Author: Antonian Lara

Russia calls on Armenian politicians to “search reasonable compromise”

Antonian Lara
MediaMax, Armenia
April 2 2021

Yerevan /Mediamax/. Deputy FM of Russia Andrey Rudenko has called on Armenia’s political forces to “search reasonable compromise”.

“We consider the processes in the domestic political field of the republic to be the domestic issue of a sovereign state. We call on all political forces of the republic to exercise restraint, search reasonable compromise for uniting Armenian society. We hope that during the pre-election period, everything will pass peacefully and in compliance with the constitution and will serve as the starting point for reaching long-term stability in Armenia,” Rudenko said in the interview to “Novoye Vremya” newspaper, published on the Russian MFA’s website.

According to the diplomat, Russia disagrees that the bilateral relations have lost their typical trust, dynamic and depth.

“Our bilateral relations, traditionally based on fraternity, friendship, and mutual trust, are developing dynamically, at various levels and in various vectors, regardless of any given external or domestic situation,” added Rudenko.

Swiss MPs urge government to put pressure on Turkey, highlight recruitment of mercenaries for Azerbaijan

Antonian Lara

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 13:29, 2 April, 2021

BERN, APRIL 2, ARMENPRESS. 33 MPs of the Federal Assembly of Switzerland have called for pressure on Turkey in a letter which highlights human rights violations committed by Turkey in its own country and in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Armenia, ANF reported.

The lawmakers urged the Swiss government to postpone ratification of the country’s new free trade agreement with Ankara until Turkey implements the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.

Mentioning Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “warlike” foreign policy, the Swiss lawmakers said in the letter that “[Erdogan] has encouraged Azerbaijan to resort to force to settle a territorial conflict with Armenia”. The MPs also noted that Turkey recruited and sent mercenaries to Azerbaijan in total violation of international law.

Turkey sent thousands of Syrian mercenaries to Azerbaijan to attack Artsakh in the 2020 war. Several of these mercenaries were detained by Armenian forces and testified how they were recruited in Turkey.

Editing by Stepan Kocharyan

11,000 Armenian soldiers were wounded and got sick during repulsion of Azerbaijani aggression

Antonian Lara
News.am, Armenia
14:14, 28.03.2021

The total number of wounded and sick in the power structures from the Armenian side during the repulsion of the aggression of Azerbaijan in September-November 2020 was 11,000, Colonel Gegham Pashikyan, deputy head of the military medical department of the Ministry of Defense noted on Sunday.

55% are minor injuries. 36% are moderately injured. 2% were extremely severely injured and 7% were seriously injured.

During the hostilities, 664 reanimation flights were made, 440 helicopter flights were evacuating the wounded and sick, and over 5,000 surgical interventions were performed, including more than 500 under general anesthesia.

Politik.am: George Soros, his money are behind case of imprisoning Armenia ex-President Kocharyan

Antonian Lara
News.am, Armenia
16:13, 27.03.2021

The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Armenia (RA) on Friday published the decision on whether Article 300.1 of the Criminal Code was in compliance with the Constitution of the country, Politik.am writes.

“The RA Constitutional Court, examining the applications, decided to recognize Article 300.1 of the RA Criminal Code as conflicting with Articles 78-79 of the Constitution and invalid. According to the 2nd part of the 170th [article of the] Constitution, this decision is final and enters into force from the moment of its publication,” President of the Constitutional Court, Arman Dilanyan, said presenting the decision.

As per Politik.am, the announcement of the decision, as expected, caused a great stir. It was first and foremost expected for tens of thousands of citizens who had fought for ex-President Robert Kocharyan’s freedom at various times and in various formats, and were confident that what happened in 2008 was not an overthrow of the constitutional order.

According to Politik.am, yesterday’s decision was a “cold shower” for the authorities, and in a sense it was unexpected that the pro-government MPs had prudence for the first time and did not try to target the Constitutional Court. In fact, they also admit that the truth will not be defeated and do not try to unnecessarily provoke the public.

As per Politik.am,  decision of the Constitutional Court also made it possible to find out who were actually behind the idea of keeping President Kocharyan in prison. Following the announcement of the decision, the “Sorosians” went on the Internet and their media platforms, who were accusing of failing to form a Constitutional Court that is obedient to the authorities, and which, according to them, enabled President Kocharyan to record another victory. What happened was an interesting lustration. According to Politik.am, in fact, the “Sorosians” admitted that they were the ones who ordered this case, and now they are unhappy that the order was not fully fulfilled. Some of them continue to show the authorities new ways which, according to them, should enable the president who liberated Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) to be imprisoned again.

As per Politik.am,  it is important for the grant-eaters receiving millions of dollars from the Soros Foundation—that is, the Open Society Foundations—that there will not even be a theoretical possibility to bring Artsakh back, whereas Kocharyan’s being in freedom may thwart their plan. And this attitude of theirs shows once again that American billionaire George Soros, who is close with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, was not spending millions of dollars in Armenia for humanitarian or human rights purposes. The money was being spent so that Armenia would have a government that would very easily hand over Artsakh to Azerbaijan, and when the handover process begins, the hands of statesmen and military personnel capable of preventing it would be tied. The March 1, 2008 case attests to this.

USCIRF highlights destruction of Armenian monuments in new report on Azerbaijan

Antonian Lara

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 13:23,

YEREVAN, MARCH 20, ARMENPRESS. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has released a country update on religious freedom conditions in Azerbaijan, recommending that the U.S. Department of State place Azerbaijan on its Special Watch List (SWL) for its ongoing and systematic religious freedom violations, Armenpress reports citing Massis Post.

The report evaluates trends relevant to freedom of religion or belief in Azerbaijan since USCIRF commissioners and staff traveled to the country in early 2020. According the report, religious freedom in Azerbaijan remains severely impeded by problematic legislation, particularly the country’s 2009 law “On Freedom of Religious Beliefs,” which the government has shown little interest in revising.

The country update also details the many obstacles posed by mandatory registration and other restrictions on religious communities, the continued imprisonment of religious activists, and recent violations committed in the context of the renewed conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.

The report notes that during the renewed conflict in Nagorno Karabakh in 2020, the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi was hit twice by Azerbaijani forces. In December, Human Rights Watch concluded that the attack was intentional, constituting a war crime that should be investigated and prosecuted.

“The announcement of a ceasefire in early November formalized the territorial gains Azerbaijan had made militarily, and it set a staggered timeline for the cession of additional territories to Azerbaijan—raising concerns about the protection of various churches, monasteries, cemeteries, and other religious and cultural sites scattered throughout the region,” the report reads.

President Aliyev reportedly gave assurances to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the country would protect Christian churches in these areas; however, some sites, such as a cemetery situated alongside an Armenian church in Hadrut, have already been vandalized. In late November, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization reiterated a call for the protection of heritage sites in the area, and it proposed dispatching a preliminary field mission to produce an inventory of such sites “as a prerequisite for effective protection of the region’s heritage.”

Armenian, Azerbaijani militaries hold exercises amid heightened tensions

Antonian Lara
EurasiaNet.org
Joshua Kucera Mar 19, 2021
As tensions around the exercises grew, Russian officials felt compelled to try to tamp down concerns. (Armenian Defense Ministry)

Armenia and Azerbaijan both conducted large-scale military exercises this week, on relatively short notice, amid heightened fears that war was again going to break out.

Azerbaijan’s exercises started on March 15, after having been announced just five days earlier. Armenia’s exercises, meanwhile, started the day after Azerbaijan’s and were announced just two days after Azerbaijan’s were announced, in apparent response.

The exercises themselves were standard issue. At least according to the official description, Azerbaijan’s were almost identical to drills that took place in May 2020, noted Nagorno Karabakh Observer, a blog and Twitter account that closely follows military developments in the region.

But the political context in which the exercises took place gave them an additional piquancy.

On March 5, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev complained that Armenia was dragging its feet on implementing one key part of the November 10 Armenia-Azerbaijan-Russia ceasefire statement: that Azerbaijan would be allowed to use some sort of transportation infrastructure in southern Armenia to connect the Azerbaijani mainland with its exclave of Nakhchivan. “Now Armenia wants to prevent the implementation of the Nakhchivan corridor,” he told a congress of his New Azerbaijan Party. “But they won’t succeed. We will force them.”

(Armenia has been objecting to Azerbaijan’s description of the as-yet-undetermined transportation arrangement as a “corridor,” as that phrase implies some kind of sovereignty, as in the “Lachin corridor” that connects Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, the territory at the heart of the conflict between the two sides. Armenia insists it will retain full sovereignty over the transportation routes. But more on that in a future report.)

Aliyev didn’t help matters by, a day earlier, reiterating his claim that Zangezur – the Azerbaijani name for the territory of current-day southern Armenia – was “historically” Azerbaijani. “The new transport corridor … will pass through the historical territory of Azerbaijan – Zangezur,” he told an economic conference.

Taken together, many Armenians interpreted all this as a threat by Aliyev to continue the fighting into Armenian territory, in the region that they call Syunik and which has been a site of particular tension ever since the fighting ended in November.

Rumors began to spread and were given credence by Armenian officials like Edmon Marukyan, the leader of one opposition faction in parliament, who called on Russia to set up a military base in the region to deter this sort of Azerbaijani/Turkey attack.

The Armenian National Committee of Armenia, a leading lobbying group for Armenian-Americans, warned President Joe Biden and other American officials that “Azerbaijan and Turkey are targeting Syunik, Armenia for their next attack.”

Rumors even spread of an alleged specific date on which the Azerbaijani/Turkish attack would begin: March 16, which fortunately came and went without any major clashes taking place.

As all this was happening, the Armenian government saw fit to reduce funding for the country’s human rights ombudsman, who had been using his post to act as a gadfly calling attention to the many confusing and intimidating developments that Syunik residents are facing now that they find themselves in new proximity to Azerbaijani forces. Many in Armenia saw a political motive to the downgrade of the ombudsman’s office and it even earned the Armenian government a rap on the hands from the U.S.-based human rights watchdog Freedom House.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijani officials stepped up their complaints about reports that Armenia was continuing to send its armed forces into Karabakh. Following a skirmish in December in the region of Hadrut, Azerbaijan captured 62 Armenian soldiers and continues to hold them. (It’s not clear whether Armenia is doing anything different from what it has done since the 1990s, which is to heavily support the de facto Karabakh armed forces and supplement them with its own military units. But following the war, Azerbaijan has become bolder in demanding that Yerevan cease its military support for the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.)

On March 13, Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov sent a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General calling attention to the issue, alleging that Armenia was sending troops to Karabakh secretly, in civilian clothing, in order to evade checks by Russian peacekeepers. “Such a misuse of the [Lachin] corridor for military purposes is a gross violation of the trilateral statement. It undermines peace efforts and demonstrates the true intention of Armenia,” Bayramov wrote.

As tensions around the exercises grew, Russian officials felt compelled to try to tamp down concerns. “According to the information we have, the exercises are planned ahead of time, aimed at improving military readiness of the armed forces and don’t constitute a risk for stability and security in the region,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters.

After all that, the exercises themselves were a bit of an anticlimax and proceeded without much drama.

Despite the large scale of the exercises – 10,000 troops on the Azerbaijani side and 7,500 on the Armenian side, along with hundreds of pieces of heavy armor and weaponry – they took place amid such secrecy that it wasn’t even clear where they were being conducted. The only media coverage of them was via official releases, photos, and videos from the respective ministries of defense.

Azerbaijani analysts argued that the exercises were aimed at preventing “sabotage groups” like the one Azerbaijanis captured in Hadrut. “These exercises are focused on anti-terror operations in the zone of precious military activity,” analyst Ilgar Velizade told the Russian newspaper Kommersant. “The logic is understandable – there is still a great probability of destabilization from groups that can infiltrate across lines and carry out partisan warfare.”

For Armenia, it appeared to be more about reassuring the public and beginning to restore morale in the military.

“What’s important is the mere fact that these are the first post-war exercises and that they are being conducted parallel to major exercises of the Azerbaijani military,” analyst David Artyunov told Kommersant. “This is a reaction to them and a signal to society that we shouldn’t be afraid of the Azerbaijani exercises. On top of that, the exercises could also be seen as a statement by the military leadership about the restoration of the army’s potential.”

Artyunov added, in another interview with Sputnik Armenia: “After the defeat, one possibility of an exercise of this scale, gathering dozens and hundreds of pieces of hardware is to signal a ‘restart’ of the Armenian army.”

Azerbaijan’s exercises ended on March 18. Armenia’s are scheduled to wrap up on March 20.

 

Joshua Kucera is the Turkey/Caucasus editor at Eurasianet, and author of The Bug Pit.

Yerevan mayor: Salaries of employees of kindergartens and sports schools raised by 20% over past 2 years

Antonian Lara
News.am, Armenia
20:45, 16.03.2021

During today’s session of the Council of Elders of Yerevan, Mayor Hayk Marutyan said the salaries of employees of kindergartens have been raised by at least 20% over the past two years, adding that the salaries of employees of sports schools have also been raised by 20%, if not more.

“It’s clear that it is necessary to aspire to pay higher salaries, but the progress is clearly noticeable,” Marutyan mentioned.

Turkish press: Turkey’s importance in its region ‘too obvious to overlook’

Antonian Lara
Ahmet Gencturk   |13.03.2021

ANKARA

Turkey’s place as a regional power cannot be denied, as its importance in the region’s stability and prosperity is “too obvious to overlook,” according to French historian and political scientist Maxime Gauin.

This was one of many observations proffered by Gauin, a senior researcher at the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM) in Turkey’s capital Ankara, in an interview with Anadolu Agency on Monday.

His research focuses on contemporary aspects of situation in Armenia and Turkish-French relations.

He completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Bordeaux and Paris before earning his doctorate in history from Ankara’s Middle East Technical University in 2020.

He has published articles in various academic journals, including the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, and the International Review of Turkish Studies.

He also contributes to various leading dailies such as Hurriyet Daily News, Daily Sabah, Cumhuriyet, Haaretz, and The Jerusalem Post.

Excerpts of Gauin’s conversation with Anadolu Agency published below give an insight into topics currently dominating international politics; from the recent coup attempt in Armenia to the continuing power struggle in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the challenges facing Turkey and France as they look to patch relations.

Anadolu Agency (AA): We have recently seen a coup attempt against Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Is this a case of public backlash or a power play that involves players such as the Armenian elite, diaspora, and Russia?

Maxime Gauin (MG): Pashinyan came to power in 2018 after two decades of what is seen as corrupt and failed governance by a pro-Russia elite that maintained intertwined relations with the Armenian diaspora, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation [Dashnaks], and the ethnic Armenian elites in Upper Karabakh.

A majority of Armenian people are frustrated and angry with Pashinyan because of the humiliating defeat to Azerbaijan in Upper Karabakh, which led to Armenia losing control of most of the territory it had occupied for nearly three decades.

However, a large segment of Armenian society still believes that Pashinyan is the best available option, a view also shared by Azerbaijan and its main ally, Turkey.

For Baku, the most important factor is that Pashinyan has seen the combined strength of Azerbaijan and Turkey, so he will not risk a new war.

As for Turkey, it believes that Armenia can be part of regional transportation and commercial networks if Pashinyan pursues a stable and peaceful foreign policy.

This has been stressed by the leaders of both Azerbaijan and Turkey, who say it could give Armenia, a country that has been mired in poverty and seen a constant exodus of people since independence, a shot at prosperity.

AA: Moving away from the Caucasus, we see that Greece is working with some non-regional actors to form an alliance that aims to isolate Turkey in the region. How feasible and sustainable could such efforts prove to be?

MG: I would like to be bluntly honest here.

Turkey and Israel are the two major powers of the Eastern Mediterranean; any country with concerns and interests in the region needs to consider this fact.

Syria is already in ruins and not likely to be what it used to be before the civil war. Lebanon is a failed state, and Egypt is heavily dependent on aid from the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

UAE, a non-regional power pretending to be a regional power, has had to stop its anti-Turkey campaign after realizing that it cannot be a match for Ankara.

So, who does that leave behind? Turkey and Israel.

You may be inclined to ask whether Greece could be seen as a significant player in the region.

And my answer, without needing to think much, would be a big no.

Greece is a country that is punching above its weight. It is a country without a real economy; it has no manufacturing capacity and no technology or defense industries. It remains at the mercy of European taxpayers who are already tired of it.

On the other hand, the Turkish economy, which is not seeing its best days at the moment, still produces and exports.

And not just textiles, garments, and raw materials; Turkey also has a promising IT and defense industry.

This is exactly why wiser and farseeing decision-makers in the West and Israel will always prefer Turkey over Greece.

The same goes for France, despite the significant problems that have blighted its relations with Turkey.

In my view, French support for Greece in the Eastern Mediterranean had mostly to do with selling Rafale aircraft and frigates.

Of course, the anti-Turkish campaign in the West funded and organized by the UAE has also played a role.

Similarly, Turkey’s other enemies, such as the Fethullah Terrorist Organization (FETO) and the Armenian diaspora, did their best to sabotage Turkish-French relations.

Still, though, French decision-makers and industrialists acknowledge Turkey’s value as a trade and strategic partner; this is clearly proven by the sheer volume of French investments in Turkey.

All in all, Turkey’s importance in the region’s stability and prosperity is too obvious to overlook.

AA: Staying on the topic of Turkish-French relations, could you share your perspective on how the two countries can improve bilateral ties?

MG: Turkey should make an effort to reach out to the French people.

The French public is exposed to a lot of anti-Turkish propaganda, and since they do not have any other connection to Turkey, they tend to believe what they hear.

I know Turkey has been fighting the Daesh/ISIS terror group. I know Turkey’s war against PKK/YPG terror group is a just cause and I also support Turkey’s stance on the Armenian issue.

But that is just me, a French scholar living in Turkey among Turkish people.

We cannot expect the same from the common person on the streets of France.

To this end, through its French service, Anadolu Agency is playing an important role in filling a significant gap.

I have seen and appreciate how your French service’s quality and content have improved just in the past year.

Armenpress: Sarkissian holds meeting with Pashinyan over political crisis

Antonian Lara

Sarkissian holds meeting with Pashinyan over political crisis

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 16:23,

YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. President Sarkissian held a meeting with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and discussed the situation in the country and the ways for surmounting the political crisis.

“In this context, early elections of parliament were discussed as a solution,” the presidency said in a news release.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan