Month: June 2022

Following E.U.-mediated talks in Brussels, Armenia and Azerbaijan announced the creation of a border commission to determine claims over the long-contested Nagorno-Karabakh region. For the last 30 years, Armenians have controlled this mountainous territory inside Azerbaijan, with skirmishes repeatedly breaking out between the two sides. The new commission has designated state officials from both Armenia and Azerbaijan – representing various ministries, state services, and executive positions – and executive representatives from the countries bordering Armenia to meet in order to make plans regarding the Armenia-Azerbaijan interstate border. The framework for the April 2022 peace agreement would give both sides mutual recognition of territorial integrity, making Karabakh an official part of Azerbaijan. However, this is an unacceptable concession for many Armenians, thousands of whom have erupted in protest.

Conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh has claimed around 30,000 lives in the past 31 years. After the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, Armenia launched an offensive against Azerbaijan, occupying the Karabakh region and settling nearly 150,000 people there. The ceasefire agreement struck in 1994 left Armenians occupying around 20% of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territories and did little to rehome the around 1 million internally displaced Azeri people.

Though violence remained low post-ceasefire, it flared up again into full-scale war in 2020 after Armenian forces shelled Azeri military positions and civilian settlements. In the ensuing six-week clash, over 6,000 people were killed and Azerbaijan reclaimed large swaths of territory, though Karabakh itself remained under Armenian control. A tri-lateral deal between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia ended the war after Russia deployed about 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the truce.

However, violations of the ceasefire have been reported since this deal was struck, with a notable uptick in incidents over the past year. Azerbaijan argues that the de facto Armenian leadership has illegal military forces in the region. Armenia asserts conversely that disarmament was not part of the 1994 ceasefire deal. In March, Azeri troops seized territory near the ethnically Armenian-populated village of Farukh, sparking concerns about a greater incoming offensive. Furthermore, Armenian officials have accused Azerbaijan of deliberately damaging a pipeline into their country’s enclave, leaving Armenians in Karabakh to endure nearly a month of extreme winter conditions without heating. Azerbaijan denies the allegations.

This precedent – Azerbaijan making consistent gains, while Armenians operate on their back foot – does not bode well for re-defining borders in Karabakh. Following the 1994 agreement, the international community noted Armenians’ distaste for having to relinquish territory which they view as ethnically, historically, and rightfully their own. “The reaction to this declaration of an end to the war in Armenia has been greeted with what appears to be absolute disgust and despair,” Robin Forestier-Walker, an Al Jazeera correspondent in neighbouring Georgia, said. “There is just a sense of disbelief that somehow this was the only option for Armenia, to effectively admit defeat, and to sign this agreement, with Azerbaijan, brokered by Russia, that brings this war to an end, but effectively allows Azerbaijan to claim almost complete victory.”

The protests against Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his insistence that the “international community calls on Armenia to scale down demands on Karabakh” suggest that Armenians will view ceding any additional territory as capitulation. Armenia’s National Security Service warns of a “real threat of mass unrest in the country.”

The E.U. has played a critical role in easing tensions between the two countries and must continue to do so. Efforts to de-escalate conflict, like re-launching a hotline between the two sides’ defense ministries or funding missions to clear landmines, will be essential to ensure that miscommunication does not cause accidental clashes and that any intentional aggression will be attributed and documented correctly.

Furthermore, the needs of ethnic Armenians in Karabakh must remain a key element of negotiations, regardless of Azeri military capabilities to re-take the area. During the active fighting in fall 2020, many people in ethnic Armenian communities were forced to flee their homes and interviewees reported extra-judicial executions by Azeri forces. Azeri people considering relocating to territory reclaimed by Azerbaijan have also expressed concerns over entering what has been an Armenian stronghold for decades. “I have huge security concerns when it comes to living close to Armenians,” one source told Amnesty International. “There is lots of trauma between our two nations. I know lots of people who were killed.”

An agreement which does not uphold the dignity and basic living conditions of all peoples living in the region will create refugee flows and suffering, and likely trigger further violent disputes. Even ignoring new refugee concerns should borders shift, Amnesty estimates that up to 100,000 displaced people still live in informal housing in Azerbaijan. The border commission should consider resolving these conditions essential to establishing a safe and secure border.

In addition to determining civilian safety, the commission must articulate a new vision for how to govern and enforce the decided-upon border. This will be difficult; authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh have laid out their unwillingness to allow for expanded Azeri control. “Any attempt to incorporate Artsakh [an Armenian name for the region] into Azerbaijan would lead to bloodshed and the destruction of Arsakh,” Davit Babayan, the de facto foreign minister for the region, said on April 14th. The territory’s parliament concurred, issuing a statement declaring, “Any change of Nagorno-Karabakh’s status is unacceptable.” One member went so far as to say that “even the threat of war can’t hold us back” from defending Arsakh’s autonomy, and a former official even suggested that he would prefer to join Russia rather than face “physical annihilation” should Azerbaijan gain ownership of the region.

Karabakh’s de facto president, Arayik Harutyunyan, offered a slightly more optimistic stance. “We understand that we have to coexist like neighbors [with Azerbaijan] but living under their control is impossible,” Harutyunyan said.

Given the extreme hostility from local governing forces and civilians, a plan for transitional governance must be discussed in order to mitigate violence during any shifts in regional power. This plan will be best formulated incorporating local opinion, so Azerbaijan must be convinced to let mediators visit the conflict zone and speak with key figures.

Russia’s role in this transition must also be navigated with care, as it remains the leading outside power in the conflict.

Ultimately, this border commission is a necessary first step in moving towards a durable peace within Karabakh, but simply articulating new borders will be insufficient to prevent further warfare. The resolution of border claims must be accompanied by clear agreements over how to counteract displacement, remedy pre-existing poor living conditions, and establish governance and military activity in the region. All of these components of peace will be supported by the full and dedicated engagement of the E.U., co-operation with Moscow, and a concerted effort to understand and incorporate local officials’ and citizens’ priorities. This well-established and complex conflict will not be ended simply or quickly, but investing in the upcoming border commission talks can lay the groundwork for a safer and more just Karabakh.

On June 18, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili paid a visit to northern Armenia’s spa town of Dilijan to meet with his Armenian counterpart Nikol Pashinyan.

The two Prime Ministers discussed bilateral relations and cooperation in the fields of trade, economy, transport, logistics, and culture, per the Georgian Government’s press release.

The parties also touched on the current situation and challenges facing the region.

The PMs also expressed readiness for future cooperation and the deepening of “friendly” relations.

New meets old as award-winning New York architect David Hotson reinterprets 1,400 year-old armenian prototype for the Saint Sarkis Church in Carrollton, Texas. The 2022 addition looks forward as well as backward, marrying ancient architectural and artistic traditions with contemporary digitally-driven design and fabricating technologies, evident more profoundly on the western side. In collaboration with Italian Architectural Surfaces manufacturer Fiandre, part of Iris Ceramica Group, a striking façade dissolves 1.5 million unique pixels each representing the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Architect David Hotson collaborates with Fiandre part of Iris Ceramica Group to memorialize the victims of the Armenian Genocide. Working with long-time collaborator Stepan Terzyan, Hotson modeled the design on the ancient church of Saint Hripsime (618 AD), which still stands near Armenia’s modern capital of Yerevan. Saint Sarkis was laid exactly fourteen centuries later in 2018, and its connection to the ancient prototype provides a link to Armenia’s legacy as the world’s first Christian nation.

It goes without saying that the most striking of these contemporary innovations is the west façade of the church, composed of interwoven botanical motifs drawn from Armenian art. As a visitor approaches, 1.5 million tiny pixels begin to dissolve. All were generated by a computer script that makes each one unique accurately representing the individuals who perished in the country’s genocide in 1915, including family members of the Saint Sarkis congregation as well. The individual icons spreading across the entire surface provides a visceral encounter with the scale of the historical atrocity, essentially serving as a subtle but powerful memorial.   

To implement the façade, David Hotson partnered closely with Fiandre. The manufacturing brand’s Design Your Slabs system allows exterior grade, UV-resistant custom printing at extremely fine resolution on large-format porcelain rain screen panel materials. The Italian-fabricated façade is the first use of this exterior grade high-resolution digital printing technology to optically engage the viewer in a series of visual scales nested inside each other. Graniti Vicentia Façades installed and utilized the proprietary ventilated system of Granitech – the division of Iris Ceramica Group dedicated to Ventilated Façade Systems. 

In addition to the memorial façade, Fiandre supplied the full range of porcelain interior and exterior floor, wall and soffit finishes used throughout the Saint Sarkis Campus. The solid gray mass of the church exterior, rendered in modern materials, references the monolithic sculptural character of ancient Armenian churches which were constructed entirely of stone. The juxtaposition of the monochrome architecture against the rich multicolored vegetation, envisioned and implemented by landscape designer Zepur Ohanian, recreates the powerful relationship between monolithic architecture and verdant landscape that is typical of the ancient churches and monastery complexes that still survive throughout the Armenian homeland.

project info:

name: Saint Sarkis Armenian Church

ceramics: Fiandre Architectural Surfaces + DYS (Iris Ceramica Group)/@fiandre_surfaces

architect: David Hotson /@davidhotson_architect

ventilated façade: Granitech /@granitech_official

installation: Graniti Vicentia Façade

location: Carrollton, Texas, USA

See photos at 

There has been no legislation passed for LGBTIQ rights in Armenia since leading trans activist Lilit Martirosyan’s historic speech to the National Assembly in 2019 – but, she argues, at least she has brought some visibility to the country’s transgender and gay communities.

“After my speech, Nikol Pashinyan’s government started to speak more about LGBTIQ issues,” said Martirosyan. “[Former] governments never spoke about LGBTIQ people.”

Martirosyan is the founder of the Right Side, a non-governmental transgender and sex workers’ rights group in Yerevan. On 5 April 2019, she became the first out trans woman to speak in the Armenian parliament, calling for for an end to violence and discrimination towards trans people.

In response, she was met with online death threats, doxxing, and calls by parliamentarians to have her burned alive. When Martirosyan tried to report the threats to the police, they laughed at her, she said. Most health centres also turned her away when she sought treatment for the panic attacks she’d developed.

“After my speech at the National Assembly, everybody started recognising my face,” Martirosyan told openDemocracy in a video call from her apartment in Yerevan. “I started receiving hate messages not only on my social media platforms, but on the streets, in shops, and other places.”

Nowadays, to avoid public harassment, she wears a mask whenever she steps foot outside her home, even though COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted in Yerevan.

Though awareness about transgender people in Armenia has increased thanks to her speech, living openly as a trans activist remains extremely hard in this conservative country. Nevertheless, Martirosyan refuses to leave.

“Of course, I can take my passport and go to different European countries or to the US, but my community is here,” she said. “Transgender people, especially transgender women, are in a bad situation here.”

Martirosyan stresses the urgent need for a hate crime law, legal gender recognition and access to trans health care in Armenia.

There is no legal definition of ‘hate crime’ in Armenian law. As a result, law enforcement agencies don’t collect data about such crimes. Out of 113 incidents of harassment against LGBTIQ people in the last two years, only 27 cases were reported to the police, but none of them was considered a hate crime, according to a survey by the Right Side.

Acknowledging the potential for human rights violations, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Equality and Non-Discrimination last year recommended that Armenia adopt effective legislation and “policies to strengthen action against discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender _expression_ and sexual characteristics”.

The lack of protection against discrimination and harassment in the workplace makes earning a living difficult for transgender people in the country. Many, Martirosyan included, get into sex work to provide an income.

“I have a lot of transgender friends doing sex work,” she explained. She provides psychological and legal support for sex workers at the Right Side. “[Clients] say: ‘We’re tired of it, but we need money for the apartment because we don’t have any support from the government.’”

Martirosyan is also taking a case to the European Court of Human Rights in which an Armenian trans man’s application to correct his gender marker on his birth certificate from ‘female’ to ‘male’ was denied by Armenian courts. Currently, the Ministry of Justice requires paperwork proving a trans person’s sex-reassignment surgery – a medical intervention that’s outlawed in Armenia and costly to do abroad, and which not everyone wants to go through.

“It’s a big problem, because there are transgender people who don’t want sex reassignment surgery,” Martirosyan explained. She was the first trans woman in Armenia to legally change her name on her passport in 2015. She changed the gender marker to ‘F’ in 2021.

Access to hormone treatment is also a problem in the country. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some Russian and Ukrainian trans refugees who fled to Yerevan sought support from the Right Side. Martirosyan regrets that she couldn’t direct them to gender-affirming healthcare, including access to hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

In January 2021, the Right Side provided at least 18 trans people with free video consultations with a Ukrainian endocrinologist and hormone therapy. However, Martirosyan reported that the pilot project came to a halt shortly after funding by the European Union and other organisations ran out.

On 7 June, the Right Side filed a complaint with the Human Rights Defender’s Office and the Commission on TV and Radio of Armenia to remove a television show, which it said “intensifies public hatred towards transgender people”.

In the third episode of the series, “Hatucum. Korupcia 2”, (“Corruption 2. Retribution”) a police chief calls trans people derogatory slurs such as “dregs”, saying they deserved to be “thrown in jail” and “beaten”, according to the statement by the Right Side.

But there is a wider political context. The series is broadcast by Yerkir Media, a television station affiliated with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). Opposition-led protests by the ARF and two parties of former presidents Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan have been taking place in Yerevan.

Demonstrators have been calling on Pashinyan to step down over his handling of the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, his ongoing peace negotiations with Azerbaijan and opening the border with Turkey.

Martirosyan is wary of the unrest. “Right now it’s very dangerous because the [former] government is using LGBTIQ topics against Nikol Pashinyan’s government,” she said.

During the snap parliamentary elections in June 2021, one opposition MP told citizens not to participate in a rally organised by Pashinyan, saying doing so meant opposing the army and the church, and “supporting the LGBT community and traitors”, according to a report by Pink Armenia, an LGBTIQ group in Yerevan.

For Martirosyan, the hardest part of her job as an activist is raising awareness and changing societal attitudes about trans people in Armenia.

Her activism was rewarded in The Netherlands last year by the Red Umbrella Fund, a global fund for sex workers, and by the Human Rights Tulip, with a prize of 100,000 euros. Martirosyan says she used the money to buy bigger office space for the Right Side in Yerevan.

“Maybe after ten or more years things will change,” she said. “We will continue to work even though it’s dangerous for us.”

PATRA – A trilateral meeting of Greece, Cyprus and Armenia on diaspora issues will be convened in Patras on Friday, , according to an announcement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Greek side will be represented by Deputy Foreign Ministry Andreas Katsaniotis, the Cypriot side will be represented by Presidential Commissioner for Humanitarian Issues and Overseas Cypriots Fotis Fotiou, and the Armenian side by High Commissioner for Diaspora Affairs Zareh Sinanyan.

After the meeting, a Memorandum of Understanding will be signed and statements to the press will follow.