14:35,
YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 17, ARMENPRESS. Armenia has signed the Second Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime on enhanced co-operation and disclosure of electronic evidence (CETS No. 224).
The document was signed by Armenia’s Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe Ambassador Arman Khachatryan, in the presence of Marija Pejčinović Burić, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe.
Ambassador Arman Khachatryan, the Permanent Representative of Armenia to the Council of Europe has signed, in the presence of Secretary General Marija Pejčinović Burić, the Second additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime on enhanced co-operation and disclosure of electronic evidence (CETS No. 224).
The protocol provides a legal basis for the disclosure of domain name registration information and for direct co-operation with service providers for subscriber information, effective means to obtain subscriber information and traffic data, immediate co-operation in emergencies, mutual assistance tools, as well as personal data protection safeguards.
Armenia has opened an investigation after the country's only synagogue was vandalised in an apparent arson attack on Wednesday, police said.
Video from social media showed an assailant pouring burning fuel on the door of the Mordechai Navi Jewish Centre, which serves the capital Yerevan's small Jewish community.
"On 15 November the police received a call that unknown persons wanted to set fire to the doors of the building," local police told AFP.
"An investigation has been launched," they added.
Rima Varzhapetyan, President of Armenia's Jewish community, said the synagogue had not been seriously damaged and that no-one was in the building at the time.
"We are horrified because Jews have never had any problems in Armenia," she told AFP.
Video of the incident was shared by news outlets from Armenia's arch foe Azerbaijan, which has fought multiple wars with its neighbour.
"We didn't know what had happened yet, and Azerbaijani channels were already circulating photos of the building," Varzhapetyan said.
"Obviously, there are some forces that work not against us Jews, but against Armenia. This is outrageous," Varzhapetyan said.
There has been a global rise in anti-Semitic incidents since the October 7 attacks by Hamas and Israel's subsequent war with the militant group in the Gaza strip.
The same synagogue had been attacked before, on October 3, local media reported.
https://www.barrons.com/news/armenian-police-open-probe-after-synagogue-vandalised-e4f53877
MOSCOW, 16 November (BelTA) – We have received no letter from Armenia stating its intention to quit the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Chief of the CSTO Joint Staff, Colonel General Anatoly Sidorov said at a briefing for the press in Moscow on 16 November, BelTA has learned.
"I think that the wise leaders of our states will find ways to help solve the difficulties that the Republic of Armenia is going through today. The organization has not received any official withdrawal letters from the Armenian leadership. Armenia has made no statements on its withdrawal from the Collective Security Treaty Organization," Anatoly Sidorov said.
"The CSTO has received no withdrawal documents from Armenia. I have not personally seen them," the CSTO Chief of the Joint Staff added.
"Armenia's participation in joint events in 2023 has been somewhat limited. It could be due to the dynamics in the country. We are not in a position to comment on such decisions. At the same time, Armenia participates in law-making activities, in the consideration of the organization's documents, and in the financing of permanent statutory bodies. The process is ongoing," he stressed.
"The CSTO has not lost interest in the Caucasus region. Neither is it going to leave Armenia. We are not even entertaining such ideas," the CSTO Chief of the Joint Staff said.
He also expressed confidence that the CSTO heads of state will take all necessary measures to stabilize the situation in the Caucasus.
https://eng.belta.by/politics/view/chief-of-staff-csto-has-received-no-withdrawal-letter-from-armenia-163362-2023/
A former advisor to the Armed Forces of Armenia filmed himself in an antisemitic rant, claiming that he will assist Hamas and Hezbollah in killing Jews, "I will scream to the whole world, about the just killing of Jews."
Political scientist Vladimir Poghosyan is known as an expert on national security in Armenia, he recently filmed himself with his cell phone, while making outrageous statements against Jews, in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre in Israel. The video was shared on social media and is currently in a number of Telegram groups.
MOSCOW, Nov 16 (Reuters) – Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said he intended to intensify political and diplomatic efforts to sign a peace treaty with Azerbaijan, Russia's TASS news agency reported on Thursday.
In late October, Pashinyan said he intended to conclude a peace treaty with Azerbaijan "in the coming months".
His comments came amid efforts to cement peace in the South Caucasus after Azerbaijan retook the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge
AKIPRESS.COM - Armenia is “not preparing the ground” for withdrawal from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), but is giving itself and the bloc time to think about further steps, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in Parliament. This is how he commented on the decision to skip the CSTO meeting, which is scheduled for November 23 in Minsk, News.am reports.
According to Pashinyan, Armenia is looking for other partners in the security field, but "it is not going to announce changes in strategic policy until it has declared or decided to leave the CSTO."
The Prime Minister said that the CSTO "has not responded properly to security challenges of Armenia": "De jure, the CSTO refuses to fix its area of responsibility in Armenia. This may mean that in these conditions, by remaining silent, we can share a worldview that could threaten the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Armenia," explained the Armenian prime minister.
Pashinyan said Yerevan did not refuse the CSTO mission, but demanded to clarify "what Armenia is in their minds." "The CSTO did not do this. We cannot accept such a mission, because it turns out that we legitimize the blurred idea of Armenia and thus legitimize Azerbaijan’s invasions," he added.
Pashinyan did not sign the joint declaration of the CSTO Collective Security Council in November 2022 due to the lack of a political assessment of "Azerbaijan’s aggression" against the sovereignty of Armenia. It was about clashes on the border of the two countries in 2021 and 2022, as a result of which Baku occupied about 140 square meters. km of Armenian territory, he said.
In May, Pashinyan admitted that Armenia could suspend its membership in the CSTO. He stated that, in Yerevan's opinion, the CSTO does not respond to requests to send a monitoring mission; thus, one gets the impression that the organization is “leaving Armenia.”
BAR HARBOR — About 125 years ago, the town of Bar Harbor became galvanized by the plight of the Armenian people, who were being slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands by the Ottoman Turks and forced from their historical homeland, between the Caucuses and the Caspian Sea.
Bar Harbor summer resident Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the declining Ottoman Empire, was the first to sound the alarm about this ongoing genocide. He eventually resigned in protest over what the Turks (eventually joined by the German army at the outset of World War I) were doing in Armenia and the lack of a cohesive, official American response.
In 1897, the Bar Harbor Record reported, “A most interesting lecture was given at the Congregational church by Rev. A. S. Abraham on the Armenian question. The church was filled, and the audience listened with rapt attention to the recitation of the wrongs done the race.”
By 1915, an estimated 1,500,000 Armenians, more than half of the total population living in their ancient homeland, had been massacred and thousands more displaced.
“I am firmly convinced that this is the greatest crime of the ages,” Morgenthau told Congress.
There are some who believe the reluctance of Europe and America to hold the Turks responsible for their war crimes against the Armenians emboldened Hitler to implement his extermination of the Jews. If the world could look the other away at the mass destruction of its oldest Christian nation (301 AD), would it come to the rescue of Europe’s Jewish population? The Holocaust may have been the terrible answer to that question.
If the world’s governments failed to act in time to prevent the Armenian disaster, the American people in big cities and small towns like Bar Harbor did pay attention. According to the Bar Harbor Times, in 1917, the Congregational church donated $91 to Armenian relief; the Sewing Circle voted to contribute its refreshment money, and in 1919, even the Sunday School pitched in $5 a month to support one of the thousands of children orphaned by the Turkish pogroms.
Led by Morgenthau and fellow Bar Harbor rusticator Cleveland Dodge, with the help of author Julia Ward Howe, Charlie Chaplin, child star Jackie Coogan and many others, Americans would raise $116 million in funds and supplies (worth more than $2 billion today).
A century of uneasy peace followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire, including two world wars and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. On the one hand this exacerbated the tension between the Islamic Turks and the Christian Armenians by creating the Turkic state of Azerbaijan on the large oil- and mineral-rich section of historic Armenian lands bordering the Caspian Sea, and on the other hand managed to prevent further mass slaughter (although not deadly pogroms) with its iron-fisted control of the region.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1991, Azerbaijan became increasingly emboldened to reclaim the region of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), an autonomous ethnic Armenian enclave within its borders. In 2020, when the world’s focus was on the COVID pandemic, Azerbaijan launched a major attack on Artsakh, creating a new humanitarian crisis as the ethnic Armenian population fled what they fear will be another genocide.
So once again Bar Harbor and area residents at large are being asked to help as they did a century ago when local church congregations and schoolchildren contributed to Armenian relief.
The Kotwica Band, led by David and Carolyn Rapkievian of Bar Harbor, will be giving a concert to benefit Armenian refugees on Sunday, Nov. 26, at 2 p.m. at St. Saviour’s Church in Bar Harbor (41 Mount Desert St.). The concert will feature music from Armenia and the neighboring countries — Poland, Macedonia, Ukraine, Romania and Greece — where many Armenians settled after the last diaspora.
For the Rapkievians it is personal. Carolyn’s Armenian relatives were among those who fell victim to the Ottoman slaughter, and the horrors they endured are part of her family lore. A photograph of her grandfather’s handsome family is not simply evidence of her Armenian heritage but a memento of loss.
“When the photo was taken, my grandfather Hovnan Okoomian had already been sent to America for safety,” Rapkievian said. “My great-grandparents who are pictured seated in the photo were beheaded in front of the children, and the youngest children were killed along with the eldest sister’s husband. The sisters were taken into a harem and raped.”
She says American missionaries eventually helped her surviving family members escape. U.S. missionaries also helped her then-infant maternal grandmother escape by pretending she was their own child and her mother their maid. Sadly, such horrors are no longer a part of the Armenian people’s past.
“Just this past September,” Rapkievian said, “120,000 people — nearly the entire population of Artsakh — fled across the border to Armenia in an arduous three-day exodus to escape attacks on their villages and towns. These refugees, who left behind their belongings, their livelihoods and their lands, are undernourished and have medical needs.
She said Armenia, now a small democratic republic wedged between modern-day Turkey and Azerbaijan, is a poor country and unable to support a refugee crisis of this magnitude.
Rapkievian hopes people will once again rally to support the Armenian people by attending the Nov. 26 concert.
“We hope they’ll enjoy our music, too,” she added with a smile, picking up her drum to resume the rehearsal.
Carolyn and her husband, David, play a variety of instruments themselves including fiddle, guitar, oud (a precursor of the lute), balalaika and drum; they have recruited button accordionist Kevin Stone of Waterville, bass player David Quinby of Sedgwick and three singers, Anne Tatgenhorst of Winterport, College of the Atlantic grad Eloise Shultz and Conners Emerson School eighth-grader Frances Stockman (whose aunt, the late Kirsten Stockman, co-founded with Tatgenhorst the Maine Women’s Balkan Choir).
Kotwica plans to perform 15 songs that speak of love, loss and yearning.
“Many of the songs have a dual meaning,” Rapkievian said. “For instance the first song, ‘Gorani,’ is Armenian and the words are about the loss of love. But it is also about the loss of a homeland.”
As they practice, one can hear that thread of longing, interwoven into often lilting tunes that beg to be danced to and most often are.
“At this Thanksgiving time we are especially thankful for our town’s support of the Armenian people — both in the past and present,” Rapkievien said. “Our songs and our music have survived, and we are thrilled to be able share them and our story with everyone.
“And, yes,” she added, “there will probably be dancing.”
https://www.ellsworthamerican.com/lifestyle/arts/music-with-meaning-bar-harbor-band-plays-for-armenian-refugee-relief/article_92f0bebc-84b9-11ee-b415-331c890ccccf.html
A synagogue in Yerevan, Armenia was set on fire on Wednesday evening in an antisemitic arson attack, the second incident targeting the city’s Jewish community since last month, according to several reports and video circulating on social media.
The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) claimed responsibility for attacking the Mordechai Navi Synagogue, the only Jewish place of worship operating in the country, Azerbaijani media and other sources reported.
Azerbaijani Ambassador to Germany Nasimi Aghayev was among those who shared footage of the synagogue attack on social media.
On Oct. 3, the synagogue was vandalized and targeted with a Molotov cocktail in an antisemitic act for which ASALA — a Marxist-Leninist group designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department in 1989 — also claimed responsibility.
The attackers issued a statement saying, “The Jews are the enemies of the Armenian nation, complicit in Turkish crimes and the regime of [Azerbaijan President Ilhan] Aliyev. The Jewish state provides weapons to Aliyev’s criminal regime, and Jews from America and Europe actively support him. Turkey, Aliyev’s regime, and the Jews are the sworn enemies of the Armenian state and people.”
The group added: “If Jewish rabbis in the United States and Europe continue to support Aliyev’s regime, we will continue to burn their synagogues in other countries. Every rabbi will be a target for us. No Israeli Jew will feel safe in these countries.”
Armenia and Azerbaijan share a border and have a long history of conflict. Israel and Azerbaijan have engaged in close cooperation, including weapons sales, in recent years.
Armenia is home to about 500-1,000 Jews, mostly of Ashkenazi origin, localized in in the capital of Yerevan, according to World Jewish Congress estimates.
After Wednesday’s incident, ASALA reportedly threatened to continue attacks against the Jewish community outside of Armenia. Israeli media outlets reported that the group issued a statement linking the latest arson to the war in Gaza, expressing “solidarity with the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements against Zionism.”
ASALA, arguably the best known of the Armenian militant groups formed during the last century, was active in the 1970s through the 1990s, but has been less visible since. The organization, which was responsible for several terrorist attacks and assassinations, was armed and trained by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). During the 1980s, ASALA terrorists trained with Palestinian factions in Lebanon, developing ties with the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a group within the PLO.
This week’s targeting of an Armenian synagogue came as countries around the world, especially in the US and Europe, have experienced a historic spike in antisemitic incidents following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
“Armenia’s only synagogue last night was burned down in an antisemitic attack,” tweeted the National Jewish Assembly in the UK. “Jews around the world are feeling less and less safe every day because of actions like this. We are seeing people be bystanders to antisemitic attacks.”
Wednesday night’s arson attack was reminiscent of a similar incident in Tunisia last month, when hundreds of Tunisians reportedly burnt the el-Hamma Synagogue in the Gabès Governorate.