Marco Grigor(Marcos Grigorian), the well known Armenian-Iranian artist died in yerevan yesterday. I have not seen any armenian news website covering his death.
He is considered a pinonner of modern Iranian art. He organized the the first Tehran Biennial.
more…

I’ve grown to admire Elif Shafak’s opinions, especially nowadays as they give us a solid preview of what life can be like for a progressive Turkish contemporary writer/intellectual living and working in a post Hrant Dink world.

Listen to this recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air radio program and please share your thoughts:

In this particular interview, it was interesting to listen to Shafak’s continued solid stance that the radical Turkish Nationalist movement is really a minority voice that is on the fringes of contemporary Turkish society, a compete opposite of what I originally conceived. There is a lot about Turkish society I have yet to discover, but it seems to be clear that there is this silent majority within the literate groups of Turkey who seem to be intellectually frustrated and actively questioning the official government “feed” about many current issues and past dark historical events. This is a good thing, as it may directly or indirectly propel a richer level of communicative openness and idea-exchange within Turks about various “Armenian” taboo topics in Turkish society such as the Ottoman era Armenian Genocide and the moral legitimacy of Turkey’s current day Armenian economic/border blockade.

Author Elif Shafak was acquitted after being taking to trial for “insulting Turkishness” when a fictional character described the Armenian genocide in her latest book. AFP/Getty Images

A video grab released by Turkish police shows an image of a man suspected of killing journalist Hrant Dink, one of Turkey’s most prominent ethnic Armenians, as the government came under fire for failing to protect him despite nationalist threats.(AFP/HO)

According to a recent AP news release, Turkish Police detained a suspect early today in the slaying of Hrant Dink, acting on a tip from the boy’s father after his pictures were broadcasted on Turkish television. According to press information provided by the Turkish Police, the suspect’s name is Ogun Samast, a 17 years old caught on a bus in the Black Sea city of Samsun. Samast was apparently on his way from Istanbul back to his hometown of Trabzon.

Reporter Benjamin Harvey of the Associated Press also notes that Dink’s secretary had also identified the young man in the photograph as the same person who had requested a meeting with Dink the day he was killed. The man said he was a student at Ankara University. The request was refused, and the secretary said she saw him waiting in front of a bank about an hour before Dink was killed.

It would be interesting to find out if this teen acted alone or had ties to a group. I doubt we will ever know the authentic truth.

It’s been a very difficult news event for me to follow and reflect upon. From what I can gather, this man was very much loved and respected by not only community ethnic Armenians but by the activist/progressive Turkish community.

The most significant memory I have of Dink was in last years American-PBS documentary film on Genocide where I think Dink describes Turks as being a kind (pari) people. I may be wrong with my recollection of what he specifically stated, but his intentions gave me impression that he was a unifier and not a divider. It is important to remember what Hrant Dink stood for, what he fought for and what he achieved for both Turkey and her minority Armenian community.

Hayk Newspaper reports, that the Forbs - Armenian service soon to be launched in Armenia, will publish the following list of ten richest people in Armenia in the first issue of the magazine. Hayk draws readers attention to the fact, that 6 of the 10 people in the list are high ranking state officials. more…

It’s good we have those rare power cuts in Armenia (mostly caused by rains) - I seem to forget sometimes just how bad it used to be in mid-90s. more…

99% of the Armenian voters stated their determination to have an Independent State – Republic of Armenia when they came together on September 21, 1991 to participate in the all-Armenian referendum.

15 years after - as 3.5 thousand troops march through the biggest and most beautiful square of Armenia, many Armenians view the celebrations and official speeches with mixed feelings. And while the First and Second Armenian TV channels burst into tearful pride under the last sounds of the national Anthem (soon to be changed into one of these: Anthems), many don’t even bother remembering the Anniversary in the tight family circle – where all the true feelings come afloat.

My personal views on the Armenian government and politics can be described as strictly oppositional. Still, I find it hard to observe peoples’ bitterness towards the Independence.

Independence is an absolute value, in spite of all problems it has brought to us. Let us celebrate this one day with pride – after all – it is only once a year! Hail to the Independent Armenia!

Following a string of deadly attacks on Armenians, another was added to the list last night when an Armenian citizen living in Moscow, was shot in a south district last night. Another Armenian who was with him was also injured, as a result of gunfire.

This is really worrying, it comes around a week after another Armenian was stabbed in Russia , and previously a number of stabbings in the last 3 months give definite cause for concern - including an Armenian being mutilated on a passenger train. I think it has gone past the point where the authorities can say the attacks are not race related, it is time for them to face up and begin tackling an increasing problem.

Gibrahayer Saturday 20 May, 2006 - Armenia’s rising tennis star 15 year old Zaruhi Harutyunyan won her first ITF title by defeating South Africa’s number one player Bianca Swanepoel in the singles of the international world ranking tournament that concluded today at the Enka Sports Club in Bolis.
In a three-set nail-biting final that was watched by local tennis fans and cheering Bolsahays, Harutyunyan found herself losing 3-1 and 15-40 in the final set before regrouping and fighting back to clinch the set, the match and the championship, 5-7,
6-2, 6-4.
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Is this a good or bad idea from Raffi? Check Hye Plan out and share your thoughts…

In response to the discussion going on in the Diaspora logs, I have decided to put online a concept paper I drafted for “promoting Armenia and Armenianism worldwide”. It includes ideas which would both promote Armenia proper, promote the and strengthen the Diaspora, and tie the two together more firmly. It is a compilation of ideas I’ve had over the years (many of which are of course not original), but which, if implemented in part or in whole could make a massive impact on our nation across the planet. To implement the whole thing would require massive resources, but bits of it could be done quite easily (and many of them rather profitably).

Some of the ideas include:
- Creating real “Little Armenia’s”, which are not just Armenian neighborhoods with a couple of bakeries, but offer a true taste of Armenia and a sort of cool neighborhood with a real flavor and tourist attraction, educational opportunities, shopping, and a tighter community. These would be also be implemented in cities where there used to be Armenian quarters centuries ago, but have disappeared (Lviv, Venice).
- Building a large-scale retirement community in Armenia, where every concern and reason why someone wouldn’t want to retire in Armenia (except the colder winters) would be addressed.
- Creating a series of Armenian theme restaurants and bars to be franchised around the world… what better way into peoples hearts, than through their bellies?

Well, if the ideas interest you, check ‘em out link…

I love these articles that appear every so often. Once every month or so the Armenian State TV’s news service runs a nice little clip of a a Minister going to Mr Kocharyan’s office and showing him what he has done.

This time it was the taxation service. According to the article a new battle is to drawn against those organisations who don’t pay enough taxes.

To judge how effective this is we can ask ourselves a simple question: what large companies come to mind when you think of Armenia? Now see if you can find them in at least the top 20 taxpayers - here’s the list

Armenian tv has just launched its own news portal. You can visit here.

Via Bloomberg:

Turkey Prosecutes More Writers, Jeopardizing EU Membership Bid
Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) — Five of Turkey’s best-known columnists go on trial at an Istanbul court today, in a freedom- of-speech case that threatens to derail the country’s bid to join the European Union.

Hasan Cemal of the Milliyet newspaper and Ismet Berkan, Murat Belge, Haluk Sahin and Erol Katircioglu of the daily Radikal face up to 10 years in prison. They criticized a judge for halting a September conference to discuss Armenian claims of genocide by Ottoman Turks in 1915.

“These curbs are unacceptable if Turkey wants to prove that it’s democratic,'’ said Oktay Eksi, head of the Turkish Press Council, in an interview on Feb. 2. “We will continue to fight these restrictions until we, or the EU, persuade the government to abolish them.'’

European Union officials say Turkey must conform to Western norms of free expression so as not to jeopardize membership talks that started on Oct. 3. Turkey last month dropped charges against prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, who had questioned Turkey’s role in the killing of more than 1 million Armenians nine decades ago.

Here’s an interesting report on the ongoing destruction of the Armenian heritage in Nakhichevan (parts of this appeared in ArmeniaNow.com last year, I think).

Here’s an excerpt of a conversation the author had with the Nakhichevan law enforcement in September 2005:

They asked me why I thought that there was a church in Shorut.
“Because a book had told me”, I said.
“It is wrong, it is lying to you. It is an Armenian book, yes?”
“Yes” I replied.
“You see, Armenians are always lying – they are lying to everyone”.
I couldn’t resist pointing out to them that there were photographs of the Shurut church in the book. To
this they responded by saying “Armenians, they came here and took photographs of Shurut village and
then they went back to Armenia and put into them photographs of a church in Armenia.”
“It is all just Armenian lies. They are lying to you! There never were any Armenian churches anywhere
in Naxçivan. There were no Armenians ever living here - so how could there have been churches here?
There never was a church in Abrakunis, there never was a church in Shurut, there never was a church
in Julfa!”

“Conciliation Resources” published in its Accord magazine an entire issue on Nagorno Karabakh conflict, called “The limits of leadership: Elites and societies in the Nagorny Karabakh peace process.” As is usual, they present ‘both sides of the story’ with submissions from Armenian and Azeri sides.

It’s a good resource, all in all.

One issue with Thomas de Waal’s entry is his repeated but unproven assertion about Sumgait’s being predated by expulsion of Azeris from southern Armenia. It first appeared in his Black Garden book, single sourced to a person unrelated to refugees in Azerbaijan, and neither he nor any organization have found any evidence for that (ICG in its report declined to endorse these claims for the same reason). Yet, it travels from one report to another.

It just shows how difficult it is for third-party observers to remain fully neutral in conflicts like this, when two sides of the story differ so dramatically.

Armenianow.com posted a little later than usual yesterday, so in case you haven’t looked at it yet, it has a number of stories on NGOs that are doing really good work. Even better — they aren’t all in Yerevan!

One especially interesting case is of an NK NGO that has trouble getting funding as NK isn’t recognized as a state. (Or maybe this was especially interesting to me because I am writing a paper on the statehood question for my international law class right now!)

Please check out ArmeniaNow for some really great stories of NGOs doing positive things.

On a related topic, I shared with a crowd at Onnik’s presentation in London, an excellent survey of NGOs in Armenia done by a wonderful scholar at the LSE, Dr. Armine Ishkanian. Here’s a publically free work of hers that may interest you if you’re curious about NGOs in Armenia. If you have access to a university’s library online database you can surely fine her longer works.

Onnik posts about homelessness in Armenia in the wintertime. As he covered extensively last year, homelessness is a problem that is really under-discussed in Yerevan, Armenia, and the rest of the Armenian world.

Please read his recent posting on the topic.

(Sorry for the late response — busy travel weekend!)

The Azeri government did it again: an old Armenian cemetery in Julfa, Nakhichevan (Hin Jugha) was reportedly completely vandalized by Azeri troops. This time, the action was documented by the Armenian Diocese in Iran as the cemetery is located on the banks of the Arax.

Through Regnum:

Almost 100 Azerbaijani servicemen penetrated the Armenian cemetery near Nakhichevan at the bank of the Araks River and using sledgehammers and other tools, began to crush Armenian graves and crosses, that were saved by a miracle in the attacks of 2002,” the Armenian Embassy in Iran, citing the Armenian Eparchy of the Iran province of Atropatena informed the press. According to the source, “this fact is another step of the Azerbaijani government, aimed at distortion of history and liquidation of the Armenian traces in the territory of Nakhichevan. According to the embassy’s report, the Armenian monuments and graves in this region continue to be the subject of planned acts of vandalism by Azerbaijanis…

The Russian version has a photo as well.

This is not a new occurence - see this ArmeniaNow story from last year.

In The New Yorker this week, the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk reflects on his upcoming trial for uttering ‘dangerous’ ideas on the taboo subjects in the Turkish history.

In Istanbul this Friday—in Sisli, the district where I have spent my whole life, in the courthouse directly opposite the three-story house where my grandmother lived alone for forty years—I will stand before a judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The prosecutor will ask that I be imprisoned for three years. I should perhaps find it worrying that the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was tried in the same court for the same offense, under Article 301 of the same statute, and was found guilty, but I remain optimistic. For, like my lawyer, I believe that the case against me is thin; I do not think I will end up in jail.

…Last February, in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper, I said that “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”; I went on to complain that it was taboo to discuss these matters in my country. Among the world’s serious historians, it is common knowledge that a large number of Ottoman Armenians were deported, allegedly for siding against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, and many of them were slaughtered along the way. Turkey’s spokesmen, most of whom are diplomats, continue to maintain that the death toll was much lower, that the slaughter does not count as a genocide because it was not systematic, and that in the course of the war Armenians killed many Muslims, too. This past September, however, despite opposition from the state, three highly respected Istanbul universities joined forces to hold an academic conference of scholars open to views not tolerated by the official Turkish line. Since then, for the first time in ninety years, there has been public discussion of the subject—this despite the spectre of Article 301…

…The hardest thing was to explain why a country officially committed to entry in the European Union would wish to imprison an author whose books were well known in Europe, and why it felt compelled to play out this drama (as Conrad might have said) “under Western eyes.” This paradox cannot be explained away as simple ignorance, jealousy, or intolerance, and it is not the only paradox. What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats? What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spread false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide? When I think of the professor whom the state asked to give his ideas on Turkey’s minorities, and who, having produced a report that failed to please, was prosecuted, or the news that between the time I began this essay and embarked on the sentence you are now reading five more writers and journalists were charged under Article 301, I imagine that Flaubert and Nerval, the two godfathers of Orientalism, would call these incidents bizarreries, and rightly so…

Pamuk, of course, tried to avoid the trial by softening his remarks and remarking that in his view the ‘killings’ did not constitute Genocide. To no avail, as the Turkish state dragged him to the trial room nonetheless.

James Tufenkian, who is in rug manufacturing and tourism development business in Armenia, has been recognized by Travel and Leisure magazine for “defending the historical, cultural, and ecological integrity of tourist destinations.”

Specifically,

The magazine paid tribute to seven innovative programs and initiatives across seven categories in the inaugural Global Vision Awards. Selected by a jury of seven distinguished global travel authorities, the winners are defending the historical, cultural, and ecological integrity of various regions throughout the world and are featured in the magazine’s December issue.

The winners are:
Economic Development: Tufenkian Artisan Carpets, Nepal and Armenia
New York-based James Tufenkian has enhanced the economy of developing communities in Nepal and Armenia by implementing worker-welfare programs, providing schools, housing, medical facilities and a water-purification plant for thousands of artisans and craftspeople.

U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans penned an op-ed on the Referendum, which appeared in several Armenian newspapers today.

DAY OF DECISION

Much has been said and written about the forthcoming referendum on the proposed amendments to the Constitution that will take place on Sunday. I do not intend to debate the merits of the package that will be put to Armenia’s voters; our position is well known and we support the recent statement of the President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in this matter. But I do wish to make clear that, in our view, a time of civic responsibility is at hand. How the authorities and the voting population of the Republic of Armenia conduct their affairs over the next few days is, of course, an internal matter. But in today’s shrunken world, where news travels at the speed of light, what happens here will inevitably become known and influence opinion in places far away, for better or for worse. History has shown more than once that it is not enough, in a democracy, to have fine words on paper enshrined in a fundamental law, or constitution…

…Armenia has an opportunity this Sunday to demonstrate that it can conduct a ballot without irregularity. We hope all of Armenia’s eligible voters will exercise their civic duty. If there is any lesson that ought to have been learned from the events of the last few years, in both hemispheres, it is that defrauding the voters, or preventing them from exercising their right to express their choice, hurts the country, its citizens and the incumbent authorities. Even in the case of elections or referenda that are adequately monitored by trained and experienced international election observers, much inevitably depends on the seriousness and sense of responsibility of the officials whose job it is to administer and oversee the process of voting. If they do an honest and effective job, everyone will win, no matter what the final result may be. If, on the contrary, there are serious irregularities, everyone will lose…

As the international awareness of XX century atrocities grow, more and more instances of genocide are being discussed and being raised. One such issue is the Holodomor, the policy of famine carried out by the Soviet authorities in then-Soviet Ukraine in 1930’s.

As a matter of fact, this instance of genocide is also recognized by many foreign governments, including the United States. President Yuschenko this week called for a wider recognition. The anniversary is marked on November 26.

Just like the Turkish government is fighting the Armenian genocide recognition campaign, the Holodomor as a subject is not welcomed by the Russian political elite which has increasingly embraced all aspects of the Soviet historical propaganda.

BBC notes:

Roman Serbyn, professor of history and a Ukrainian expert at the University of Quebec in Montreal, says: “Ukraine did not make a technically clear case.” He believes the “genocide” designation has proved elusive because the famine is often considered to have been aimed at a social group (peasants) rather than a national or ethnic group. However, a strong case can be put showing that by closing the borders so Ukrainians could not escape to Russia, Stalin was targeting Ukrainian nationals, he says.

Russia opposes designation as genocide, he says, and “the biggest reason is national pride. But also the political and economic consequences… if you recognise a crime you might have to pay compensation”.

In 2003 Russia’s ambassador to Ukraine, Viktor Chernomyrdin, was quoted by Interfax news agency dismissing talk of an apology or compensation, saying: “We’re not going to apologise… there is nobody to apologise to.”

I think the Tsitsernakaberd Museum must include an exhibit on the Holodomor, as well as other atrocities of the Stalin regime that targeted specific nationalities.