Month: March 2023

Artsakh’s Human Rights Defender Gegham Stepanyan on Tuesday issued a statement commemorating the 35th anniversary of the Sumgait pogrom. His full statement is provided below.

"On February 27-29, 1988, in the city of Sumgait, Soviet Azerbaijan, under the coordination of the authorities and the negligence of the law-enforcement bodies a mass massacre of the Armenian population was carried out.

What happened in Sumgait should make any impartial observer believe that it was a systematic, directed, and organized crime aimed at the partial or total destruction of a specific ethnic group – the Armenians, which has a clear definition under international law: Genocide.

The Sumgait crime originated the ethnic cleansing and mass pogroms of the Armenians in other communities of Soviet Azerbaijan – Baku, Kirovabad-Gandzak, Shamakhi, Shamkhor, Mingechaur, and elsewhere, in which hundreds of Armenians became victims and hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly displaced from their homes.

The genocidal actions initiated by Azerbaijan were aimed at suppressing the realization of the inalienable right of Artsakh people to live in their Homeland and determine their identity and the civilized struggle that began for it.

The Azerbaijani leadership responded to this simple and understandable aspiration of the Armenian people for the realization of these universal rights with the policy of collective punishment, carrying out multiple crimes against humanity.

After Sumgait, manifestations of ethnic hatred and discrimination were not only unpunished but also became a state-encouraged policy with which the Azerbaijani authorities continue to poison their own society. The apparent justification of the violence and the lack of responsibility became a basis for the chain of crimes of the Azerbaijani authorities against ethnic Armenians, such as the massacres of the civilian population of Maragha and other communities during the Artsakh Liberation War, the brutal murder of an Armenian officer Gurgen Margaryan, as well as the April 2016 and the 44-day wars of and the many war crimes.

The criminal activities carried out regularly after the establishment of the ceasefire and the illegal blockade of Artsakh for 79 days now are the clearest proof that the impunity of gross violations of human rights gives a green light to the aggressor, pushing him to commit new crimes. In order to ensure accountability and justice, it is urgent for the international community to address a legal and political assessment of the criminal behavior of the Azerbaijani autocratic authorities and to take practical steps to curb it.

It is in such conditions that the community of states guided by the rule of law must prove its commitment to human rights to ensure that new crimes against humanity and genocides do not occur due to indifference and silence tantamount to complicity."

Armenia has become a “tool” against the regional countries due to the polices of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s administration, political analyst Alen Ghevondyan claims.

“The outlook for the future gives reason for worst predictions, because Armenia will be divided between the neighboring countries both politically (zones of influence) and, perhaps, territorially conditioned by their national security interests,” he wrote on Facebook on Monday.

"The West will incite provocations, and naturally, having failed, it will step aside, after which, according to the Armenian political tradition, they will start cursing their fate, forgetting about rational thinking.

“I assume that some parts of Armenia will be under joint administration. Moreover, at least one more foreign military contingent will be deployed to Armenia.

“When Armenia’s current prime minister invites the Western powers to Armenian territory to continue the confrontation with Russia on its soil, as a result of which nothing will remain of Armenia, he does not say that, in addition to confrontation with Russia, he provides the country’s territory for a possible operation against Iran,” the expert stated.

The Lachin corridor should operate in conformity with the trilateral statement of the Russian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani leaders dated November 9, 2020, which has no provisions on any checkpoints, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday after talks with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov, TASS reported.

"The regime of its [the Lachin corridor] operation should be fully in in line with the first trilateral statement dated November 9-10, 2020, which means that free movement for solely civilians and humanitarian cargoes must be ensured. This is what we want to achieve, first of all with the help of the Russian peacekeeping contingent. It doesn’t envisage the establishment of any checkpoints," he said.

According to the Russian top diplomat, it is possible to "remove suspicions" about the use of the corridor "by technical means." "We touched that upon today. Technical details are of secondary importance," he added.

Azerbaijan continues doing everything it can to extort the maximum concessions from Armenia and Artsakh, opposition MP Tigran Abrahamyan claims.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Abrahamyan, the secretary of the Pativ Unem faction, underscored the international efforts to suppress Azerbaijan's actions proved inefficient during the 2020 war in Artsakh as well as the three subsequent Azerbaijani attacks against Armenia’s sovereign territory.

"Thus, regardless of what the Armenian and Artsakh authorities say, Azerbaijan's intentions, which do not rule out the resolution of its problems through the use of force, will remain unchanged," the deputy stated.

Abrahamyan also noted that the Armenian authorities had already unveiled their main approaches to the Artsakh issue.

"The publicly expressed approaches are enough to suggest that the processes focus on concessions regarding the Artsakh people’s right to self-determination and a settlement in line with the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan,” the MP charged.

Today, February 28, marks the 143rd birth anniversary of prominent Soviet Armenian painter Martiros Saryan.

As a matter of tradition, intellectuals and employees of the Martiros Saryan House-Museum laid flowers at the monument to the great landscape artist in a park named after him in central Yerevan. Then they went to the Komitas Pantheon to lay flowers at Saryan's tomb.

Speaking to Panorama.am, Saryan's granddaughter, art critic and museum director Ruzan Saryan quoted Armenian artist Grigor Khanjyan as saying: "There were times we used to say, ‘let's go to Yerevan, Armenia to see Saryan’, then it was like, ‘let's go to see Saryan's Armenia’.”

"He left us a legacy of Sarian's Armenia, because the perception of our country has completely changed. Before Saryan, Armenia was portrayed in the arts as gray and colorless. Saryan really made a revolution, showing how beautiful our nature is, how colorful, rich and diverse it is, what a gifted and talented people live on the slopes of Aragats, struggling and creating," Ruzan Saryan said.

She stressed Armenians are lucky to have had Saryan, Hovhannes Tamanyan, Alexander Spendiaryan, Romanos Melikyan, Avetik Isahakyan, Yeghishe Charents and a whole galaxy of brilliant intellectuals.

"We inherited from them today’s Yerevan. They took a heroic step; they gave up a life of comfort – they were people who had already made major achievements – and came to Armenia to pay their debt to their country and people. It's a pity that our compatriots are now leaving Armenia. We should stick to our roots and culture and finally learn to appreciate ourselves," she added.

An exhibition will launch at Saryan Museum on Wednesday, showcasing posters from the most important exhibitions organized by the museum in the past 55 years as well as books published over the last ten years.

Ruzan Saryan stresses there is always something to tell about Martiros Saryan.

"It's a whole ocean with no visible shores. We still have so much to do. In seven years we will be celebrating Saryan's 150th birth anniversary. I hope that the anniversary will also be marked by UNESCO with beautiful exhibitions in famous European capitals. If we do not do this, no one will do it for us. We must learn to present our culture to the world,” the art critic stressed.

“We have seven years to publish plenty of materials, complete the publication of his letters and print albums of unknown or little-known paintings by Saryan. There is a big job ahead and we should do it together," she added.

Saryan also urged officials to help popularize the legacies of great artists.