Armenian News... A Topalian... 9 editorials
Forthcoming production of Beast on the Moon at Finborough Theatre.
Milwaukee in the 1920s. Aram believes he will begin a new life when his teenage ‘mail-order’ bride, Seta, arrives to join him. They are a couple united by history – both survivors of the Armenian Genocide. But their painful, shared experience does nothing to promote domestic harmony as Aram is obsessed with creating a family to replace the one he lost in such savage circumstances, and Seta, just fifteen and trapped by the traditions of the old ways, struggles to embrace her new life in a new country…
Richard Kalinoski’s beautifully written, universal story of hope and healing, has been performed in more than twenty countries. It returns to London in a production commissioned by the Finborough Theatre, where it was last performed in the 1990s.Beast on the Moon remains a play for our times – a powerful exploration of legacy for so many refugees.
Post-show discussions:
The Armenian Genocide and Refugees
Saturday 2 February
Hosted by Ara Sarafian (Gomidas Institute) and Misak Ohanian (Centre for Armenian Information and Advice).
Blessed are the Peacemakers
Wednesday 13 February
Hosted by Ara Sarafian (Gomidas Institute)
Tickets and more information: https://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2018/beast-on-the-moon.php
youtube clip of the cover song of the Sao Paulo Samba Troupe ‘Rosas de Ouro’ (Roses of Gold)- for this year’s Brasil Carnival.
The song is called ‘Viva Hayastan’, it starts with the words ‘Havadk, Huys, Ser’ and then translated into Portuguese. The chorus says:
Tem que respeitar a minha identidade Roseira é felicidade A esperança de um novo amanhã Viva, Hayastan!
They have to respect my identity
Rose-bush and happiness
The Hope of a new tomorrow
Viva Hayastan
JAM News
Jan 4 2019
The seven most important events in Armenia in 2018
Gevorg Ghazaryan, Yerevan
Calls for one step forward resulted in leaps for Armenia
1. Peaceful transfer of power
The main, crucial event of the year, the Velvet Revolution, began with the Take a Step campaign.
The initiator of the protest movement and leader of the Civil Contract opposition party, Nikol Pashinyan, went from the second largest city of Armenia, Gyumri, to the capital by foot. The march transformed into round-the-clock protests, and then into a mass protest movement.
The motto of the protest movement was the phrase “Reject Serzh”, referring to Serzh Sargsyan who had served as president for 10 years. On 23 April, under pressure of tens of thousands of people, Serzh Sargsyan announced his resignation. The ruling Republican Party then made concessions in the parliament and elected Nikol Pashinyan as prime minister.
After the revolution, a new government was formed in Armenia. It declared that the fight against corruption and the corrupt top echelon of the previous government, in addition to their closest circles and relatives, to be one of its main tasks.
2. The release of political prisoners
Another promise of the government that came to power after the revolution was the release of all who were considered political prisoners in Armenia.
Under the previous authorities, the political prisoners issue raised a lot of questions and caused discrepancies, such as human rights activists holding contradictory views on the issue of whether there are people in Armenia who are imprisoned for their political views.
The human rights activists, who nevertheless were inclined to believe that there were political prisoners in Armenia, put out different numbers. In general, according to their lists, there were possibly up to 25 people. However, not one of them was recognised as a political prisoner by the Council of Europe.
From 2016, members of the armed Sasna Tsrer group, who seized a Patrol Police station in Yerevan, joined the list. They were the first to demand a change of power, having resorted to an armed seizure of a public institution. However, their attempt failed.
As a result of their actions, three policemen were killed. Two weeks after they seized the station, members of the armed group surrendered and were arrested. Some residents of the country considered them political prisoners, while others thought them terrorists.
However, society demanded the release of all political prisoners after the revolution, and in 2018 they were also set free.
3. The ex-president goes to prison
The second President of Armenia, Robert Kocharyan, celebrated his New Year in a prison cell. He has been charged with ‘overthrowing the constitutional order’ in the country in 2008.
Among the main promises of Pashinyan’s “revolutionary” government was a fair investigation of the events of 1 March 2008.
In 2008, there were two main candidates in the presidential election – Serzh Sargsyan and the first President of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan. The latter did not recognize the official results of the vote – that is, his defeat. His supporters took to the streets and protests lasted two weeks. They later turned into large-scale clashes with law enforcement agencies, as a result of which 10 people were killed.
During these events, President Robert Kocharyan was the President of Armenia, and introduced a state of emergency in the country.
Nikol Pashinyan was a member of Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s campaign headquarters at the time. After the tragic events of 1 March, the opposition figure was accused of organizing mass riots. He hid for a year and four months, then voluntarily surrendered and was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of “using violence against a representative of the authorities”.
After being released during his active political activities, Pashinyan consistently declared his intention to bring Robert Kocharyan and other perpetrators of the 1 March events to justice.
Kocharyan himself does not recognize the charges against him. Supporters of the second president consider him a political prisoner.
The criminal prosecution of the second president of the republic has made Armenian-Russian relations tense.
4. Charles Aznavour to be represented by his son in Armenia
“In France, poets never die,” said French President Emmanuel Macron at a farewell ceremony for French singer of Armenian origin Charles Aznavour.
In Armenia, many have perceived the passing of their favorite singer as a personal tragedy.
However, having lost Charles Aznavour, a friend and benefactor, the people of Armenia found him again in his son: Nicolas Aznavour.
Very soon after the death of his father, Nicolas arrived in Yerevan. He heads the Aznavour Foundation and will continue his father’s work in educational, social and cultural projects.
In December, Nicolas and his wife visited the second largest city in Armenia, Gyumri, and donated apartments to families who lost their houses during the 1988 earthquake. Nicolas, who is a dual citizen of France and Armenia, participated in the early parliamentary elections. He recently announced that he intends to move to and settle in the homeland of his ancestors.
5. The Francophonie Summit in Yerevan
Charles Aznavour was also a central figure at the 17th Francophone Summit this year. He was going to be the “ambassador” of Armenia at this event. However, he managed to become the unifying symbol of the world of the Francophonie, without even being physically present, say summit participants.
The summit was the largest event ever held in Armenia in the period of independence. It was attended by delegations from more than 80 countries, 38 of them represented at the presidential or the prime ministerial level. Among them, in particular, were French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The summit was held under the slogan “Living Together”, and at the end of it a declaration with the same name was adopted. It enshrined the following principles: respecting solidarity, humanitarian values and diversity as the basis for peace and prosperity in the countries of the Francophonie.
The summit allowed for meetings between the new authorities of Armenia with the heads of France and Canada. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also noted the importance of establishing close ties with African states.
6. Revolutionary government receives majority in parliament
The last chord of the Velvet Revolution were the snap parliamentary elections held in December.
The ‘revolutionary’ government, from the first day of its formation, worked in conditions of sabotage, said Nikol Pashinyan before the elections.
The opposition force that formed after the revolution did not have a majority in parliament – rather, parliament was still dominated by the old guard. Given that Armenia is now a parliamentary republic, it was extremely important for the new government to have a majority in the National Assembly.
Nikol Pashinyan and his My Step bloc won more than 70% of the vote. They now have an absolute majority in parliament.
However, in the National Assembly, there will be no serious opposition. One of the two other forces that made it into the parliament – the Bright Armenia party – was an ally of Pashinyan’s in the previous convocation of parliament.
The Prosperous Armenia Party has never been perceived in the political arena as a serious opposition party.
One of the surprises of the election was that the former ruling Republican Party was unable to gain the necessary number of votes to get into parliament. However, representatives of the party said that despite the defeat, they would continue the struggle.
7. A small joy for football fans
The most important sporting event of the year was the 21st World Football Championship, which was held in Russia.
It was the first time that the golden cup of the FIFA World Cup was brought to Armenia. The cup was brought to Armenia by the former Real Madrid player Christian Carambo, who in 1998 became world champion while playing for France.
Since 2006, FIFA has been organizing a cup tour before each World Cup. The famous cup weighing 6.2 kg is put up on display in front of football fans in different countries. This year the cup visited 50 countries, and for 24 of them, this was a first appearance.
Countries that have never been able to participate in the world championships were able to feel the spirit of the football seasons thanks to the World Cup tour.
THREE GOOD NEWS STORIES to START the 2019 !!!
1) Between January 1 through December 25, 2018, 21,000 TWENTY-ONE THOUSAND more people have entered Armenia then people have left. This is a FIRST for a looooong time and demographically very significant. Hopefully the trend will continue in the coming years.
2) Armenia's Annual 2018 economic growth will be 5-5.5%.
AND
3)The Globe & Mail, Canada
Jan 4 2019
At 21, this aerospace engineering student, former refugee has created her first invention
LES PERREAUX
Shoushi Bakarian, an aerospace engineering student at Concordia University, poses for a photograph with a ventilation device that she redesigned for Cessna Aircraft, at Stratos Aviation in Montreal on Oct. 30, 2018. Bakarian arrived from Syria in 2016.
This is part of Stepping Up, a series introducing Canadians to their country’s new sources of inspiration and leadership.
The distance from Aleppo to the lab at Montreal’s Trudeau airport where a young engineer-in-training is perfecting her first invention is 8,580 kilometres, but Shoushi Bakarian’s trajectory might better be measured in light speed.
Three years ago, Ms. Bakarian was sitting in Lebanon, part of a family of four Syrian refugees facing an uncertain future with hope of making a new start in Canada. Fast-forward those 36 months: Ms. Bakarian is in her third year of aerospace engineering at Montreal’s Concordia University. She has learned her fourth language, French – in addition to English, Arabic and Armenian. She’s got two part-time jobs with promising prospects in her field: one in the parts department at Bombardier Aerospace and another at Stratos Aviation, a small aviation and flight simulation firm. There, she’s co-created her first invention in the lab she’s building. Oh, and she leads a Scout troop where she hopes to influence her young charges.
She’s 21. “I want to reach girls and tell them they don’t have to limit themselves to traditional jobs, like teachers. Especially for girls from my community, they have a very limited idea of what’s out there,” Ms. Bakarian says. “I want to become an example.”
On a recent late fall day, Ms. Bakarian tinkers with the tiny generator fan blades of her latest accomplishment: The Ventus, a 5-volt accessory charger for Cessna airplanes that runs off the aircraft’s air vents and as an added bonus cools the air by compressing it. The simple blue tube prototype seems likely to become a must-have accessory for pilots who rely on tablets and smartphones for aviation computation but fly aircraft that were mostly built long before the smartphone era.
“I like clean energy, solar power, wind power, so we developed it further to add on the charger idea,” she says. “I spent my summer designing, drawing and testing until it worked.”
Naor Cohen, the owner of Stratos Aviation, hired Ms. Bakarian within days of meeting her during an outreach program for women in aviation about a year ago. Ms. Bakarian started out as an instructor on the company’s flight simulators. One day he shared an idea he had to improve cooling small Cessna cabins by using a Venturi tube to compress and cool the air. He invited her to set up a lab with computers and 3-D printers and she ran with it.
“I guess she must sleep very little,” Mr. Cohen says. “We’ve never seen her as an employee, and more as a partner in the team. She’s free to come whenever stuff needs to be done. Right now, she’s concentrating mainly on the lab. We want to put that imagination and creativity to work more.”
Ms. Bakarian arrived in Canada on Christmas Eve, 2015, with her father, Antaranik, her mother, Ani, and her now-24-year-old sister, Meghri. The daughters had high school diplomas earned during the Syrian civil war with rockets flying overhead and bombs bursting not far from their Armenian school in Aleppo.
Small details come back to Ms. Bakarian as she remembers the time. “Our school was in the firing line, so we had to study in a kindergarten in these tiny little chairs,” she recalls. “I always make jokes about it, but it’s not funny.”
By 2015, the battle for Aleppo had settled into a stalemate and her family was stuck. “In Grade 10, the big bombs started, by Grade 11, we were without electricity or running water or internet. Some people started to leave but we didn’t know how to get out of Aleppo. We didn’t know who was on the road waiting to kidnap us. … Once the missiles started falling, we didn’t know where they were coming from or where they’d land.”
A turning point came when her mother needed surgery that had to be performed in Lebanon. The medical issue combined with mounting violence forced the family to make a move. They spent a year in Lebanon while she recovered. Her parents concluded the family would have limited education and work opportunities in that country. That’s when Canada opened the doors to Syrian refugees.
In those early Canadian winter days, the family enrolled in French classes while all four of them set about finding work. Ms. Bakarian got hired at McDonald’s, a job she kept as she enrolled at Concordia, which helped her family survive while her parents found work in the garment industry. It was a step down from her father’s previous job managing a tools warehouse. Meghri, meanwhile, is specializing in child studies at Concordia.
Ms. Bakarian is grateful for the sacrifices her parents made, but she made some, too. She was almost crushed by workload as a first-year university student who was working 30 hours a week at her fast food job. “I was physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted,” she says. “But now I’m making up for it. My family is okay now, and it’s easier.”
Arpi Hamalian, an education professor emerita at Concordia University, took the younger Bakarian women under her wing when they showed up at an orientation in early 2016. “They were looking a little lost,” Dr. Hamalian recalls now, but it didn’t take long for them to get on track. “Shoushi, well both girls really, know exactly who they are and where they are going. They are unbelievably talented, focused and team-oriented. There aren’t many like them.”
News.am, Armenia
Jan 5 2019
Anonymous publicizes documents on Integrity Initiative operations in Armenia
Hackers from the Anonymous group published a new batch of leaked documents on the activities of the UK state-funded Integrity Initiative project in Armenia, including a list of disloyal journalists, publications timetable, contacts’ list, and payment documents, RIA Novosti reported.
The group published documents and invoices, which it claims are the evidence showing that the Integrity Initiative project carries out analysis of the activities of the UK opposition Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn, as well as the RT broadcaster, with the use of UK taxpayers’ money.
The documents, particularly, concern the coverage of the Salisbury poisoning incident and the situation in the Middle East, namely in Syria. The UK Foreign Office has recognized the authenticity of the documents, which were released by Anonymous last year, concerning London’s interference in EU countries’ affairs and waging an information war against Russia.
The documents include reports on RT’s activities and invoices for writing them for Integrity Initiative.
The documents, revealed by Anonymous, include a timetable of activities of the Institute for Statecraft, which funds Integrity Initiative, for March-June 2016, including a list of media publications on Russia and its alleged negative role in the world. The batch also featured an article by a researcher, Eduard Abrahamyan, on the recent protests in Armenia, called “Moscow Worries Armenian ‘Velvet Revolution’ Could Lessen Its Leverage Over Yerevan.”
The hackers also published an invoice for the payment of 250 pounds (US$329) to this researcher, which reads that he has “briefed the audience about the ongoing dynamics of Armenia’s domestic and foreign policy.”
The Production Timetable of the Institute for Statecraft, published by the hackers, includes “eight complaints forwarded to [UK media watchdog] Ofcom on RT’s failure to ensure due impartiality with request to launch a formal investigation.”
One of the documents, released by Anonymous, is a report on the coverage of the recent protests in Armenia, showing that the Integrity Initiative’s staff emphasized Russia’s alleged negative role in them. Moreover, comments and examples of the publications include their criticism toward journalists who covered the protests from the pro-Russian point of view.
The hackers also leaked a list of “activists in Armenia that contribute Russian interests, propaganding and promoting Russia’s official posture and intensions, meantime positioning themselves as ‘analysts’, ‘experts’, ‘politics’.”
The hacktivist group published the first batch of documents on the activities of the Integrity Initiative project in November 2018. The hacktivist group described the program as a “large-scale information secret service” created by London to “counteract Russian propaganda.”
According to the hackers, the program of the Institute for Statecraft has not been renewed since 2017 while there was no information on its employees and contact details in the public domain. The source code of its online publications allows assuming that they have been issued automatically, according to the hackers.
Panorama, Armenia
Jan 4 2019
Cigarette production grows strongly in Armenia in eleven months
Armenia saw a strong growth in tobacco production in the first eleven months of 2018, the latest official statistics show.
The country produced a total of 27,686,900 units of cigarettes from January to November last year, up by 11.3% from the same period of 2017, when the output stood at 24,867,500 units, Panorama.am learnt from the Statistical Committee of Armenia.
The cigarette production share in process manufacturing now makes up 15.1% in Armenia due to the registered growth.
According to statistics, more than 50% of Armenian men and almost 4% of women above 16 years of age are smokers.
Sputnik News Service
December 30, 2018 Sunday 4:00 AM UTC
Russian, Armenian Troops to Hold 20 Joint Drills, Tournaments at Gyumri Base in 2019
ROSTOV-ON-DON, December 30 (Sputnik) - Russian troops stationed near Armenia’s second-largest city of Gyumri will take part next year in some 20 drills and competitions together with Armenian personnel, the Russian military said.
"Russian service members at the Southern Military District’s military base in Armenia will take part in over 20 joint exercises, competitions, championships and tournaments in 2019," the military district’s press office said.
The military base near Gyumri marked on Saturday 77 years since it was established during the Soviet times. Armenia's acting Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan said during the celebrations that Russian deployment there was in the strategic interest of both countries.
The Economist, UK
Jan 3 2018
The extraordinary life of Calouste Gulbenkian
War and ethnic hatred were a distraction from the real business of oil
Mr Five Per Cent. By Jonathan Conlin. Profile Books. 416 pages; £25.
The end of the Ottoman era is generally described in one of two ways. In the first, a moribund empire that had oppressed its Christian subjects began to annihilate them. In the other version, the Christians colluded with foreigners to dismember an Islamic realm in which they had lived quite safely. The life of Calouste Gulbenkian, a tycoon and philanthropist who helped to shape today’s oil industry, offers a nuanced third perspective.
An Armenian with deep roots in central Anatolia, Gulbenkian emerged from the heart of the Ottoman Christian world. As Jonathan Conlin shows in his meticulous biography, he epitomised one of the striking features of late Ottoman history: a final burst of economic expansion that was made possible by the capital and expertise of prominent Christians, from Greek bankers to globe-trotting Armenian traders. An easy interlocutor with European grandees, he also had an insider’s understanding of the region then called the Near East. His chameleonic empathy made him a superb broker of many-sided deals that seemed to satisfy all parties, including himself.
Gulbenkian was born in 1869 to a father with growing oil interests in the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, attending French lycées and King’s College London. After Ottoman Armenians had suffered a wave of killing, he returned to London in 1897; soon he was building connections in the world of finance. In 1907 he helped to bring together the two companies that formed Royal Dutch Shell.
But he plunged back into Ottoman affairs when a window opened to serve the empire. Right up to 1914, he advised the Young Turks who had seized the reins of Ottoman power as they pushed back against their European economic overlords, artfully playing one against another. Working closely with Cavid, the finance minister, Gulbenkian founded both a new National Bank of Turkey and the Turkish Petroleum Company (tpc), which had a careful balance of Western shareholders.
The window soon snapped shut. Starting in 1915, as this book somewhat laconically notes, “between a third and a half of the world’s Armenians died on forced marches,” from “exhaustion, starvation or disease” or by the bullets of Ottoman soldiers and their Kurdish accomplices. Although Gulbenkian drafted a will which provided for the relief of Armenian orphans, his people’s tragedy does not seem to have been a preoccupation at that time; instead he was busy managing a somewhat turbulent relationship with Henri Deterding, a fellow oil magnate. He might easily have played a part in lobbying for an Armenian homeland after the Ottoman defeat, but he kept aloof.
The first world war put an end to Turkish control over the oilfields of present-day Iraq, but not to the tpc. In 1928 the company—whose many shareholders included Gulbenkian himself—struck a deal to extract those deposits. His 5% stake made him fabulously wealthy, and a great collector of art at his Parisian residence, though Mr Conlin presents him as a man driven more by the thrill of commerce itself than by Mammon.
During the second world war Gulbenkian was an envoy of the Iranian government to the collaborationist French regime, and was duly proclaimed an enemy alien by Britain. But his establishment friends chimed in to see that he was forgiven after 1945, although he lived the rest of his life in Lisbon (where he endowed a well-known philanthropic foundation). It might almost be said that Gulbenkian treated outbreaks of ethnic hatred and war as a kind of nuisance to be pragmatically overcome while building commercial alliances and orchestrating oil supplies.
As well as compellingly tracing his professional dealings, Mr Conlin’s book evokes Gulbenkian’s dysfunctional family. Among the memorable revelations is that in middle age he was told by an Armenian doctor to have sex with multiple young women, advice that was followed and apparently tolerated by his long-suffering wife. Yet for all the rich detail, quite what he made of the violent collapse of the empire in which he was born remains something of a mystery.
This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "Fire sales"https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/01/05/the-extraordinary-life-of-calouste-gulbenkian
PanArmenian, Armenia
Jan 5 2019
6000 Ottoman-era photographs digitized by Getty Research Institute
Thousands of images from the Pierre de Gigord Collection are now accessible online, thanks to an undertaking by the Getty Research Institute.
In the 1980s the French collector Pierre de Gigord traveled to Turkey and collected thousands of Ottoman-era photographs in a variety of media and formats. The resulting Pierre de Gigord Collection is now housed in the Getty Research Institute, which recently digitized over 6,000 of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs, making them available to study and download for free online.
The collection features, among other things, pictures taken by Armenian photographers. Photographs of cities, markets, and sites of destruction are recorded along with encounters with government functionaries such as the minister of war, Enver Pasha, the highest-ranking perpetrator of the Armenian Genocide.
From albumen prints to lantern slides, glass negatives and albums, the collection documents landmark architecture, urban and natural landscapes,
archaeological sites of millennia-old civilizations, and the bustling life of the diverse people who lived over 100 years ago in the last decades of the waning Ottoman Empire.
The digitization project focused on photographs from the nineteenth century until World War I (Series I–VIII), resulting in 3,750 individual records of digital files. Research Institute photographers such as Lyndsey Godwin-Kresge took thousands of materials that are difficult to find, as they are preserved in the vaults with limited circulation, and transformed them into digital files.
Artist Hande Sever recently highlighted the central role Armenian photographers played in shaping Turkey’s national cultural history and collective memory. Sever notes how the archive offers visual records of an obliterated past, a world that disappeared due to ethnic conflict and cleansing.
RFE/RL Report
Pashinian Promises ‘Economic Revolution’ In 2019
January 04, 2019
In his first New Year’s Eve address to the nation, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian reaffirmed his pledges to carry out an “economic revolution” that would significantly improve the lives of ordinary Armenians.
“Our main task in 2019 is the economic revolution and making its results more tangible,” Pashinian said. “But next year will not be the climax of our victories, not because our flight will be low but because our national and state ambitions will be higher and higher.”
“This is the key point of the non-violent, velvet, popular revolution in Armenia,” he added in reference to the mass protests that toppled the country’s former government and brought him to power in May.
Pashinian repeatedly promised the “economic revolution” before and after the December 9 parliamentary elections which his My Step alliance won by a landslide. He said his government has already succeeded in practically eradicating corruption and breaking up economic monopolies that have long
hampered Armenia’s development.
Pashinian and the government have so far set few socioeconomic targets for the coming years. They are due to submit a five-year comprehensive policy program to the new Armenian parliament later this month or early next.
In its election campaign manifesto, My Step pledged to cut the official poverty rate in the country, which currently stands at around 30 percent, by at least
10 percentage points in the next five years. It did not forecast economic growth rates.
Former Prime Minister Karen Karapetian’s cabinet committed itself to achieving a slightly faster pace of poverty reduction. Its policy program approved by the
parliament in June 2017 said that the Armenian economy will grow at an average annual rate of around 5 percent for the next five years.
According to official statistics, economic growth in Armenia reached 7.5 percent in 2017. Economy Minister Tigran Khachatrian said in November that it
will slow down to between 5 and 6 percent in 2018.
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