Author: Kajoyan Gevork

Azerbaijani Press: Azerbaijani FM: Status quo in Karabakh conflict is ‘unacceptable and unstable’

Kajoyan Gevork
APA, Azerbaijan
Nov 20 2017

The status quo in respect of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is unacceptable and unstable, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov told a joint press conference with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Baku on Monday.

 

“We today discussed Russia’s role in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. I informed my Russian counterpart about the latest results of the negotiations on the conflict’s resolution,” said Mammadyarov.  

 

The Azerbaijani foreign minister noted that he had recently held discussions on concrete topics in Moscow.  

 

“I told Lavrov that there are a number of approaches that can lead to progress on this issue. The OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs have repeatedly stated that no one accepts the current situation on the contact line of troops,” added Mammadyarov.   

 

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict entered its modern phase when the Armenian SRR made territorial claims against the Azerbaijani SSR in 1988.

 

A fierce war broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. As a result of the war, Armenian armed forces occupied some 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory which includes Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts (Lachin, Kalbajar, Aghdam, Fuzuli, Jabrayil, Gubadli and Zangilan), and over a million Azerbaijanis became refugees and internally displaced people.

 

The military operations finally came to an end when Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in Bishkek in 1994.

 

Dealing with the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the OSCE Minsk Group, which was created after the meeting of the CSCE (OSCE after the Budapest summit held in December 1994) Ministerial Council in Helsinki on 24 March 1992. The Group’s members include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belarus, Finland and Sweden.

 

Besides, the OSCE Minsk Group has a co-chairmanship institution, comprised of Russian, the US and French co-chairs, which began operating in 1996.  

 

Resolutions 822, 853, 874 and 884 of the UN Security Council, which were passed in short intervals in 1993, and other resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly, PACE, OSCE, OIC, and other organizations require Armenia to unconditionally withdraw its troops from Nagorno-Karabakh.

 

Music: State Youth Orchestra of Armenia to perform in Moscow

Kajoyan Gevork
Public Radio of Armenia
Nov 15 2017
11:37, 15 Nov 2017

On November 18 the Great Hall of the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory will host a concert entitled “The language of communication: Music”. The State Youth Orchestra of Armenia will perform at the concert headed by its Artistic Director and Principal Conductor Sergey Smbatyan, conductors Eduard Topchjan and Constantine Orbelian.

Narek Hakhnazaryan (cello), Gevorg Hakobyan (baritone), Hasmik Torosyan (soprano), Suranush Gasparyan (soprano), Mihran Aghajanyan (tenor) will perform as soloists.

The orchestra will present compositions by Armenian and Russian composers: Alexander Arutiunian, Barsegh Kanachyan, Tigran Tchoukhajian, Avet Terteryan, Arno Babajanyan, Aram Khachaturian, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

The People’s Artist of the USSR, conductor Vladimir Spivakov is the honorable guest of the concert. The hosts of the evening are Sati Spivakova and Garik Martirosyan.

The concert will be organized within the framework of the Days of Armenian Culture in Russia held under the 2016-2018 cooperation program between the two countries.

Azdrbaijani press: Armenia-Azerbaijan Civil Peace Platform requests advisory mandate within OSCE Minsk Group

Kajoyan Gevork

By Azernews


By Rashid Shirinov

The participants of the First General Assembly of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Civil Peace Platform, which was held in Tbilisi on October 30, have appealed to the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs with the initiative to establish a review board of representatives of the Armenian and Azerbaijani civil societies which would have an advisory mandate under the Minsk Group.

The appeal noted that the OSCE Minsk Group has made serious efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, stop military operations on the frontline and continue the negotiation process between the parties, and the organization continues to work in this direction.

The OSCE Minsk Group, established in 1992 to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, is the only international organization carrying out its mediation mission in the issue. However, despite the measures taken and negotiations held over the past 25 years, the peace has not yet been established between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“There are many reasons for this situation, and one of them is that the civil societies and NGOs of Armenia and Azerbaijan are not able to cooperate either with each other or with state structures,” the Civil Peace Platform stated.

The appeal also noted the deep concern about the systematic violations of the ceasefire on the frontline, which led to numerous casualties, and about the possibility that these violations will develop into large-scale military operations.

“We as the Armenia-Azerbaijan Civil Peace Platform feel responsibility and the need to establish cooperation with the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs that can contribute to the settlement of the conflict and also help you in this complex peace building process,” the appeal reads.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Until now, Armenia controls fifth part of Azerbaijan's territory and rejects implementing four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts.

The decisive process of bringing together the people of Azerbaijan and Armenia on boosting the settlement of the conflict started in December 2016, when the Armenia-Azerbaijan Peace Platform was founded in Baku by a group of Azerbaijani and Armenian public figures and peacekeepers. It was created to bring together representatives of civil society of the two countries for creating dialogue between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the sides to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

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Nearly 770 governmental administration positions to be cut in 2018

Kajoyan Gevork
| 12:23 | November 1 2017
Category
BUSINESS & ECONOMY

Cuts in governmental positions are planned in the state administration system, first deputy minister of finance Atom Janjughazyan said during parliamentary debates of the 2018 state budget draft.

In response to a question from opposition MP Edmon Marukyan, the deputy minister said: “Cuts of positions are planned for 2018 in the administration system. We are talking about cut of nearly 770 positions”, he said.

The MP asked whether or not deputy governors are included in the positions, but the deputy minister didn’t specify, and chairman of the state-legal affairs and human rights protection committee Hrayr Tovmasyan answered by saying that deputy governors aren’t included in the cuts.

Angela Merkel’s CDU Party Received Donations from Azerbaijan

Kajoyan Gevork
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11 hours ago

Angela Merkel

BONN, Germany (Deutsche Welle) – Germany’s CDU party has received donations from a state-run Azerbaijani company, a German media consortium reported. The affair again highlights links between conservative politicians and the Central Asian dictatorship.

A district chapter of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) received €28,000 ($33,114) from the state-run Azerbaijani oil and gas company Socar in contravention of German rules on party donations, a consortium of public broadcasters NDR, WDR and daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported.

The case again calls into question connections between certain conservative politicians and the South Caucasian republic, whose leader, President Ilham Aliyev, has been criticized by human rights organizations.

According to the report, two payments, one of €3,000 and one of €25,000, were deposited by Socar’s Germany-based branch on the account of the CDU’s district association in Frankfurt at the end of February 2012.

No fine for the CDU

The affair had caused a four-year-long legal dispute with the parliamentary administration authority behind the scenes, the report said, since German law prohibits parties from receiving donations from non-EU countries.

Although the district CDU branch accepted the donation without question, auditors at party headquarters in Berlin notified the Administration of the German Bundestag, which decided as early as autumn 2013 that the gift was not allowable under the law. The CDU then gave up the donation to be immediately impounded, the report said.

However, despite having broken the law, the party will not have to pay a fine, largely owing to a ruling made by an administrative court in April that self-denunciation in such cases can not only mitigate penalties, but even avert them altogether.

Mysterious links

The affair has raised several questions about links between the conservative CDU/CSU bloc and Azerbaijan, and what objectives the country could be pursuing with its donations.

The German CEO of Socar, Anders Egen Mamedov, was quoted by the paper as saying that the company’s contacts with political officials was taking place “against the background of the geopolitical importance of Azerbaijan and Socar,” including with regard to the pipeline network through seven countries that is currently under construction.

The massive gas pipeline project was chosen over the Nabucco-West pipeline in 2013 with the support of the then EU commissioner for energy, the German CDU politician Günther Oettinger.

Mamedov said Socar also made donations to sports and cultural associations in Germany. He declined to give details or speak about possible donations to other German of European parties to the paper.

Lobbying activities

The Süddeutsche also pointed to CDU parliamentarian Karin Strenz, who according to the paper did not disclose her work for an Azerbaijan-financed lobbying firm within three months as asked. The company is owned by former CSU politician Eduard Lintner, who has been doing lobbying work for Azerbaijan since 2009.

In another possible indication of her sympathies with the authoritarian country, in June 2015 Strenz voted against a resolution by the Council of Europe to call on Azerbaijan to release its political prisoners — the only German MP to do so, according to an earlier report in the paper.

Azerbaijan was described in a resolution by the European Parliament in September 2015 as “having suffered the greatest decline in democratic governance in all of Eurasia over the past 10 years.”

Azerbaijani press: Armenian Parliament acknowledges country’s desperate situation

Kajoyan Gevork

By Azernews


By Rashid Shirinov

The deplorable situation in the Armenian economy and society continues for many years, but the country’s government still is not capable to fix it. The situation has got to the point that the Armenian government now openly acknowledges its failures.

“The wages are not growing, at the same time there is inflation, and the situation is deteriorating,” said Mikael Melkumyan, Vice-speaker of Armenia’s National Assembly, at the meeting of the Committee on Health and Social Issues on October 20.

Indeed, the wages in the country are not growing, but rather falling down. Significant decrease in salaries is being observed throughout Armenia, in both public and private sectors of employment. Meanwhile, the prices for goods and services in the country continue to go up, and this hits ordinary Armenians.

Melkumyan further added that the political assessment of the state budget is negative.

“If there is no growth of salaries and pensions since 2015 in this country, it is natural that the political rating should be negative. People want progress and their income to grow,” he noted. “If we add the existing inflation to this, it is natural that the situation is getting worse.”

The Vice-speaker further spoke about the youth unemployment in Armenia and noted that it exists in Europe too, but there are jobs in Europe and no applicants. “But we have no jobs,” he acknowledged.

Unemployment remains one of the main problems of the Armenian society for many years. Although the trend keeps growing, the Armenian government still fails to fight the problem. This year, the unemployment rate in the country already hit 19 percent of the economically active population.

With every hundred new workplaces, several hundred of them get closed, and as a result, more than 200,000 of economically active people in Armenia are now unemployed, and this is just the official data, which can be forged.

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Azerabijani Press: French political analyst: Azerbaijan is a powerful country ready to liberate its territories by any means

Kajoyan Gevork
AzerNews, Azerbaijan
Oct 12 2017
11:54 (UTC+04:00)
317

French political scientist Sébastien Boussois has published an article “Occupation of Nagorno Karabakh: Azerbaijan is still seeking peaceful resolution of the conflict in Cnpnews portal.

“No country in the world has recognized the so-called “Nagorno-Karabakh Republic” created by invader Armenia. In contrast to Armenia, Azerbaijan follows the path of regional integration, and tries to solve the conflict peacefully by building stable relationship with regional powers and coordinating its diplomacy with the neighboring countries,” Boussois writes in the article.

He recalls the four resolutions of the UN Security Council demanding immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from Azerbaijani territories. He notes that Azerbaijan lost over AZN800 billion during the conflict.

The political scientist mentioned French presidents Nicola Sarkozy`s and François Hollande`s visits to Azerbaijan as well as the opening of a French lyceum in Baku.

Boussois also highlights the history of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Khojaly genocide committed by the Armenian armed forces in 1992, which killed more than 600 innocent people, and expulsion of around 800,000 Azerbaijani civilians from their native lands.

“Nowadays Azerbaijan is not what is was in the 1990s. Azerbaijan has gone through a huge development path. Unlike Armenia, which has nothing but diaspora, Azerbaijan is a powerful country, which ensures its energy security and is ready to liberate its territories by any means,” Boussois concludes.