Please find the attached press release of the Ministry of Diaspora. Sincerely, Media and PR Department (+374 10) 585601, internal 805 ---------------------- Հարգանքով` Մամուլի և հասարակայնության հետ կապերի վարչություն (+374 10) 585601, ներքին 805
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Najwa Karam (center) visits the EducationUSA Center at AMIDEAST and meets with six students, ALAB member Wafa Saab, and Gala co-chair Milia Garabet
WASHINGTON, BEIRUT—Lebanese superstar Najwa Karam and award-winning Lebanese-Armenian pianist Guy Manoukian’s visit to AMIDEAST’s Beirut office on August 30 caused an emotional outpouring of support. In anticipation of the star-studded Education Hero Award Gala being held in Beverly Hills on October 14, the celebrities’ behind-the-scenes tour included a “meet and greet” with several AMIDEAST scholarship recipients.
Guy Manoukian is welcomed with a small cedar tree during his visit with AMIDEAST board members Asma Zein and Wafa Saab and several scholarship recipients
Representing different backgrounds, ages, and majors, eight young Lebanese scholars shared their stories and how AMIDEAST had changed their lives by enabling them to attend top U.S. schools, including MIT, the University of Chicago, Swarthmore, and Williams College.
The stars were visibly impressed by the accomplishments of these young adults and moved by their commitment to give back to their country. Ms. Karam praised AMIDEAST and its advisory board of successful Lebanese business and civic leaders for their efforts to build the capacity of Lebanon’s youth — much needed efforts in her view to make the country blossom again. Mr. Manoukian urged the young scholars not to forget about Lebanon and or compromise what impact they can make, while continuing to do their best.
AMIDEAST students present Najwa Karam with a small cedar tree to thank her for her support.
The celebrities were also welcomed by two officers of the AMIDEAST/Lebanon Advisory Board (ALAB), who are cohosting the gala: Ms. Asma Zein, General Manager of Infofort Lebanon — Crypta, and Ms. Wafa Saab, CEO of Tinol Paints.
Najwa Karam and her brother during their visit to AMIDEAST/Lebanon
Impressed by the brilliance and commitment of these deserving students, Najwa Karam and Guy Manoukian are generously supporting AMIDEAST’s first international gala by donating their performances in-kind. The evening program will also include a performance by the California Crooners Club. The event promises to be an unforgettable and elegant evening with top entertainment that will generate additional support for AMIDEAST’s programs benefiting youth in Lebanon.
Proceeds from the gala will be used to expand the organization’s youth programs in Lebanon.
For additional details, please visit the gala website: www.AMIDEASTgala.com.
America-Mideast Educational and Training Services, Inc., or AMIDEAST (www.amideast.org), is an American nonprofit organization engaged in international education, training, and development assistance. Founded in 1951, AMIDEAST is headquartered in Washington, DC, with a network of field offices in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, West Bank/Gaza, and Yemen. AMIDEAST has operated continuously in Lebanon for nearly 50 years. The AMIDEAST/Lebanon Advisory Board consists of 30 prominent business and civic leaders in Lebanon, the United States, and the Gulf.
Round 3 of the European Youth Chess Championship underway in Mamaia, Romania, from 4-15 September 2017 ended with 18 Armenian chess players claiming victories out of 36. As the Chess Federation reported, 8 players played drew, while the remaining 10 representatives of Armenia suffered defeats.
International master Hayk Martirosyan claimed the second consecutive victory at the tournament, while Benik Aghasarov (10 years old), Robert Piliposyan (10 years old), Aram Hakobyan (16 years old) and Konstantin Yayloyan (18 years old) are among the leaders in their respective age groups.
Round 4 of the tournament will start today.
To note, the European Youth Chess Championship is played according to the Swiss System in 9 rounds, with time control 90 minutes for the first 40 moves followed by 30 minutes for the rest of the game with an addition of 30 seconds per move starting from move one. The Championship will be played in 6 age categories: under 8, under 10, under 12, under 14, under 16 and under 18, boys and girls separately.
The total amount of all prizes and presents is 40.000 EUR at the minimum.
A postcard from the Orlando Carlo Calumeno Collection & Archives
LOS ANGELES—The USC Institute Of Armenian Studies presents a one-of-a-kind installation of extremely rare postcards from Anatolia, displayed alongside scenes from many of the same locations captured a century later.
“Undeliverable: Postcards and Photos of Lives Interrupted,” which opened on August 28 and will run through December 18 in USC’s Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library, revolves around 160 original printed sepia tones, some of which have never been exhibited before, hand-picked from the world’s largest collection of Ottoman postcards. Illustrating the everyday lives of Armenians in cities, towns and villages, these pictorial souvenirs would be banal had their subjects not been exterminated by near-total genocide.
From the Orlando Carlo Calumeno Collection & Archives
Collected over 32 years by Istanbul-based businessman Orlando Carlo Calumeno, the 80,000 unique postcards, all printed between 1895 and 1921, belong to a larger collection of books, furnishings and printed ephemera documenting quotidian life in multicultural, multilingual, turn-of-the century Anatolia.
“The postcards are especially interesting artifacts to work with,” says exhibition co-curator Narineh Mirzaeian, a Los Angeles-based designer and architect. “They’re pre-genocide, but they foreshadow what is about to happen. Or they don’t foreshadow it, which feels even more stark.”
As a counterpoint to the vintage postcards, the installation features Brazilian photographer Norair Chahinian’s visual explorations into his own Armenian roots. Drawn from two books of his photography, Armenia (2008) and The Power of Emptiness (2012), they include images captured using an antique camera owned by Chahinian’s grandfather, an Anatolian refugee who operated a photo studio in Aleppo, Syria, before joining the Armenian diaspora in São Paulo.
Photography and photographic printing, notes the collector, Calumeno, were almost exclusively Armenian trades in Ottoman Turkey. Religious prohibitions against making graven images prevented Muslims from entering the profession until 1910, and it fell to Christians, particularly Armenians, to fill the vacuum.
Postcards, he says, “were what the Internet is today”—an easy, low-cost way to preserve a travel memory or to keep in touch with loved ones. “In those days, people received hundreds of postcards from friends everywhere,” Calumeno says. “Most were thrown away.”
Some postcards included in the “Undeliverable” installation depict world heritage sites along the Silk Road. Others document ordinary village life and mundane urban structures—a new factory wing, school building or orphanage. Missionaries used these to support fund-raising efforts.
Calumeno, who is Armenian on his mother’s side and Levantine-Italian on his father’s side, focuses his postcard collecting on Anatolia’s diverse minority communities: Assyrians, Jews, Greeks, Kurds and especially Armenians. “The greatness of Anatolia was that melting pot,” he says. “Now it has become a mono-cultural, mono-lingual environment.”
Orlando Carlo Calumeno Collection & Archives
His favorite card—the first he ever purchased, at age 16—depicts Istanbul’s Hippodrome Square near Hagia Sophia, the cathedral-turned-mosque and a major tourist attraction. Curiously, on the back side, the sender had jotted down a home remedy for nursing mothers to prevent cracked nipples. The card is addressed, in swirling Armenian cursive, to the woman’s sister in Bursa.
“These postcards are very important,” says Calumeno. “Each one is a gateway to connect with the past—a glorious past where everybody called each other ‘my brother, my sister.’ You see these naïve people, not knowing what is going to happen in the future. In these images, they live happily forever.”
“Undeliverable” is presented on two floors, in multiple parts, spanning the Doheny Library’s Treasure Room, Rotunda and Arts Corridor.
Working closely with USC Institute of Armenian Studies director Salpi Ghazarian, 160 vintage postcards are displayed in vitrines on the ground level, alongside documentary-style black-and-white images taken by Chahinian in recent years.
But in the Treasure Room, the curator has taken an unconventional approach. Focusing on 10 of the most intriguing postcards, she has scanned, enlarged and optically separated the images, creating layered, three-dimensional dioramas. Standing at eye-level on tripods, each diorama box invites visitors to peer into a lost world through a time-bending tower viewer. On the surrounding walls and ceiling, Mirzaeian has splashed full-scale murals of Chahinian’s bleak architectural photography illustrating modern Anatolia’s abandoned spaces, including a dilapidated Armenian church dome looming overhead.
The installation design invites visitors to navigate the curated scenes at two scales, says Ghazarian—zooming in to study nuances of daily life brought to life in the postcard dioramas, and zooming back out to see the blight left in the wake of genocide.
“It’s this surreal emotional landscape where alienation meets nostalgia, what-if encounters why, and despair yields to an irrepressible urge to reconstruct and build upon the erased past,” she adds.
Genocide exhibitions typically focus on victims, notes Mirzaeian. This installation focuses on places.
“It’s a different approach to what was lost, and what has remained,” she says. “It goes beyond victimhood—all these feelings we slip into that are unproductive. It’s more about re-inhabiting these spaces through the persistent architectural details. Those imaginative realities are interesting because they beg a lot of productive questions. Anytime you can do that, it’s good.”
“We’re very pleased to be able to present this immersive installation, in a timeless, three-dimensional space, here in the Library. This is especially important because the library’s long hours (open ‘til 10 pm weeknights, ‘til 8 pm Fridays and Sundays, and 5 pm Saturdays) will make it easy for anyone who wants to spend time in this lost world to attend. Admission, of course, is free,” said Ghazarian.
“I am immensely happy and proud for becoming world champion for the third time,” Armenian Greco-Roman wrestler, Olympic Champion (2016) a three-time World Champion (2014, 2015, 2017), and a three-time European Champion Artur Aleksanyan told reporters at a briefing at Zvartnots Airport upon arrival of Armenian wresting team from Paris.
In the words of the champion all the victories have been fought hard taken much efforts and dedication.
As to his future plans Aleksanyan said long trainings and hard work is ahead for victories in the coming tournaments and ultimately another Olympic gold in the 2020 Olympic Games to take place in Tokyo.
Aleksanyan also congratulated and praised his fellow team member Maksim Manukyan who won the second gold for Armenia on Wednesday.
“Maksim has worked hard for many years and he certainly deserved the title,” Aleksanyan said.
To note, the Armenian team conquered two gold medals at the 2017 World Championships in Paris with Artur Aleksanyan and Maksim Manukyan becoming champions respectively in the 98kg and 80kg weight categories.
Tue 10:38 GMT | 6:38 Local Time
Especially if it's not there. But it is. And it tries to run between Azerbaijan and Israel. Now it is important for Baku and Tel Aviv to find it, until darkness comes.
Azerbaijan has always regarded, and I hope, will long regard Israel as its strategic partner. Azerbaijan has a special attitude to Israel in terms of military cooperation, and close ties between official Baku and Tel Aviv, despite the absence of the Azerbaijani embassy in Israel, and cooperation in the energy sphere, etc. In general, we can't complain.
Moreover, Israel is supplying Azerbaijan with the best of its weapons, as demonstrated by the success of the Azerbaijani army during last year's counter-terrorist operation in the occupied territories.
But there is a feeling that someone (and maybe a whole group) is diligently trying to sow discord between the two countries. The attempts are made periodically and they are not always paid attention to… And this is so wrong!
It is clear that there are enemies of Azerbaijan in Israel. And they are obviously closing their ranks. For example, after the 2015 elections in Israel, among the key figures, both in the coalition and in the opposition, were the old supporters of the recognition of the "Armenian genocide", and they are closing their ranks on this issue.
I think it's not worth talking about how important is the semantics, both in diplomacy and politics, and in international public opinion. With the easy hand of Armenian nationalists, the word "genocide" was used without any ground, often accusing those who protect their civilians from aggression and terrorism, and presenting the terrorists as victims of genocide.
For example, in Israel, there is the chairman of the Meretz party – a passionate fighter for the recognition of the "Armenian genocide" Zehava Galon. She consistently defends Armenian interests in the Israeli parliament. In addition to the demand for Israel's formal recognition of the "Armenian genocide," she demanded that Moshe Ya'alon, then the Defense Minister, halt the supply of UAVs to Azerbaijan unless Baku undertakes to abstain from using drones against Armenian occupiers in Nagorno-Karabakh.
It is obvious that the attacks of the pro-Armenian lobby in Israel in the person of Zehava Galon are the attempts to damage the ever deepening relations between our two countries. In short, there is a sufficient number of enemies in the political establishment of Israel.
INSIDIOUS ARTICLE IN HAARETZ
But not only in the political establishment. Thus, on July 30, the fake version of the Haaretz newspaper published a completely false article about the family of the Azerbaijani president. Baku's concern was caused by the fact that this information referred to the Minister of Tourism of Israel, Yariv Levin.
The reaction followed. It turned out that it was a fake, and the minister did not make such statements. However, it left an unpleasant sludge. After all, they did not know who was behind this.
ISRAELI WEAPON FOR ARMENIA?
Former Knesset deputy, co-chairman of the public forum "Armenia-Israel" Alexander Zinker spoke about the possibility of delivering Israeli weapons to Armenia. And Israel allegedly had offered it to Yerevan. In an interview with Sputnik-Armenia, Zinker said that bilateral cooperation can develop in any sphere, including military one.
Alexander Zinker is on the "black list" of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry. The Israeli figure got there for being present as an "observer" in the "elections" in the occupied Azerbaijani territories.
It's no secret that Israel is one of the world's largest exporters of military equipment. But, as you know, Israeli developments are expensive, so can impoverished Armenia afford buying them?
There is no reliable, official information from the Israeli side on this matter, which once again proves that it was an informational throw-in.
WHO REFUSED TO SEND DRONES TO ARMENIA?
But it was not the last throw-in. The Israeli Defense Ministry is verifying information that the operators of the Israeli company Aeronautics Defense Systems allegedly refused to demonstrate the capabilities of the new unmanned equipment supplied to Azerbaijan on Armenian targets, newsru.com reports citing the Ma'ariv a-Shavua.
The author of the publication, Yossi Melman writes that the relevant complaint was filed by Azerbaijan to the Ministry of Defense of Israel. Aeronautics Defense Systems dismisses the charges.
According to the source, the incident occurred more than a month ago when the Aeronautics Defense Systems delegation arrived in Baku to discuss a new contract for the supply of unmanned aerial vehicles, including so-called barrage ammunition. The publication says that the Azerbaijani military asked to demonstrate the possibilities of new technology during real military operations against the Armenian army, and were refused. The article states that the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan expected to publish a television broadcast of this attack in order to show the power of its armed forces.
The press service of Aeronautics Defense Systems categorically rejected the allegations in the complaint and stated: "The company delivers its products to customers in 50 countries, exclusively in accordance with the licenses of the Department for Defense Export Control in the Ministry of Defense." The statement stresses that operational control is always carried out by the buyer and is entirely in his responsibility. "Aeronautics never demonstrates on live targets. The same applies to this case," the statement said.
INSTEAD OF EPILOGUE
Any provocation, be it a statement of a politician or informational throw-in, gets hard on someone's ear. Especially if there is trust in the relationship. Azerbaijan's foreign policy is known all over the world for its balance. Baku, in particular, the Foreign Ministry of the country never make sudden conclusions and quick statements. They wait for the development of events, and sometimes for a meaningful culmination.
Again, provocations are straining, but Baku is trying to find this very black cat. Is Israel looking for her? I think we will find it out in a very short time …
News.Az
Turan reported yesterday that the tax authorities accuse the news agency of under-declaring profits since 2014 and are demanding more than 37,000 manats (18,000 euros) in back taxes and other charges. They began a criminal investigation on 7 August and sent a tax inspector to Turan’s offices the next day to begin an audit.
Turan denies the allegations and has referred the matter to a Baku economic administrative court, pointing to many irregularities in the investigation including the fact that the tax authorities omitted to mention a recent audit in response to similar allegations, one that exonerated Turan.
“It was just a matter of time before the authorities targeted the last independent media outlet still operating in Azerbaijan,” said Johann Bihr, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.
“These proceedings are designed to cripple a respected news agency financially. We call on the authorities to end this systematic harassment of the last independent media voices and to drop the investigation into Turan.”
Created in May 1990 by a group of journalists who did not want to work for the state media, Turan was one the Soviet Union’s very first independent news agencies and produces dispatches in three languages – Azerbaijani, English and Russian.
Thanks to the professionalism of its reporters, who dare to cover the most sensitive subjects, it is an essential news source in a country whose president, Ilham Aliyev, is on RSF’s list of press freedom predators. It was nominated for RSF’s Press Freedom Prize in 2014.
The Azerbaijani authorities have gone all out to eliminate media pluralism in recent years. As a result of being throttled financially, the daily newspaper Zerkalo was forced to stop publishing in May 2014, while Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Baku bureau was forcibly closed at the end of 2014.
The last opposition newspaper, Azadlig, was forced to stop producing a print edition in September 2016. Its senior staff have had to flee the country and its financial director, Faiq Amirov, was sentenced last month to three and a half years in prison on trumped up charges. The leading independent news websites are all blocked.
Azerbaijan is ranked 162nd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2017 World Press Freedom Index.
«Member of the European Parliament Frank Engel wants Europe in Nagorno-Karabakh». A video with this claim appeared recently on Facebook. It refers to an appeal that is aimed at initiating EU engagement with Nagorno-Karabakh.
«Nagorno-Karabakh’s isolation is unique. The EU provides aid to 150 countries around the World. It also provides aid to people in many unrecognized territories such as Abkhazia, Transnistria and Northern Cyprus regardless of their status. This policy is called “engagement without recognition”.
We call on the EU to engage with Nagorno-Karabakh and support projects to improve the living conditions of its population because EU policies should contribute to the welfare, not to the hardship of populations in Europe and in its periphery», the appeal states.
Naira Hayrumyan, Political Commentator
Comments – Tuesday, , 21:36
Baku, Azerbaijan, Aug. 8
Trend:
Tovuz District Prosecutor’s Office has opened criminal case under the articles 116.0.10 (violation of the international humanitarian law during armed conflicts, with attacks on civilians or individuals not participating in fights), 29, 120.2.7 (attempt of intentional killing of two or more persons) of the Criminal Justice Code of Azerbaijan over the shrapnel wounds of thirteen-year-old resident of Garalar village of Azerbaijan’s Tovuz district Ramil Yusibov. Investigation is underway, said the press service of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Azerbaijan, Aug. 8.
The message said that Armenian Armed Forces located in Azerbaijan’s occupied territories, grossly violating the requirements of international humanitarian law, have continued their provocative actions once again and using large-caliber guns shelled the frontline positions of Azerbaijani Armed Forces, as well as the territories inhabited by civilian population.
On Aug. 7, at about 20:00 (GMT + 4 hours), Armenian military units, dislocated on the occupied Azerbaijani territories, using large-caliber guns shelled the Garalar village of Tovuz district, thus conducting another provocation aimed at the intentional slaughter of civilians.
As a result, Ramil Yusibov, while returning from grass mowing, received shrapnel wounds and in serious condition was taken to hospital.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries 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 districts.
The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.