Armenian News... A Topalian... Merkel and the word Genocide in Armenia
Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Germany
August 24, 2018 Friday 5:20 PM EST
Merkel dances around the term 'genocide' at memorial in Armenia
Germany Merkel dances around the term 'genocide' at memorial in Armenia Yerevan German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday paid herrespects at a memorial to those killed in the Armenian genocide
without using the term "genocide" - a point of tension with Turkey.
She planted a tree at the Tsitsernakaberd memorial in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, "in the spirit of the 2016 resolution of the Bundestag."
Although the German government's resolution was not a legal one, the decision caused massive protests in Turkey, which strongly rejects terming the the mass killing of Armenians during World War I at the hands of the Ottoman Empire a genocide.
Merkel was in Armenia on Friday as part of a three-day tour of the region that started Thursday in Georgia and ends in Azerbaijan.
During her visit to Yerevan, she also underscored her support for closer cooperation on migration with Armenia, saying Berlin would consider liberalizing visa requirements depending on how the country
makes progress on the question of asylum and the migration question.
"The prospect is there, but we still have a ways to go," she said.
Armenia's new prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, said at a joint press conference with Merkel that emigration could be stopped as the nation becomes more democratic, and that Armenians would return to the homeland.
Merkel also voiced support for a political solution to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Deutsche Welle, Germany
Aug 25 2018
Angela Merkel in Azerbaijan calls for peace with Armenia
Angela Merkel has offered Germany's help in forging a diplomatic solution to the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Baku is the chancellor's last stop on a three-day visit to the South Caucasus.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Saturday that Berlin could help mediate between Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia to resolve a long-running territorial dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.
"Germany wants to help find peaceful solutions," the chancellor told journalists in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, adding that the conflict was a major burden on the region.
Merkel called for stronger economic cooperation with Azerbaijan as she sat down for talks with the South Caucasian country's president, Ilham Aliyev. The pair discussed the domestic human rights situation, the possibility of expanding energy markets to avoid dependency on Russian gas, and efforts to end the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Azerbaijan is Merkel's final stop on a three-day tour that has already taken her to Georgia and Armenia.
Frozen conflict
Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous border region, officially belongs to Azerbaijan but was seized by local Armenian forces during a war in the early 1990s following the break-up of the Soviet Union.
For more than 20 years, the two countries have been locked in a bitter dispute, with occasional flares in violence along the border. Azerbaijan has repeatedly threatened to take the region back by force, while Armenia says it will crush any military intervention.
RFE/RL Report
Merkel Praises Armenia’s Delicate Balancing Act
August 24, 2018
German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised Armenia on Friday for developing relations with the European Union while remaining allied to Russia during her
first-ever official visit to the South Caucasus country.
“Armenia is a good example of how one can simultaneously cooperate with Russia and the European Union,” she said after talks with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.
Merkel arrived in Yerevan as part of a regional tour four months after Pashinian-led mass protests brought down Armenia’s previous government.
Pashinian’s press office quoted her as saying at the start of the talks that the “big changes” were unexpected to the German government and "positive” for Armenia.
“Our relations are very good but can deepen further,” Merkel told an ensuing joint news conference with the Armenian premier. She said Germany would
specifically welcome closer commercial and cultural ties with Armenia.
Merkel also pledged to help Yerevan implement its landmark Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with the EU signed last November.
Pashinian said that just like the former Armenian government his administration is committed to stepping up cooperation with the EU while remaining part of the Russian-led alliances and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in particular. The
Armenian foreign policy strategy is “totally understandable” to Berlin, he said.
At his meeting with Merkel, Pashinian was reported to renew his calls for the EU to reward the new Armenian government’s ambitious reform agenda and anti-corruption efforts with greater financial assistance. Earlier this summer he criticized the EU for not rushing to do that.
Merkel said she discussed with Pashinian domestic Armenian politics and “anti-corruption issues.” But in her public remarks she said nothing about the
possibility of greater EU or German aid to Yerevan.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in late June that Berlin stands ready to help Armenia’s new government carry out sweeping reforms. “We have followed social change in the country with great interest and will support its reform efforts,” Maas said after talks with his visiting Armenian counterpart Zohrab Mnatsakanian.
Germany has already been Armenia’s number one EU donor. Pashinian emphasized the fact that it is also his country’s third largest trading partner.
Armenians, he said, have “great respect for Germany, the German people and Angela Merkel personally.”
The German leader, who also met with President Armen Sarkissian on Friday, was noncommittal on the lifting of the EU’s visa requirements for Armenian
nationals sought by both the current and former authorities in Yerevan. She noted that she spoke with Pashinian about scores of Armenians seeking asylum in Germany. “We cooperate in this area quite well but more can be done,” she said without elaborating.
The unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was also on the agenda of the talks, with both leaders calling for its peaceful resolution. Merkel will proceed to
Baku on Saturday for talks with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev.
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50.000 AMD fine to be set for smoking in public places: Anti-tobacco bill still at development stage
50.000 AMD fine may be set for smoking in public places, and 800.000 AMD fine – for advertising tobacco production, deputy healthcare minister Lena Nanushyan told reporters.
She said an official may be fined with 200.000 AMD if the law on tobacco is violated at his territory, but he hasn’t taken necessary actions for preventing that violation.
The anti-tobacco bill is still at the development stage.
“According to the current law, the fine for a secret advertisement of a tobacco comprises 500.000 AMD, but in case of repeating the same action within a year, the fine is set 1 million AMD. But according to the bill which is at the development stage it is defined that the 800.000 AMD fine will be doubled in case of violation of the second time”, she said.
She informed that the new bill will ban smoking in all public places.
Commentary
Despite an Encouraging Visit to Armenia,
Chancellor Merkel Didn’t Say Genocide
By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Georgia, Armeniaand Azerbaijan. Media reports indicated that her visit to Armenia and meetings with its leadership were very constructive. Armenian-German political, cultural and trade relations are expected to expand.
Merkel’s visit resulted in a much needed boost for Armenia’s new democratic government.
One of the sensitive issues that both Armenians and the international community were carefully following was Chancellor Merkel’s comments on the Armenian Genocide. The German Parliament (Bundestag) almost unanimously adopted a resolution in 2016 recognizing the Armenian Genocide and declared that “the German Empire bears partial complicity
in the events.”
Immediately after the adoption of the Genocide resolution, Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Berlin and threatened to cut off ties with Germany. Relations between Germany and Turkey remain tense for a variety of reasons, but are expected to improve after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s forthcoming visit to Germany in late September.
While in Yerevan, Chancellor Merkel paid a visit to the Armenian Genocide Memorial. She laid a wreath in memory of the 1.5 million Armenian victims and planted a tree at an adjacent park. However, Merkel avoided the use of the term genocide in Yerevan, describing Turkey’s mass killings as “heinous crimes against Armenians” which “cannot and must not be forgotten.” She also stated that she had visited the Genocide Memorial “in the spirit of the Bundestag 2016 resolution.” She clarified that the language used was “a political,not a legal classification.”
Despite Merkel’s goodwill toward Armenia and her very positive statements, I hope that Armenia’s leaders reminded her that the proper term to describe the planned extermination of 1.5 million Armenians is “Genocide,” not simply “heinous crimes.”
Armenia’s leaders could have informed Chancellor Merkel of a recent report by Ben Knight of Germany’s Deutsche Welle (DW) about the weapons provided by the German Reich to the Ottoman Turkish forces to carry out the Armenian Genocide.
According to DW, “Mauser, Germany’s main manufacturer of small arms in both world wars, supplied the Ottoman Empire with millions of rifles
and handguns, which were used in the genocide with the active support of German officers.” Furthermore, quoting from a report by “Global Net—Stop the Arms Trade,” DW stated that “the Turkish army was also equipped with hundreds of cannons produced by the Essen-based company Krupp, which were used in Turkey’s assault on Armenian resistance
fighters holding out on the Musa Dagh Mountain in 1915.”
The author of the Global Net report, Wolfgang Landgraeber, wrote that “Mauser really had a rifle monopoly for the Ottoman Empire.”
DW revealed that “many of the firsthand German accounts in the report come from letters by Major Graf Eberhard Wolffskehl, who was stationed
in the southeastern Turkish city of Urfa in October 1915. Urfa was home to a substantial population of Armenians, who barricaded themselves inside houses against the Turkish infantry. Wolffskehl was serving as chief of staff to Fakhri Pasha, deputy commander of the Ottoman 4th Army, which had been called in as reinforcement.”
In a letter to his wife, Major Wolffskehl shamelessly bragged about the killing of Armenians by German troops in Urfa: “They [the Armenians] had occupied the houses south of the church in numbers.
When our artillery fire struck the houses and killed many people inside, the others tried to retreat into the church itself. But ...they had to go around the church across the open church courtyard. Our
infantry had already reached the houses to the left of the courtyard and shot down the people fleeing across the church courtyard in piles. All in all the infantry, which I used in the main attack ... acquitted
itself very well and advanced very dashingly.”
Landgraeber also reported that “while German companies provided the guns, and German soldiers the expert advice on how to use them, German
officers also laid the ideological foundations” for the ArmenianGenocide.
German Navy Attache Hans Humann, a member of the German-Turkish officer corps and close friend of the Ottoman Empire’s war minister,Enver Pasha, wrote: “The Armenians—because of their conspiracy with the Russians -- will be more or less xterminated. That is hard, but useful.”
Furthermore, Landgraeber wrote in his report about “the Prussian major general Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, a key figure who became a vital military adviser to the Ottoman court in 1883 and saw himself as a lobbyist for the German arms industry and supported both Mauser and Krupp in their efforts to secure Turkish commissions. (He once boasted in his diary, ‘I can claim that without me the rearmament of the [Turkish] army with German models would not have happened.’)” Goltz
“helped persuade the Sultan to try and end the Armenian question once and for all!”
The above quotations support the admission by Bundestag’s 2016 resolution that Germany was complicit in the Armenian Genocide and German President Joachim Gauck’s acknowledgment in 2015 about Germany’s “co-responsibility” for the Armenian Genocide. Being well aware of these facts, Chancellor Merkel should have called the Armenian Genocide by its proper name: Genocide.
The 3400 year old hymn, is the oldest known fragment of noted music so far discovered in history. It was created by an anonymous Hurrian artist in 1400 BC. and dedicated to the goddess of orchards.
At the time, the Armenians from the region of Van were known to their Hittite and Assyrian neighbors as the Hurri / Harri. The iron age Armenian kingdom of Urartu / Ararat is considered to be the continuation of the earlier Hurrian kingdoms. One such kingdom was that of the late Bronze Age kingdom of Mittani (the Biblical Aram-Naharaim, meaning “Aram of two rivers”). Another Hurrian kingdom was called Arme-Shupria (Akkadian: Armani-Subartu). Jacquetta Hawkes in her book ‘The First Great Civilizations’ writes of it:
“Yet the Hurrians did not disappear from history. Away to the North in their Armenian homeland, they entrenched themselves and build up the kingdom of Urartu.”
Hurrians along with Urartians (to the Persians already known as the Armenians) are considered to be the direct ancestors of modern Armenians. According to Diakonoff, the present-day Armenians are therefore an amalgam of the Hurrians and Urartians. According to Dr. Johannes Lehman in his book ‘The Hittites’, all indications point toward the general region of Armenia as a main area of Hurrian concentration.
Several recent genetic studies support these conclusions by showing a direct genetic continuation of modern Armenians to their ancestors c. 4000 years ago. To read more about the Hurrians, visit: http://www.armeniapedia.org/wiki/Hurrians
This Hurrian Hymn (catalogued as Text H6) was originally discovered in Ugarit, in northern Syria, in the early 1950s, and was preserved for 3400 years on a clay tablet, written in the cuneiform text of the ancient Hurrian language. The tablet h.6 contains the lyrics for a hymn to a goddess Nikkal and instructions for a singer accompanied by a nine-stringed sammûm, a type of harp or, much more likely, a lyre. One or more of the tablets also contains instructions for tuning the harp.
Although about 29 musical texts were discovered at Ugarit, only this text, (text H6), was in a sufficient state of preservation to allow for modern academic musical reconstruction. While several reconstructions exist, the current arrangement, is based on the original transcription of the melody, as interpreted by Prof. Richard Dumbrill. Here is a link to the sheet music, as arranged by Clint Goss:
The above melody is performed by Michael Levy on a Lyre. The Cuneiform text clearly indicated specific names for lyre strings, and their respective musical intervals – a sort of “Guitar tablature”, for lyre. More of his work can be found on his website: http://www.ancientlyre.com/
Now listen to it:
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