTANJIAN

Following the attacks unleashed by Baku on Armenia on July 12, strategic analysts monitoring the dynamics of the “no war, no peace” situation in the volatile and conflict-ridden region, have come across plans for a joint Turkish-Azerbaijani war against the Republics of Armenia and Artsakh.

This is evidenced by the statements of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the results of a joint reconfiguration of these plans during the visit of an Azerbaijani Armed Forces delegation to Ankara headed by Lieutenant General Ramiz Tahirov, Commander of the Azerbaijani Air Force.

Erdogan confirmed that the Turkish Army Chief of Staff General Yashar Guler had successfully worked with the Azerbaijani military delegation with the involvement of the commanders of all branches of the Turkish Armed Forces. It can be assumed that the adjustment of the plans of the joint Turkish-Azerbaijani war against Armenia was carried out taking into account the lessons of Azerbaijan’s defeat of in the 2016 April War and the precise and crushing counteraction of the Armenian Armed Forces to an attempt to escalate the Karabakh conflict in the Tavush Province in Armenia.

The end result of the statements by the heads of Turkey and Azerbaijan about their readiness to implement the adjusted military plans for a joint war has made it imperative for the authorities of the Republic of Armenia to speak about the threat of recurrence of the Genocide hanging over the Armenian people.

The relevance of the “Never Again” principle for the Armenian people is due to the genocidal attacks on the Armenian population of Azerbaijan during Perestroika in the USSR, which were in response to peaceful political rallies of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians for the right to self-determination and secession from the Azerbaijani SSR in accordance with the USSR legislation and international law. We are talking about the pogroms in Sumgait and Kirovabad in 1988 and in Baku in 1990, as well as war crimes committed against the civilian population of Armenia during the April war of 2016.

In this regard, it is extremely important to call on the international community, represented by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, and the three permanent members of the UN Security Council – Russia, the United States and France to take sequent steps to prevent a new Genocide against the Armenian people.

Wanting to make sense of the lessons of the April War and to ensure a guaranteed peace, the OSCE Minsk Group offered confidence-building measures to the parties to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which were agreed on in Vienna on May 16 and in St. Petersburg on June 20, 2016.

The authorities of the Republic of Armenia must appeal to the Minsk Group Co-Chairs with a proposal to return the issue of confidence-building measures to the agenda, so that all stakeholders can receive reliable information on the escalation of the conflict and the identification of the initiator or the aggressor. As a monitoring tool for ceasefire violations, the use of a space sensing method in the Karabakh conflict zone via satellites employed by the three permanent members of the UN Security Council—Russia Russia, the United States and France—should be considered.

The coordinated satellite signals by the Co-Chairs to determine the concentration of military buildup and threats of deployment will enable Azerbaijan and Armenia, through the mediation of the Minsk Group Co-Chairs, to pursue more substantive steps for a peaceful resolution of the Karabakh conflict.