Month: July 2022

The FIDE July ratings of top 100 players feature three players of the Armenian chess team.

In particular, Gabriel Sargissian sits 37th, Haik Martirosyan comes 73rd and Shant Sargsyan is placed at 87th.

Magnus Carlsen leads the world rankings, followed by Ding Liren, Alireza Firouzja and Fabiano Caruana.

Levon Aronian, who is now listed as a US player, is ranked 5th on the list.

The Armenian opposition will hold its next rally in Yerevan on July 8, ARF Armenia chair and opposition leader Ishkhan Saghatelyan said, addressing protesters in central France Square on Friday evening.

In advance of the rally, a march is scheduled for July 5 marked as Constitution Day in Armenia.

Saghatelyan reiterated the opposition movement aimed at toppling PM Nikol Pashinyan “is not dying down”.

“We are going to give fresh impetus to the movement. We are doing a great deal of work, the results of which will be visible soon. The outcome of this struggle is important for us,” the leader said.

Also, he denounced the authorities for military call-up of several dozen opposition activists being held in custody, including 2020 war participant Taron Manukyan.

Saghatelyan says the move indicates that the Armenian leadership is “terrified” by the opposition movement.

No matter how much Nikol Pashinyan’s teammates claim that the former authorities handed over Artsakh’s territories and “slipped it into this poor man’s pocket”, they deny it with their own statements and deeds.

An ardent love for the Turks, a long-cherished dream to make our roads serve Turkey a little bit… persistent efforts to that end and a confession that whether the incompetent commander had gone to war with Azerbaijan or not, he would have lost it anyway. Simply. this is how he lost, leaving 5,000 victims, 10,000 disabled, 25 percent of Artsakh, tattered and weak borders of Armenia, incompetent foreign policy and spineless image to us.

I’m not going to list them all, since only a weak-minded man would not realize that is happening.

And the current government has done and continues to do everything possible to make society worse than itself and thus worthy of it.

And the fact that in no way, not through the Constitutional Court, the National Assembly, by shaming or invoking their conscience… is it possible to oust the current regime, the former authorities are to blame for. The latter’s fault lies in the fact that they created or made possible such a system of government, which is in no way under the control of society.

The most trivial thing is the parliament where the ruling majority has a say and government controlled by the majority. This is what the RPA (former ruling Republican Party of Armenia) put into Pashinyan’s pocket as a gift. The rest is a consequence of that system.

By A. Voskanyan

Lawyers of arrested opposition activist Avetik Chalabyan have sounded the alarm on another violation in their client’s case concerning the assignment of an appeal against his arrest.

The defense appealed against the decision of a Yerevan first instance court to reject a request for Chalabyan’s release to a higher court. The appeal was first automatically assigned to a judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals, but then “manually” passed to another judge, the legal team quoted lawyer Varazdat Harutyunyan as saying on social media.

According to the lawyer, on Friday the Court of Appeals said that judge Arshak Vardanyan had been appointed to the case, but today it turned out that the case had been unlawfully passed to lawyer Tigran Simonyan, who has the lowest rating on HelpCourt, a review site for judges, the legal team said in a statement.

Chalabyan was arrested on May 12 for allegedly trying to pay students of the Armenian National Agrarian University to participate in anti-government protests in Yerevan. He has denied the charges as politically motivated.

Chalabyan is a co-founder of Arar Foundation, a charity supporting the Armenian army as well as border villages in Armenia and Artsakh.

Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) Government Affairs Director Tereza Yerimyan shared findings from her recent, three-person ANCA fact-finding mission to Artsakh in testimony submitted this week to the U.S. Senate panel drafting the FY23 foreign aid bill, ANCA reports.

Yerimyan underscored the longstanding calls for to end all U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan and the delivery of an urgently needed $50 million aid package to Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh).

“Having recently returned from a fact-finding mission in Artsakh, I can bear witness to the devastating humanitarian impact of Azerbaijan’s aggression against Artsakh’s civilian population,” stated Yerimyan. “As many as 100,000 Armenians were displaced. Many schools and hospitals, destroyed during the war, remain in ruins. Countless homes remain uninhabitable. The maternity ward of the state hospital has been rendered completely unusable. In addition to losing at least 70% of their indigenous lands, the Armenians of Artsakh now live upon a landscape littered with landmines and, especially, unexploded ordinance, posing a threat to the daily lives of children and families.”

Yerimyan continued, “Azerbaijan, for its part, continues to illegally hold and abuse Armenian prisoners of war, in contravention of the ceasefire agreement and Baku’s own commitments under international law. During our recent ANCA visit to Artsakh we interviewed a repatriated POW – an 80-year-old female civilian who was captured in her village home, witnessed the beating of her husband, and was tortured herself.”

Yerimyan made the case that Congress should hold the Aliyev regime accountable for the ethnic-cleansing of Artsakh and Baku’s ongoing occupation of sovereign Armenian territory by cutting off all U.S. military aid to its armed forces. She also pressed for a long-term developmental investment in Artsakh, to help its families “rebuild their lives and resettle in safety upon their indigenous Armenian homeland.”

Speaking to the need for increased aid to Armenia, Yerimyan prioritized U.S. aid programs aimed at materially strengthening Armenia’s security and sovereignty in the face of escalating Turkish and Azerbaijani threats.

In May, Yerimyan, ANCA IT Director Nerses Semerjian, and Programs Director Alex Manoukian were joined by ANC International’s Gevorg Ghukasyan in a week-long fact-finding mission to Artsakh.  While there, they worked closely with the ANC of Artsakh, which was launched in September 2021, to focus on protecting the rights of Artsakh’s citizens, securing international recognition of the Artsakh Republic, and restoring Artsakh’s territorial integrity.

The ANCA team discussed Artsakh’s geopolitical challenges with Foreign Minister David Babayan and learned new details about the plight of the 100,000 Armenian refugees forced from their ancestral homes during the 2020 war from Artsakh Republic Minister of Social Development and Migration Armine Petrosyan. Artsakh Human Rights Ombudsman Gegham Stepanyan discussed the effects of Azerbaijan’s ongoing attacks on border villages and the water and gas challenges facing the Artsakh population.

During meetings with Vardan Tadevosyan, the founder and director of the Lady Cox Rehabilitation Center, the ANCA team learned more about the life-changing assistance the center provides for soldiers and civilians injured during the 2020 Artsakh war, while working with children and adults with physical and mental disabilities. The ANCA team also met with representatives of The HALO Trust, whose demining efforts have saved countless lives in Artsakh for over two decades, in part through ANCA-supported U.S. assistance.