Author: Ani Basmajian

Hurriyet, Turkey
Nov 2 2017
Turkey sees Nusra Front as main 'issue' in post-IS Syria
The al-Nusra terror group will be the main issue to deal with in Syria
in the post-Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (IS) period, Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said, stressing that targeting
al-Nusra constitutes the "real pillar" of the ongoing Turkish-Russian
operation in rebel-held Idlib.
"After Daesh [an Arabic acronym for Islamic State militant group, IS],
the real issue will be local terror organisations such as al-Nusra.
Some [local groups] will recede while others [IS] will go away
entirely. We want locals to return to their lands in Iraq and Syria.
We encourage moderate opposition groups, the Free Syrian Army [FSA],
to stake a claim on their lands," Erdogan told reporters while
returning from a trip to Azerbaijan late on 31 October.
"This is the fact lying behind the operations we are carrying out with
Russia," Erdogan said.
Ankara and Moscow are co-operating to monitor the ceasefire between
the Syrian regime and opposition groups in the Idlib province of Syria
as part of the Astana Process. Much of Idlib has been under the
control of al-Nusra-linked groups since July.
Recalling that IS had to remove its forces to Deir al-Zour, an
oil-rich region in southern Syria, after leaving Raqqa, Erdogan said
"Deir al-Zour must be cleared of Daesh."
"There are currently around 2,000 Daesh members in Iraq and it
controls only 10 percent of the territory. It is nearly finished and
is running away from there. We will see whether its members will
escape to Africa, the United States, or Europe," he added.
'Solidarity between Turkey and Russia'
As part of the deal in Astana, Turkey is monitoring the ceasefire
inside Idlib and Russia outside the province, and Erdogan said Turkey
is "in solidarity with Russia on Idlib."
"This will also cover Afrin province. Because Afrin could present
threats to us at any moment. Members of the separatist terror
organisation may try to reach the Mediterranean through the north by
occupying Idlib," he added, referring to the People's Protection Units
(YPG), which controls the Afrin canton along the Turkish border.
Turkey designates the YPG as a terror organisation that is the Syrian
branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
Turkey will "never allow the YPG to expand its influence in the
region," Erdogan vowed.
Recalling that Turkey has troops inside Syria even though it has not
been invited by the Syrian state, he noted that the Russians have five
bases in Syria while the U.S. has "five aerial and eight other bases"
there at present.
"I always tell this to those who ask why we are there: There are
terror organisations harassing us from [inside Syria]. We may stage
cross-border operations against them any moment. Manbij, for example,
is fully under the control [of the YPG]," he said.
Talks with Abadi
Erdogan also touched on his talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider
al-Abadi in Ankara last week, stressing that the fight against the PKK
was among the issues discussed.
"Armed action against the PKK by the Iraqi central government is out
of the question at the moment. Its priority is Daesh and it does not
want to engage in such a thing before Daesh is fully cleared. But they
have assured us that they will do whatever is necessary to disarm the
separatist terror organisation," he said, adding that Turkey "will not
have to wait for the central Iraqi government in operations against
the PKK.
"We can launch cross border operations if anything negative happens
toward our country, or in the event of a provocation. I have also
explained what needs to be done so that we do not feel obliged to
act," he said.
With the handover of the Ibrahim Khalil border gate to the control of
the Baghdad government from the KRG, Turkey will be able to deliver
humanitarian aid to northern Iraq, Erdogan said, hinting that the aid
may also be sent through Iran, which currently has five border gates
with Iraq.
"Both Iran and Iraq have told us this is possible. We are leaning
toward delivering aid through the central government, since we don't
regard the KRG as our counterpart," he added.
On KRG President Masoud Barzani's recent decision to step down as
leader after the KRG independence attempt failed, Erdogan stressed the
importance of Iraq remaining a "federal entity."
"We think that such integration will benefit all Iraqi people. You see
the recent developments with Catalonia in Spain. Where did the person
who attempted to divide Spain flee? To Belgium," he said.
'Turkmens should return to Telafer'
President Erdogan also stressed the importance of seeing the return of
Iraqi Turkmens to Tel Afar, a northern Iraqi town that was liberated
from IS in early 2017.
"There are around 400,000 Turkmens in Tal Afar. Half of them are
Shiites, half of them Sunnis. Around 100,000 of them fled to Turkey
and the rest are in nearby regions. Our aim is to let them return to
their homes," he said.
Erdogan also addressed his talks with Azerbaijan President Ilham
Aliyev in Baku, noting that the two countries will co-commemorate the
centennial foundation of the Caucasus Islamic Army in 2018.
"Our Azerbaijani brothers wish to build a monument in Gallipoli, so we
have issued necessary instructions to our ministry for the allocation
of a proper site in Gallipoli. Necessary works are now underway," he
said.
Gallipoli on Turkey's northwestern coast was the scene of a major
battle between the Ottoman Empire and the British-led allied forces
during the First World War, which resulted in the defeat of the
latter. The site hosts a number of memorials and monuments in memory
of Turkish, British, French and Anzac soldiers who fought in the
Dardanelles in 1915 and 1916.
Meeting with Putin
The Turkish president said he also discussed the decades-old
Nagorno-Karabakh issue with Aliyev, pledging that Turkey will continue
to stand with Azerbaijan on this issue.
"I will discuss this issue directly with [Russian President Vladimir]
Putin either next week or the week after next. It seems a result on
this issue will be facilitated if Putin really engages with it," he
added.

ARMINFO News Agency, Armenia
 Saturday
Newly appointed French Ambassador to Armenia presented credentials to
RA President
Yerevan October 14
Naira Badalyan. On October 13, the new Ambassador of France to
Armenia, Jonathan Lacote, presented credentials to Armenian President
Serzh Sargsyan. The press service of the Armenian leader reports.
The President wished the diplomat success and expressed his hope that
the Ambassador will open a new page in Armenian-French relations with
his active work. The Armenian President and the French Ambassador
agreed that the privileged Armenian-French relations, developing in
ascending order, fully reflect the spirit of friendship between the
two peoples. Serzh Sargsyan considered symbolic the fact that the
newly appointed ambassador starts his mission in Armenia in the year
when Armenia and France celebrate the 25th anniversary of diplomatic
relations.
Stressing that there is a stable political dialogue between the two
countries, active high-level interaction and mutual visits, Serzh
Sargsyan stressed the importance of intensifying trade and economic
relations between Armenia and France. The President of Armenia
stressed the role of the interparliamentary partnership in
strengthening and deepening interstate relations, noting with
satisfaction that the Armenian and French parliamentarians cooperate
effectively not only in bilateral formats, but also within the
framework of international parliamentary organizations. The President
of the Republic attached importance to the activity of the friendship
group established in 2013 in the French Parliament with
Nagorno-Karabakh.
During the meeting, the sides touched upon the prospects for the
development of Armenia-EU relations, including the preparatory work
for the signing of the Agreement on Comprehensive and Enhanced
Partnership in the near future in Brussels. Serzh Sargsyan stressed
the importance and appreciated the active participation of France in
the negotiation process for the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict as a co-chairing country of the OSCE Minsk Group.
Touching upon cooperation in the humanitarian and cultural spheres,
the Armenian President and the French Ambassador highly assessed the
summit of the International Organization of Francophonie countries,
which will be held in Armenia in 2018.
Lacote replaced Jean-Francois Charpentier, who held this position
since 2014. Earlier, the 45-year-old Lacote was the adviser to the
French ambassador to the UK, he also worked in the French Foreign
Ministry, in the bureau for Europe, at the French embassies in
Montenegro and Germany. Lacote speaks English, German, Russian,
Spanish, Estonian, Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian.

USC INSTITUTE OF ARMENIAN STUDIES
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California, USA
Contact: Syuzanna Petrosyan, Associate Director
[email protected]
213.821.3943    
“Undeliverable: Postcards and Photos of Lives Interrupted" Opens at USC
Peer into lost worlds represented by vintage Armenian postcards in 3D dioramas, 
juxtaposed with full-scale murals of contemporary images
THE USC INSTITUTE OF ARMENIAN STUDIES presents a one-of-a-kind installation of 
extremely rare postcards from Anatolia, displayed alongside scenes from many of 
the same locations captured a century later. 
“Undeliverable: Postcards and Photos of Lives Interrupted," which runs August 
28 through December 18 in USC’s Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library, revolves 
around 160 original printed sepia tones, some of which have never been 
exhibited before, hand-picked from the world’s largest collection of Ottoman 
postcards. Illustrating the everyday lives of Armenians in cities, towns and 
villages, these pictorial souvenirs would be banal had their subjects not been 
exterminated by near-total genocide. 
Collected over 32 years by Istanbul-based businessman Orlando Carlo Calumeno, 
the 80,000 unique postcards, all printed between 1895 and 1921, belong to a 
larger collection of books, furnishings and printed ephemera documenting 
quotidian life in multicultural, multilingual, turn-of-the century Anatolia. 
“The postcards are especially interesting artifacts to work with,” says 
exhibition co-curator Narineh Mirzaeian, a Los Angeles-based designer and 
architect. “They’re pre-genocide, but they foreshadow what is about to happen. 
Or they don’t foreshadow it, which feels even more stark.” 
As a counterpoint to the vintage postcards, the installation features Brazilian 
photographer Norair Chahinian’s visual explorations into his own Armenian 
roots. Drawn from two books of his photography, Armenia (2008) and The Power of 
Emptiness (2012), they include images captured using an antique camera owned by 
Chahinian’s grandfather, an Anatolian refugee who operated a photo studio in 
Aleppo, Syria, before joining the Armenian diaspora in São Paulo. 
Photography and photographic printing, notes the collector, Calumeno, were 
almost exclusively Armenian trades in Ottoman Turkey. Religious prohibitions 
against making graven images prevented Muslims from entering the profession 
until 1910, and it fell to Christians, particularly Armenians, to fill the 
vacuum.  
Postcards, he says, “were what the Internet is today”—an easy, low-cost way to 
preserve a travel memory or to keep in touch with loved ones. “In those days, 
people received hundreds of postcards from friends everywhere,” Calumeno says. 
“Most were thrown away.”
Some postcards included in the “Undeliverable” installation depict world 
heritage sites along the Silk Road. Others document ordinary village life and 
mundane urban structures—a new factory wing, school building or orphanage. 
Missionaries used these to support fund-raising efforts. 
Calumeno, who is Armenian on his mother’s side and Levantine-Italian on his 
father’s side, focuses his postcard collecting on Anatolia’s diverse minority 
communities: Assyrians, Jews, Greeks, Kurds and especially Armenians. “The 
greatness of Anatolia was that melting pot,” he says. “Now it has become a 
mono-cultural, mono-lingual environment.”
His favorite card—the first he ever purchased, at age 16—depicts Istanbul’s 
Hippodrome Square near Hagia Sophia, the cathedral-turned-mosque and a major 
tourist attraction. Curiously, on the back side, the sender had jotted down a 
home remedy for nursing mothers to prevent cracked nipples. The card is 
addressed, in swirling Armenian cursive, to the woman’s sister in Bursa. 
“These postcards are very important,” says Calumeno. “Each one is a gateway to 
connect with the past—a glorious past where everybody called each other ‘my 
brother, my sister.’ You see these naïve people, not knowing what is going to 
happen in the future. In these images, they live happily forever.”
“Undeliverable” is presented on two floors, in multiple parts, spanning the 
Doheny Library’s Treasure Room, Rotunda and Arts Corridor. 
Working closely with USC Institute of Armenian Studies director Salpi 
Ghazarian, 160 vintage postcards are displayed in vitrines on the ground level, 
alongside documentary-style black-and-white images taken by Chahinian in recent 
years.
But in the Treasure Room, the curator has taken an unconventional approach. 
Focusing on 10 of the most intriguing postcards, she has scanned, enlarged and 
optically separated the images, creating layered, three-dimensional dioramas. 
Standing at eye-level on tripods, each diorama box invites visitors to peer 
into a lost world through a time-bending tower viewer. On the surrounding walls 
and ceiling, Mirzaeian has splashed full-scale murals of Chahinian’s bleak 
architectural photography illustrating modern Anatolia’s abandoned spaces, 
including a dilapidated Armenian church dome looming overhead.   
The installation design invites visitors to navigate the curated scenes at two 
scales, says Ghazarian—zooming in to study nuances of daily life brought to 
life in the postcard dioramas, and zooming back out to see the blight left in 
the wake of genocide. 
“It’s this surreal emotional landscape where alienation meets nostalgia, 
what-if encounters why, and despair yields to an irrepressible urge to 
reconstruct and build upon the erased past,” she adds. 
Genocide exhibitions typically focus on victims, notes Mirzaeian. This 
installation focuses on places. 
“It’s a different approach to what was lost, and what has remained,” she says. 
“It goes beyond victimhood—all these feelings we slip into that are 
unproductive. It’s more about re-inhabiting these spaces through the persistent 
architectural details. Those imaginative realities are interesting because they 
beg a lot of productive questions. Anytime you can do that, it’s good.” 
“We’re very pleased to be able to present this immersive installation, in a 
timeless, three-dimensional space, here in the Library.  This is especially 
important because the library’s long hours (open ‘til 10 pm weeknights, ‘til 8 
pm Fridays and Sundays, and 5 pm Saturdays) will make it easy for anyone who 
wants to spend time in this lost world to attend. Admission, of course, is 
free,” said Ghazarian.
Related Events:
An opening reception on Thursday, September 21—coinciding with Armenia’s 
Independence Day—will bring together curator Narineh Mirzaeian, postcard 
collector Orlando Carlo Calumeno and São Paulo-based photographer Norair 
Chahinian. The event is open to the public, and will include short remarks by 
Ghazarian, Mirzaeian, Calumeno, Chahinian and USC Dean of Libraries Catherine 
Quinlan.
On Saturday, September 23, the institute hosts its annual day-long Innovate 
Armenia festival in Alumni Park. The “Undeliverable” installation ties into 
that event with a panel discussion in Bovard Auditorium featuring Mirzaeian, 
Calumeno and Chahinian, alongside historians. Moderated by Ghazarian, the 
panelists will probe major themes in contemporary post-genocide scholarship as 
it dovetails with artistic responses to atrocity.
About the Institute 
Established in 2005, the USC Institute of Armenian Studies supports 
multidisciplinary scholarship to re-define, explore and study the complex 
issues that make up the contemporary Armenian experience—from post-genocide to 
the developing Republic of Armenia to the evolving diaspora. The institute 
encourages research, publications and public service, and promotes links among 
the global academic and Armenian communities. 
For Information: 
USC Institute of Armenian Studies, 3518 Trousdale Parkway (VKC 351), Los 
Angeles, CA 90089-0043, tel. (213) 821-3943, email: [email protected]  
Doheny Library Hours:  
Monday through Thursday, 8 am-10 pm; Friday, 8 am-8 pm; Saturday, 9 am-5 pm; 
Sunday, 12 pm-8 pm. 
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