Author: Karlen Baghdasarian

France has welcomed the Bundestag vote on Armenian Genocide recognition.

“I welcome the Bundestag vote on recognition of the Armenian Genocide, State Minister for Europe Harlem Desir tweeted.

Je me réjouis du vote du Bundestag de reconnaissance du génocide arménien. (1/2)

— Harlem Désir (@harlemdesir)

“France will continue to fight for the universal recognition of the Armenian Genocide,” he added.

La France continuera à se battre pour la reconnaissance universelle du génocide arménien. (2/2)

— Harlem Désir (@harlemdesir)

A German tourist was found dead in a hotel in the Manavgat district of the southern province of Antalya on June 2, the Hurriyet Daily News reports.

Gabrielle Maria Dietter, 66, arrived in Manavgat with her husband Georg Hans Dietter for a vacation on June 1.

However, the next morning Hans Dietter was unable to wake his wife up and asked the hotel staff for help.

Medical staff at the hospital then determined that Dietter had lost her life.

Her dead body was sent to the forensic medicine institute in Antalya for an autopsy after the prosecutor’s examinations.

Asbarez – On Tuesday, May 24th, the student government at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz), the Student Union Assembly (SUA), unanimously voted to pass the “Armenian Genocide Commemoration Resolution.” The effort was led by the Armenian Students’ Association (ASA) at UC Santa Cruz.Approximately thirty students attended the SUA meeting at the school’s campus.

The resolution sheds light on the massacres of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Ottoman Empire’s attempt to systematically annihilate the Armenian people. Furthermore, it brings awareness to the Republic of Turkey’s continuous genocide denial campaign and efforts to hide its crimes against humanity.

Four Armenian students at UC Santa Cruz, Maral Tatoian, Nara Avakian, Daniel Sarkissian, and Haik Adamian, worked on finalizing the language of the resolution. At last Tuesday’s SUA meeting, Tatoian presented about the resolution, speaking on the history of the Armenian Genocide, the cycle of genocide that continues today, as well as what the passing of the resolution would mean for genocide education and the recognition of the Armenian Genocide on a national level.

“Being one of the co-founders that re-established ASA [at UC Santa Cruz], I have seen this organization grow over the past four years and partake in movements like this. It is very touching for me and truly shows the impact we are making on campus in order to make our voices heard. After all, they tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds and we will continue to grow!” said Tatoian, a fourth-year linguistics major and education minor undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz.

The resolution calls on SUA to not only commemorate the Armenian Genocide, but also “condemn those attempts made by governments as well as other entities, both public and private, to distort the historical reality and legal relevance of the Armenian Genocide to the descendants of its survivors and humanity as a whole.”

Through this resolution, the students hope to raise awareness about the Armenian Genocide and the ongoing denial by the Republic of Turkey and the United States. Moreover, they hope to work with SUA to educate students on campus about the cycle of genocide that continues with denial.

“For me, the passing of this resolution means a lot. Having a prominent student association recognize our cause as Armenians is a big step. But this is only the first step of many toward the recognition of the Armenian Genocide” said Nara Avakian, a first-year sociology major and global information and social enterprise studies minor undergraduate student.

Furthermore, through the passing of this resolution, SUA “supports the efforts of the Armenian-American community at UC Santa Cruz to establish April 24th as the official Day of Remembrance for the Armenian Genocide.”

“For me, this means the progress of the marginalized Armenian Diaspora. As I am a descendent of genocide survivors, it is an honor to have represented my nation in a monumental step on our campus. With Turkey launching a major anti-genocide [recognition] campaign, every step we take as Armenians towards recognition is valuable to our community” said Daniel Sarkissian, a second-year neuroscience undergraduate student.

The ASA at UC Santa Cruz will be meeting with the school’s Executive Vice Chancellor to discuss the next steps that need to be taken to ensure that April 24th will become Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day at UC Santa Cruz

“Passing the resolution marks the beginning of the battle for getting UC Regents, and other authorities to give up their strategic ties to bodies and companies who are active participants in Turkey’s genocide denial and normalization campaigns. At the very least, we can help to expose the role of the education industry in the widespread denial of the Armenian genocide” said Haik Adamian, a second-year anthropology major at UC Santa Cruz.

Armenian students at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) ensured the adoption of similar genocide recognition resolutions last year on their respective campuses.

, the UC Santa Cruz ASA introduced and ensured the unanimous adoption of “A Resolution to Divest from the Republic of Turkey to End the Perpetuation of the Armenian Genocide”, which calls for UC Santa Cruz, the UC Santa Cruz Foundation, and the University of California to divest $72.6 million dollars worth of University of California bonds and investments in the Republic of Turkey for its crimes in, and continued denial of the Armenian Genocide. The resolution was a part of the greater #DivestTurkey campaign led by the Armenian Youth Federation – Western United States (AYF-WUS) and campus-based ASAs.

Boris Johnson has won a £1,000 prize for a rude poem about the Turkish president having sex with a goat, reports. 

The former mayor of London’s limerick, published by the Spectator as a rebuff to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to prosecute a German comedian’s offensive poem, also calls the president a “wankerer”.

Johnson, a former editor of the magazine, won the Spectator’s “President Erdogan offensive poetry competition.” The prize money has been donated by a reader.

The limerick was written off-the-cuff by the Conservative MP during an interview with the Swiss weekly magazine Die Weltwoche.

Johnson – whose great-grandfather was Turkish – called it “a scandal” that a German court had granted an injunction to prevent comedian Jan Böhmermann repeating his offensive skit about the Turkish president.

“If somebody wants to make a joke about the love that flowers between the Turkish president and a goat, he should be able to do so, in any European country, including Turkey,” Johnson told interviewer Nicholas Farrell, who then challenged him to enter the Spectator’s poetry prize.

An open-air concert dedicated to Charles Aznavour’s 92^nd birthday will take place at Charles Aznavour Square in Yerevan on Sunday, May 22.

The performers at the concert will include Levon Malkhasyan, Aramo, Tigran Hamasyan, the Art Cinema Ensemble, Sona Shiroyan and Hayk Petrosyan.

Aznavour’s best works will be performed at the concert.

“France welcomes the results of the meeting held on May 16 in Vienna on Nagorno-Karabakh, which helped to restore dialogue between Armenia and Azerbaijan after the deadly clashes on April 2 to 5,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France said in a statement.

“Presidents Sargsyan and Aliyev, in the presence of Harlem Désir, Secretary of State for European Affairs, John Kerry, US Secretary of State, and Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, reiterated their commitment to respect the ceasefire and to a solve the conflict in a peaceful way. They also agreed to the establishment of confidence-building measures, including a mechanism to investigate incidents,” the statement reads.

“These commitments are important. France calls on the parties to respect them and pledges to continue to play its role of an OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair together with its Russian and American partners,” the Ministry said.

The famously bullish art dealer built an empire spanning 16 locations around the globe by never saying no to his artists’ ambitions, according to the .

Larry Gagosian grew up in Los Angeles, the only son of an Armenian family. His mother, Ann Louise, made a living acting and singing, while his father, Ara, was an accountant. His actor uncle, who played a pirate in the 1960 version of Peter Pan, for a time lived in the family’s small downtown apartment along with Gagosian’s sister and grandmother. After his father became a stockbroker, the family upgraded to Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley. In high school, Gagosian swam competitively; he continued to swim and play water polo at UCLA until he quit the team his sophomore year.

After earning a B.A. in English literature at 24 (he never studied art history), he kicked around doing odd jobs in L.A. before getting hired at William Morris Agency, from which he was fired after a year. (“It was like a knife fight in a phone booth,” says Gagosian now. “I just didn’t have that DNA, to be in an office. Whatever I was going to do, I was going to do it on my own.”) Without savings, he needed a job and began working as a parking lot manager.

“I’ve always been somebody who just kind of does what’s in front of me,” says Gagosian. So when he observed a man selling posters near the parking lot, he decided to give it a shot and soon discovered he had a knack for selling. “So I started buying more expensive posters,” he says. “Rather than selling something for $15, with the frame it becomes $50 and $100.” Eventually he also started a frame shop (where Sonic Youth rocker Kim Gordon worked, writing in her 2015 memoir that he was a “mean” and “erratic” boss), and then rented out a former Hungarian restaurant in Westwood Village in 1976. In this narrow space he opened Prints on Broxton, selling more upscale pieces to fledgling collectors like Geffen, whom he met through his former William Morris boss Stan Kamen.

Gagosian himself is estimated to clear $1 billion in sales annually and is among a small group of gallery owners whose appetites are omnivorous: He works across the contemporary and modern eras, representing living artists like John Currin and Mark Grotjahn while also dealing on behalf of the estates of Alberto Giacometti, Richard Avedon and Helen Frankenthaler. He exhibits a wide range of work, from Instagram images appropriated by Richard Prince to boulders-as-sculpture by cerebral artist Michael Heizer. At the same time, he conducts sales on the so-called secondary market—a term he hates—by privately buying and selling artworks to clients. He was also an early proponent of the museum-quality show within a private gallery, securing sought-after loans of historic works that are often not for sale. Such wide-ranging exhibitions have included a show on Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens in 1995 and 2009’s Picasso: Mosqueteros, co-curated by Picasso biographer John Richardson, which drew 100,000 visitors to the gallery to see the artist’s less-examined late work.

Gagosian does all of this on an unprecedented scale, with 16 locations from Hong Kong to New York’s Chelsea, around 200 employees, a publishing arm that produces 40 books a year, a quarterly magazine and an in-house newspaper—even a retail storefront that sells Warhol Campbell’s Soup candles and butterfly-print deck chairs by Gagosian artist Damien Hirst.

Turkey’s embassy in Stockholm has asked Sweden’s TV4 television network to pull a documentary on the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, urging the channel to “reconsider” because the film “will fail to serve the principle of objectivity,” reports.

Ahead of Sunday evening’s scheduled broadcast of a documentary titled “Seyfo 1915 – The Assyrian Genocide,” TV4 said it received an email from Turkish embassy press officer Arif Gulen, in which he opposes the film’s use of the term “genocide,” used to describe the tragic death of thousands of Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks during WWI.

The letter, which was subsequently  on TV4’s official website, asks the station to “reconsider your decision on broadcasting of the… documentary film with a balanced and sensible attitude,” while cautioning that “only a competent international tribunal can determine whether a particular event is genocide.”

His statement provoked a sharp reaction from the broadcaster, which denounced Gulen’s attempt to pressure the channel to cancel its broadcast, while promising to air the documentary on Sunday despite the warning.

“We can never accept this. We will protest against any attempt to exert pressure that threatens freedom of expression,” said TV4’s program director, Viveka Hansson, in a written statement on the company’s website.

Speaking to Expressen, Gulen  that he had “full respect for freedom of expression and for the channel,” but refused to retract his plea to TV4 to withdraw the documentary piece.

“These are my feelings. It is their decision. I don’t know if they will change it. They can transmit it, if they want. But I can say what I feel, too,” he said, as cited by Expressen.

Hanson said that the message’s polite tone should not deceive the public, pointing out that while “the email is polite, the message cannot be mistaken.” She sees the request as an attempt to prevent a Swedish media outlet from broadcasting an opinion that “the Turkish embassy would not appreciate,” according to Expressen.

Swedish MP and Left Party chairman Jonas Sjöstedt also weighed in on the mounting controversy, urging the Swedish government to fend off Turkey’s attack on the national media.

“It is unacceptable that the country [Turkey] is seeking to silence media in Sweden and it [the government] must take a hard stance against such actions,” he said, adding that Stockholm should recall its ambassador from Turkey “to make clear that what you are doing in Turkey, which is very bad for the media, you cannot do in Sweden,” according to Expressen.

Hansson also pointed out in her statement that the attack on TV4 comes just days after Sweden’s Green Party tried to hush up another Swedish station, SVT, which broadcast a story critical of Sweden’ former housing minister, Mehmet Kaplan, who is a Green Party member of Turkish origin. The party’s press officer, Magnus Johansson, reportedly called on SWT to drop the coverage of Kaplan’s case, while offering to provide the station with access to the party’s top bosses for a story on Green Party candidate Yasri Khan, who is under fire for his unwillingness to shake hands with a female host from TV4.

“I did not actually believe my ears. I have never seen anything similar from a representative of a political party in Sweden,” Anders Holmberg, an SVT presenter.

Kaplan resigned last Monday amid allegations that he has ties to the Turkish ultra-nationalist Gray Wolves movement and the retired head of the Turkish National Association of Sweden, Barbaros Leylani, who has previously called on the Turkish people to kill “Armenian dogs.”

Meanwhile, an orchestra in Germany has accused Turkey of forcing it to change the name of a concert it is scheduled to give on April 30, as well as remove a piece from its program that calls the massacre of Armenians a genocide.

The name of the event is “Aghet,” a term commonly used by Armenians to describe the events of 1915 as genocide, whose literal translation in English is “catastrophe.”

The Dresden Symphony orchestra said that Turkey’s delegation to the EU had reportedly asked the European Commission (EC), which is financially supporting the event, to defund the concert and remove its title from the EC’s official website. While the Commission declined to withdraw the €200,000 ($224,500) it had pledged to the musicians, it did remove the announcement of the concert.

“Due to concerns raised regarding the wording used in the project description, the Commission temporarily withdrew it,” a spokesperson for the Commission said.

The orchestra’s director, Markus Rindt, slammed Turkey’s bold interference as an “an infringement on freedom of expression.”

“You have to call it what it was,” said the director. “We cannot quibble when it comes to genocide,” he added, as  by Die Welt.

The project premiered in Berlin last year to mark the 100-year anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

Second President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan is not planning a meeting with incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan.

“I do not plan to initiate such a meeting,”Robert Kocharyan told

“In light of the events and taking into consideration the experience acquired at a heavy price it is more important now to resolve the issue of providing the army with modern weapons without delay,  to adapt the combat and tactical training of personnel to the new conditionsas as soon as possible, ” he said.

According to Robert Kocharyan, the meetings of the incumbent president with the ex-presidents are unlikely to contribute to the resolution of urgent practical issues.

“It is gratifying that the Armenian society  proved once again that in case of a serious external threat it can unite to confront the aggression. It is also clear that the patriotic capacity doubles when backed by modern efficient army and effectively functioning institutions,” said the ex-President of Armenia.

Incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan and first President Levon Ter-Petroyan to discuss the situation established as a result of the recent Azerbaijani aggression against Karabakh.

A group of French MPs, Senators and politicians have come forth with a joint statement on the recent escalation at the Nagorno Karabakh Line of Contact. The translation of the statement published by French newspaper is provided below:

It is now six days that the South Caucasus is ablaze again. Encouraged by international indifference, Azerbaijan under the rule of Ilham Aliyev attempted to regain by force its former colony, the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh. This deadly offensive was concluded by a fragile cease-fire. It must be noted that this attack brought nothing to anyone, since the balance of power and the front line remain unchanged.

The fact remains that again the people of Karabakh paid with their lives for the vengeful impulses of the despot of Baku. Civilians were deliberately targeted by shelling and murdered by commandos, children were killed in the courtyard of their school.

This new aggression carries lessons. Who would dare ask the people of Karabakh to integrate with a regime that wants their physical annihilation? For the people of Karabakh independence and the establishment of the Republic have never been an objective, but a means; the way to live in peace and security, the way to build a democratic state that respects its citizens, open to the world and looking towards the future.

Azerbaijan is in turn a rich country but Azerbaijanis are poor. For the Aliev clan, regularly cited in the lists of “Swiss leaks” and “Panama Papers,” the war against Nagorno-Karabakh remains a good way to divert the attention of his countrymen from his material and moral corruption, which impoverishes its people.

The international community, fully aware of this, must take responsibility. We propose that the Minsk Group of the OSCE develops further negotiations on the following bases that will certainly be more fruitful.

On the one hand the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh that has over twenty years proven its viability and credibility must now be recognized for Baku not to continue to use the pretext of lack of recognition for attacking civilians.

On the other hand, the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh should be readmitted to the negotiating table: the twenty-first century negotiating the fate of a people with their representatives absent  is a meaningless process.

Finally, it’s necessary to impose effective measures for monitoring the cease-fire, measures already agreed by Yerevan and Stepanakert, and only Baku stubbornly refusing. In this context and considering the serious events that have just taken place, we call on the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs to initiate an inquiry which will establish the facts and responsibilities. It will become possible to apply a system of political and legal sanctions on warmongers, as is the case in many other regional conflicts in the world.

The signatories: François Rochebloine (UDI), MP (Loire); Guy Teissier (LR), MP (Bouches-du-Rhône), René Rouquet (PS), MP (Val-de-Marne), Nicolas Daragon (LR) Mayor of Valencia, Luke Carvounas (PS), Senator (Val François de-Marne), André Santini (IDU) deputy (Hauts-de-Seine)Michel Amiel (RDSE), Senator (Bouches-du-Rhône) Roland Blum (LR), Deputy Mayor of Marseille; Valérie Boyer (LR), MP (Bouches-du-Rhône) François Pupponi (PS), MP (Val d’Oise); Hugues Fourage (PS), MP (Vendée); Bernard Fournier (LR), Senator (Loire); Sophie Joissains (LR), Senator (Bouches-du-Rhône) Arlette Grosskost (LR), MP (Haut-Rhin); Jean-Jacques Guillet (LR), MP (Hauts-de-Seine) Christian Kert (LR), MP (Bouches-du-Rhône) Patrick Labaune (LR), MP (Drôme); Philippe Marini (LR), Honorary Senator (Oise) and Mayor of Compiègne; François-Michel Lambert (EELV), MP (Bouches-du-Rhône) Richard Mallié (LR), mayor of Bouc-Bel-Air; Emmanuel Mandon (UDI), Regional Advisor (Rhône-Alpes Auvergne); Christophe Masse (PS), general counsel (Bouches-du-Rhône) Marlene Mourier (LR), Mayor of Bourg-lès-Valence; Jacques Remiller (LR), former MP, honorary mayor of Vienna; Alain Neri (PS), Senator (Puy-de-Dôme) Rudy Salles (UDI), MP (Alpes-Maritimes)