ANN/Armenian News – Conversation with Arthur Khachatryan of the ARF Dashnaktsutyun

Armenian News Network / Armenian News

Conversation on Armenian News: Conversation with ARF’s Arthur Khachatryan

ANN/Armenian News

Guest

  • Arthur Khachatryan

  • Hovik Manucharyan

  • Asbed Bedrossian

Hello and welcome to the Armenian News Network, Armenian News. We’ll be talking about the demands of the political opposition in Armenia for a provisional government to lead the country out of the crisis following the catastrophic loss in the war in Artsakh. 

This episode was recorded on Thursday, .

Following the trilateral Karabakh ceasefire of Nov 9, the Armenian opposition has nearly universally condemned Nikol Pashinyan’s agreement to the deal. 

The largest opposition grouping, called Movement of the Salvation of the Homeland (Հայրենիքի փրկության շաժում in Armenian), composed of 17 political parties including the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), Prosperous Armenia, and the Republican Party, are demanding Pashinyan’s immediate resignation and the appointment of their unified candidate, Vazgen Manukyan as interim PM. 

This group has been holding regular protests featuring a growing number of participants, with the latest gathering Wednesday, December 17, estimated to be 20K in size. 

Today, we’ll be talking with a representative of one of the political forces behind the movement, to better understand the internal political developments in Armenia and specifically the goals of the Movement of the Salvation of the Homeland.

To talk about these issues, we are joined by:

Arthur Khachatryan, who is a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF Dashnaktsutyun) Supreme Council in Yerevan. In the past, he held government posts such as Deputy Minister of Territorial Administration and Development, Governor of Shirak, and Minister of Agriculture. Currently, Arthur is a professor of finance at the French University of Armenia and lectures on Leadership at the Public Administration Academy of the Republic of Armenia.

What made the ARF Dashnaktsutyun join forces with the 16 other political parties and what is the broad position of the movement, and the ARF specifically?

Especially during the earlier days of the protest, we heard that many of the organizers of the protests were being detained by police and national security forces. Can you say that police intimidation is still taking place and how has it affected the leadership of the protests?

Nikol Pashinyan criticized this movement for being an “elitist protest”, not representative of the entire Armenian populace. How would you respond to that?

How does the ARF differentiate from the wider opposition goals, especially during the “provisional” 6-12-month period that you suggest? Specifically, we’ve heard Vazgen Manukyan express a position on foreign funding of Armenian NGOs for instance. Is that position also shared by the ARF?

What do you think of the government’s proposal and effort to change the electoral code? Is this a change that should be prioritized in the interim period?

The Alliance settled on Vazgen Manukyan as the interim Prime Minister to head a provisional government and lead to preterm elections. As the politics evolve in Yerevan, if the situation requires that a different potential candidate be nominated, would the ARF support that? What are the red lines for the ARF about who might or might not be acceptable as an interim Prime Minister?

During the 2018 elections the ARF didn’t receive sufficient votes to gain any seats in the parliament. What are your party’s plans for becoming a relevant political force, represented in the parliament in Armenia? What is your party’s vision for Armenia over the next 5-10 years?

That concludes this Conversation On Armenian News. We hope it was helpful in your understanding of some of the issues involved. We look forward to your feedback, including your suggestions for Conversation topics in the future. Contact us on our website, at groong.org, or on our Facebook PageANN – Armenian News”, or in our Facebook Group “Armenian News – Armenian News Network.

Special thanks to Laura Osborn for providing the music for our podcast. On behalf of everyone in this episode, we wish you a good week. Thank you for listening and we’ll talk to you soon.

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Armenia, Artsakh, Karabakh, Opposition, Salvation of the Homeland, ARF, Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Dashnaktsutyun, Arthur Khachatryan, Stepanakert


Minister of Defense visits Syunik Province to inspect border reinforcement work

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 12:12,

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 17, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Minister of Defense Vagharshak Harutyunyan is visiting the Province of Syunik to get acquainted with the ongoing reinforcement works on the ground in the regions bordering Azerbaijan.

The Ministry of Defense said he will also get acquainted with the ongoing construction of combat positions, and the process of the military’s on-duty combat shifts.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan

Artsakh Defense Army: Bodies of 9 Armenian soldiers found in area near Hin Tagher-Khtsaberd military posts

News.am, Armenia

Dec 17 2020
19:22, 17.12.2020

The Defense Army of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) reports the following:

“On , according to preliminary information, the Russian peacekeeping contingent deployed in Artsakh transferred to the Defense Army of Artsakh the bodies of 9 Armenian servicemen found in the area near the Armenian military posts stationed in the direction of Hin Tagher-Khtsaberd (the circumstances behind the deaths of those servicemen remain unknown).

Necessary operations are currently being carried out to find out the circumstances behind the deaths of the servicemen and to identify them.”




ANN/Armenian News On The Role of Humanities & Social Sciences in Armenian Life

Armenian News Network / Armenian News

Conversation on Armenian News: The Role of The Humanities and Social Studies in Armenian Life

ANN/Armenian News


Guest

  • Angela Harutyunyan

  • Asbed Kotchikian

  • Asbed Bedrossian

  • Hovik Manucharyan

Hello and welcome to Armenian News Network, Armenian News.

In this Conversation on Armenian News episode, we’ll be talking about the role of the humanities and social sciences in Armenian life. Our host for this discussion is:

Dr. Asbed Kotchikian, who is a senior lecturer of political science and international relations at Bentley University in Massachusetts.

This episode was recorded on Thursday, December 3rd, 2020.

Academia and academic work, especially in the fields of humanities and social sciences, has always been instrumentalized by various ideologies and/or political regimes. Moreover, various disciplines within each of those fields such as anthropology, art history, literature, etc., have a long tradition of being the middle children of academia and are rarely considered to have a role in shaping minds and trends in society. In Armenia the roles of humanities and social science have undergone changes since soviet and immediate post-soviet times. At a time where both these fields were viewed as instruments of legitimization of Communism and later nationalism, academics in these fields had to navigate the murky waters of ideology less they were willing to be labeled “pseudo-academics” or even worse as traitors.

The challenge of having robust disciplines in humanities and social sciences in Armenia is manifold. These include encouraging critical thinking void of ideology, the role of individuals with degrees in humanities and social sciences in the larger society, challenging pre-existing paradigms and many more. 

To talk about these issues, we are joined by:

Dr. Angela Harutyunyan, who is Associate Professor of Art History and the chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut. She is founding member of BICAR (Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research) and the Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities in Yerevan, Armenia. She is editor of ARTMargins peer-reviewed journal (MIT Press). Her monograph The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real'" was published by Manchester University Press in 2017 and 2019.

How would you justify the role of humanities in the world today?

The humanities deal with a different temporality than the expediency that the social and political world demands. To ask the humanities to respond in those terms means to subsume them under a different temporal regime and logic, which is one of immediate practical life. 

 It is already noteworthy that we are asked to “justify” the humanities. What are the conditions that require such justification? What are the modes of justification? Justification normally is made according to this regime of emergency or instrumentalization for expedient needs – ethics for engineers, art history for doctors, etc. (the late capitalist regime of catastrophes piling up upon each other).

The arts and humanities in moments of “historical danger” -1930s, 1960s-70s. The autonomous pursuit of humanistic scholarship through the means and tools provided by the internal laws of the humanities’ disciplines a posteriori rather than their politicization Avant le lettre. The Marxian debates of the disciplines’ relative autonomy but also the transformation of their spheres through the material world they are embedded in.  Today, we have vulgar instrumentalisation, without either the nuanced politics of humanist thinkers or the dialectical thought of the good Marxists. 

A brief overview of the place and role of humanities in Soviet Russia.

The fellow-travelers of the 1920s, critical philosophical discourses forming the armature of institutionalizing the humanities in the Soviet Union: how to deal with tradition, and especially with the bourgeois tradition of humanistic heritage (both European and Russian)?

Lenin vs. Bogdanov, the importance of discovering Marx’s EPM, the move of the Marx and Engels archives to Moscow (Marx-Engels Institute), discussions in aesthetic and literary theory while discovering “young Marx”; Deborinites vs. mechanists (Marxism as a positivist science to explain the mechanics of the world vs. philosophy as an autonomous discipline. Dialectics is not a law of philosophy but is in nature.). 

1930s-Stalinization of the humanities, Zhdanovschina (culminating in the 1947 publication of the textbook 

A History of Western Philosophy), the Thaw – relative liberalization and revisiting the legacy of the 1920s, partial de-Stalinization of philosophical thought as well as history, literature, aesthetics, but in its ESSENTIAL outlines the Soviet humanities is largely the heir of the Stalin-era scholarship (abolition of class for the sake of the nation understood in terms of ethnicity).

The specific nature of philosophy as sublated within the State and the Party to justify its historical-transhistorical necessity. We could call this an ideocracy – philosophy becoming the ultimate criterion of social reality itself, and in a way, replacing it.  Social reality reduced to the sphere of ideation. Our own “Armenian ideocracy” – intellectuals standing above the quotidian life and its discontent and issuing verdicts from the purity of their thought.

Where does the field operate today? What are the pulls and pushes that influence these two fields?

The legacy of Soviet scholarship: tradition as doxa (unquestionable); knowledge as a weapon (especially in history, philosophy, art history), etc. on the one hand, and on the other hand, uncritical and schematic application of post-Marxist “Western” theory (Susan Buck-Morss’s story about the meetings of the philosophers from the East and West in the early 1990s).

Respectively, on the one hand, we have official academic disciplines in YSU, Academy of Sciences where the main ideological trajectory geared towards nationalism is a straitjacket for any scholarly inquiry (for instance, in the Academy’s newly developed textbook of the History of Armenian People the authors state that they have radically revisited the flawed and politically dangerous thesis that for centuries Armenian people were deprived of statehood. They claim that, in reality, the Armenian statehood that has a history of 5000 years (!) and was barely ever interrupted. Or the department of Philosophy at YSU mainly studies Garegin Nzhdeh (as the most significant philosopher.)

And on the other hand, we have independent centers, critically minded scholars who subject the tradition that they take for granted to radical revisionism (for example, viewing through the glance of Western feminist theory “the sexuality of queen Satenik” – volume published last year by Socioscope where most of the research articles examining gender and sexuality from the pre-Christian age to the post-Soviet era, apply the Foucaultian theoretical language to varied historical examples) without historicizing the constitution of the tradition that they deconstruct. The tradition is assumed to be heteronormative, patriarchal and so on, but the actual historical work with that tradition that is subsumed under these labels is not done. Here, western theory as a critical “toolbox” for revisionism becomes a schemata that is applied (anachronistically and uncritically) to the local historical tradition. In addition, these revisionist attempts are caught up within the political regime of urgency.

As different as these two dominating trends are, what they share is that they operate with schemas and ready-made theories, they both accept “tradition” as an unquestioned phenomenon, and they subject scholarship to moral and political imperatives. 

Discuss the importance of the historical and critical work to understand the nature of this “tradition”, how it is constituted historically, how it informs our present, the courage to confront the nature of “tradition” as distorted, falsified, erased (Missak Khostikyan’s example).

Another important point is to understand ourselves not in isolation but as part and parcel of a diverse and complex region of nations, ethnicities and cultures, something we have not done because of the orientation of our humanities and historical intellectual thought towards the West, through Russian. The slow work of cultural transformation through developing a self-understanding in our complex historical present. And this is not about intercultural dialogue, reconciliation and so on – but about understanding those forces – cultural, political that were formative of our identity and yet have been disavowed as such.

The problem with critical thinking is that when you question existing entrenched myths and narratives, there is bound to be a backlash.  How have those backlashes manifested themselves in post-Soviet Armenia?

Proper critical thinking that engages with its object of critique imminently stops at dispelling myths and narratives but tries to understand the reality of these myths, what is the social basis of their historical constitution. How and why do they come to replace “reality”? Mythology, in a Marxian sense is a mediating link between social relations and ideology: Marx- “natural and social phenomena are assimilated in an unintentionally artistic manner by the imagination of the people.” – dichtung. Or a mythology produced by a special caste, in our case, the Church Fathers. What is the nature of these myths produced by the scholarly caste and the people? How do they clash and contradict each other? Ashot Hovhannissyan’s work in this context – how the wishes and desires of the people that produce myths, belief in miracles crystalize the very social contradictions, their unfulfilled dreams for liberation. And the idea of liberation as a political ideal serves as a cornerstone for Armenian modernity. Here the real world of struggle for liberation appears through reflection, which is ultimately a refraction – these myths show reality upside down. 

 The backlashes in post-Soviet Armenia normally take place at the moral and political level – you may be called a traitor or given other labels, but you can rarely expect an imminent critical engagement with your scholarship. 

This is best crystalized in the inability to implement educational reforms in the past 30 years. The recent backlash against the criteria for school curriculum proposed by the Ministry of Culture and Education, especially in History and Literature. Especially the former is viewed as the disciplinary branch of the National Security Services. The criteria for the subject of History are criticized because of their supposed anti-Armenian orientation with the essential argument that the chair of the task force Lilit Mkrtchyan had participated in a workshop organised by the NGO Imagine Center for Conflict Transformation during which the teaching of History in Turkey and Armenia was discussed. The former late chair of the History Department at YSU Artak Movsisyan criticizes that Urartu is not presented as a kingdom of Armenians, a view that he had been advancing for decades without any historical evidence that could withstand critical scrutiny. The National Academy of Sciences went as far as declaring that these criteria are a “threat to national security”. Their justification? The concept of “patriotism” is absent from the proposal; the omission of 3000-1000 B.C. from “Armenian” history; and of course, Lilit Mkrtchyan’s participation in the mentioned workshop and publication of the proceedings is brought up as the main argument. These reactions contain no scholarly or critical substantial engagement with the proposal and focus on discrediting it via a character assassination.

History, as formed through persons: heroic and sacrificial deeds of individuals vs. the traitors of the nation. The recent “capitulation” and attribution of all guilt to one individual, the national shock, reality appearing as disintegrated, but the historical materialist knows that the world is always already broken. We are nowadays confronted with our naked reality without the possibility to further fictionalize it. 

The importance of the autonomous pursuit for truth; not doing work politically and ideologically avant le lettre but how one’s critical historical work might have unforeseen political effects; the untimeliness of the scholarly pursuit for truth, not in the presentist regime of political expediency but within an unpredictable temporality of historical transformation.

That concludes this week’s Conversation On Armenian News on Armenia’s debate on Armenia’s IT Industry. We’ll continue following this discussion and keep you abreast on the topic as it progresses.

We hope this Conversation has helped your understanding of some of the issues involved. We look forward to your feedback, including your suggestions for Conversation topics in the future. Contact us on our website, at groong.org, or on our Facebook PageANN – Armenian News”, or in our Facebook Group “Armenian News – Armenian News Network.

Special thanks to Laura Osborn for providing the music for our podcast. Thank you for listening and we’ll talk to you soon.

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Armenia, Armenian, Soviet, Humanities, Social Studies, Arts, Education, Stalinism, Marxism, Modernity, Yerevan State University

Additional: Democratization, liberalization, YSU


Lawmaker considers elections the only way of checking people’s demands

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 11:50,

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. Member of Parliament of Armenia from the ruling My Step faction Hamazasp Danielyan says different parts of the people can have different demands over politics, in this concrete case over the tenure of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, stating that elections are the only mean of checking all of this.

During a parliamentary briefing the lawmaker commented on the observation that different forces, individuals and citizens demand the PM’s resignation and was asked whether they are not representing the people so that it will be perceived as a public demand.

“Different parts of the people can simultaneously demand different things. In this sense elections are the only way of checking it”, he said.

The lawmaker said the demands of each citizen of Armenia, their expectations and feelings over politics are valuable for him. “Especially when we are talking about those citizens who are presenting their demands on their own, rather than due to different circumstances”, he added.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan

COVID-19: Armenia reports 1077 new cases, 1592 recoveries in one day

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 11:15,

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. 1077 new cases of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) have been confirmed in Armenia in the past one day, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 146,317, the ministry of healthcare said today.

1592 more patients have recovered in one day. The total number of recoveries has reached 123,474.

3057 tests were conducted in the past one day.

29 more patients have died, raising the death toll to 2445.

The number of active cases is 19,785.

The number of patients who had coronavirus but died from other disease has reached 613 (7 new such cases).

Reporting by Lilit Demuryan; Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan

Iran not a fan of Erdogan’s ‘ill-recited’ Karabakh poem

Free Malaysia Today
Dec 11 2020

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks at a joint news conference with Azerbaijan in Baku yesterday. (AP pic)

TEHRAN: Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Friday slammed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for an “ill-recited” poem, seen as implying Iran’s northwestern provinces were part of Azerbaijan.

Erdogan spoke in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku on Thursday during celebrations marking Azerbaijan’s military triumph over Armenia, in six weeks of fighting over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

“Pres. Erdogan was not informed that what he ill-recited in Baku refers to the forcible separation of areas north of Aras from Iranian motherland,” Zarif wrote on Twitter.

Iran is home to a large Azeri community, mainly in the northwest in provinces next to Azerbaijan and Armenia, with the Aras River as a border.

“Didn’t he realise he was undermining the sovereignty of the Republic of Azerbaijan?” Zarif added.

“NO ONE can talk about OUR beloved Azerbaijan.”

According to Iran’s Isna news agency, the poem recited is “one of the separatist symbols of pan-Turkism”.

It said the verses point to Aras and “complains of the distance between Azeri-speaking people on the two sides of the river”.

Iran’s foreign ministry said it had summoned Turkey’s ambassador in Tehran over Erdogan’s “interventionist and unacceptable remarks”, and demanded an “immediate explanation”.

The envoy was told that “the era of territorial claims and warmongering and expansionist empires has passed”, according to an official statement.

It added that Iran “does not allow anyone to interfere in its territorial integrity”.

NYT: When an Enemy’s Cultural Heritage Becomes One’s Own

New York Times
Nov 30 2020

Could the cease-fire in Nagorno-Karabakh offer new hope for the preservation of threatened monuments everywhere?

By 

Mr. Eakin is a Brown Foundation Fellow.

  • Nov. 30, 2020


Dadivank Monastery, in Nagorno-Karabakh, is one of the hundreds of Armenian churches, monuments and carved memorial stones that will come under the control of predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan according to a cease-fire agreement reached this month.Credit…Sergei Grits/Associated Press

Since its origins in the ninth century, Dadivank Monastery has withstood Seljuk and Mongol invasions, Persian domination, Soviet rule and, this fall, a second brutal war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Now the majestic stone complex — which includes two frescoed churches, a bell tower and numerous medieval inscriptions — faces something that could be even worse: a dangerous peace.

Perched on a rugged slope in the western part of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region, Dadivank is one of the hundreds of Armenian churches, monuments and carved memorial stones that will come under the control of predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan according to a cease-fire agreement reached earlier this month. Some of those structures — like the Amaras monastery and the basilica of Tsitsernavank — date to the earliest centuries of Christianity. For many Armenians, turning over so much of their heritage to a sworn enemy poses a grave new threat, even as the bloodshed has for the moment come to an end.

Their concern is understandable. Under the cease-fire, hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis uprooted by a previous war in the early 1990s will be able to return. In a victory speech on Nov. 25, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan suggested that Armenians have no historical claims to the region, asserting that the churches belonged to ancient Azerbaijani forebears and had been “Armenianized” in the 19th century.

Between 1997 and 2006, the Azerbaijani government undertook a devastating campaign against Armenian heritage in Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani enclave separated from the main part of the country by Armenian territory: Some 89 churches and the thousands of khachkars, or carved memorial stones, of the Djulfa cemetery, the largest medieval Armenian cemetery in the world, were destroyed. And since the recent cease-fire, images circulating on social media suggest that some Armenian monuments and churches in territory newly claimed by Azerbaijan have already been vandalized or defiled.


On the other hand, Armenian forces laid to waste the Azerbaijani town of Agdam in the wake of the previous Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s. The Azerbaijani government has also claimed that mosques and Muslim sites that had been under Armenian control were neglected or desecrated.

Now, as Azerbaijan takes possession of newly won territories, a longstanding problem acquires special urgency: How can a government be persuaded to care for the heritage of a people that doesn’t fit into its view of the nation?


In any instance of intercommunal strife, preserving monuments must take a distant second place to saving lives and protecting human welfare. But the fate of cultural sites matters, too, for the prospects of long-term peace.

Until now, international efforts to protect monuments have overwhelmingly focused on acts of war and terrorist violence. Following the widespread destruction of museums, libraries and artworks during World War II, diplomats drafted the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which was eventually ratified by more than 130 countries. But the treaty had a significant loophole for “military necessity.”

Since the Cold War, deliberate attacks on an adversary’s major monuments — the Croatians’ shelling of the Old Bridge of Mostar, Bosnia, in 1993; the Taliban’s dynamiting of the giant sandstone Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001; the Islamic State’s razing of Yazidi shrines in Iraq in 2014-15 — have pushed world leaders and international organizations to give more teeth to the existing legal framework.

Yet some of the most systematic destruction in modern times has involved sovereign governments rather than military combatants or extremist groups. China launched a sweeping campaign against Tibetan monasteries, not during the annexation of Tibet in 1950-51, but years later, when the region was firmly under Beijing’s rule. The Turkish government continued to seize or destroy Armenian sites in Eastern Anatolia many decades after the Armenian genocide, including even in recent years.

Since 2012, the Myanmar military has demolished hundreds of mosques and Islamic schools in Rakhine State — part of its brutal crackdown on Rohingya Muslims. Satellite evidence suggests that the Chinese authorities have destroyed 8,500 mosques in Xinjiang in the last three years alone.

Just a few months ago, India’s Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, laid the cornerstone for a new Hindu temple on the site of the 16th-century Babri Mosque, which was destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has ordered that two of Istanbul’s most important Byzantine churches — Chora and Hagia Sophia — be converted from museums to mosques, raising fears that their extraordinary Christian mosaics might not be cared for.

But in all of these cases, the United Nations, the United States and its European allies have remained largely mute. UNESCO, which depends on many of the offending governments for funding and support, has shown little interest in intervening. And alliances and prevailing international norms tend to make foreign governments reluctant to interfere with the domestic affairs of other nations during peacetime.

By contrast, the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, where a hot war has just ended, could provide a rare opportunity.

As in other post-conflict situations, cultural sites are particularly vulnerable to score-settling attacks. In 1992, Georgian forces destroyed numerous Abkhaz cultural sites in the former Soviet republic of Abkhazia, including the archive containing much of the region’s history; in the five years after Kosovo’s 1998-99 war with Serbia, some 140 Serbian Orthodox churches and monuments in Kosovo were burned or destroyed.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of war, precisely because a peace effort is underway, foreign governments and international peacekeepers are unusually well-placed to intervene. Unlike during armed conflict, there is also a chance for international mediators and local communities to work together to prevent attacks before the damage is done.


The historical treasures of Nagorno-Karabakh need not become casualties of the recent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan — nor drivers of a next one.

Since antiquity, numerous sites and monuments have successfully passed from the control of one group to another, often across confessional lines. The Pantheon in Rome, one of the greatest pagan temples of antiquity, owes its remarkable survival in part to its adoption by the Catholic Church in the seventh century. After the fall of Constantinople, Mehmed II the Conqueror preserved Hagia Sophia as a mosque. During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther opposed the destruction of Catholic art in Germany, even as he sought to stamp out Catholicism.

In these cases, major buildings or artworks were recognized by their new stewards as having transcendent value, aesthetic or otherwise. Prestige helped determine preservation: As later Catholic chroniclers argued, the Holy See, by converting one of the greatest Roman buildings into a church, had inherited the glory of the ancient world.

But legions of lesser-known buildings, artworks and sites have also been cared for and maintained across centuries and traditions. Typically, that has been because they spoke to the people living around them, regardless of the identity of their creators.

During the Syrian civil war, while Western leaders were wringing their hands about Islamic State attacks on Palmyra, the ancient trading city and UNESCO World Heritage site, residents of Idlib, a rebel-controlled city, courageously protected the ancient, pre-Islamic mosaics and structures in their communities. They viewed these artifacts and sites as crucial to their own contemporary Syrian identity.

In divided Cyprus, a joint cultural-heritage commission of Greek and Turkish Cypriots was created in 2012 to care for endangered monuments on both sides of the island. Funded by the European Union and the U.N. Development Program, the commission has been embraced by both communities for restoring churches as well as mosques and hamams, and ancient aqueducts and fortifications. Following recent arson attacks on mosques in Greek Cypriot territory, the Greek Orthodox community was quick to condemn the assailants.



Armenian inscriptions at Dadivank.Credit…Robert Harding/Alamy

In Nagorno-Karabakh, too, cultural reconciliation is still possible. Despite the dismal record of the past three decades, both sides have demonstrated awareness of — and admiration for — heritage that is not their own. In 2019, Armenians restored a prominent 19th-century mosque in Shusha (though they pointedly failed to note its previous use by Azerbaijani Muslims). And in his recent address, Mr. Aliyev acknowledged the importance of the region’s churches — even as he denied their Armenian origin.

Security must come first. Russia has already deployed peacekeepers at Dadivank Monastery and has pressed Azerbaijan to protect other Armenian monuments now under its control. The European Union should make similar demands as part of its offer of humanitarian aid, as well as insist that Armenians’ access to important churches is assured. The Azerbaijani government, which already has obtained much of what it wanted in the cease-fire, would have a strong incentive to comply.

But a durable future for Armenian sites — especially the numerous less known medieval churches and ornate khachkars — will require direct engagement by Armenians and Azerbaijanis themselves.

In fact, the two communities have coexisted at many points in the past. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, was once home to an Armenian population, and there were a number of mosques in Armenia. In the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the strategic town of Shusha, now under Azerbaijani control, has important 19th-century monuments from both nations — including the distinctive mosque with twin minarets that was controversially restored by the Armenians and a large cathedral, which was damaged by Azerbaijani forces during the recent fighting.

Despite centuries of regime change, many of the most important monuments in the region, including Dadivank and other early Armenian sites, have endured — a reminder that the supposedly ancient and intractable differences driving the current conflict are of recent manufacture. Like the beleaguered civilians around them, these buildings need the world’s immediate attention. But their very survival — like that of the Pantheon or Hagia Sophia — so far points to a hopeful truth: It is the natural inclination of human beings to preserve; destruction takes special effort and motivation.

Hugh Eakin, a Brown Foundation Fellow, has reported on endangered cultural heritage for The New York Review of Books and other publications.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].


Russian peacekeepers defuse nearly 1,000 explosives in Karabakh

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 10:30, 1 December, 2020

YEREVAN, DECEBER 1, ARMENPRESS/TASS. Troops of Russia’s peacekeeping contingent have cleared of mines nearly 10 km of roads and defused some 1,000 explosives in the Lachin corridor in Nagorno-Karabakh, TASS reported citing the Russian Defense Ministry.

"Russia’s peacekeepers have defused explosives in the area in the Lachin corridor and ensured safe work of repair crews on restoring a high-voltage power line destroyed during the combat actions," TASS quoted the ministry as saying.

During the peacekeeping operation in Nagorno-Karabakh engineer units cleared more than 29 hectares of land and some 10 km of roads, inspected over 100 houses and vital social facilities and discovered and defused some 1,000 explosives, according to the statement.

All explosives and munitions, which did not explode, are taken to a specially equipped firing range to be destroyed. Sappers explode munitions on the scene if it is unsafe to evacuate them.