Author: Badalian Vardan

MY LITERARY PROFILE: A MEMOIR BY PILIBOSIAN, HELENE

Kirkus Reviews (Print)
January 8, 2015, Thursday

NONFICTION; Memoir

In this debut memoir, an Armenian-American woman details her family
background, health issues, and literary education and craft.Pilibosian
was born in 1933 to survivors of the Armenian genocide. Her memoir
leads off with “the background our lives were played against, the
Armenian lives of my parents before they had immigrated, and our
Armenian or American lives here.” She then largely shifts to her
saga of growing up in an Armenian-American community in Watertown,
Massachusetts.

Since she was shy and “lacked ambition to go to college though my
marks in school were very good,” Pilibosian went to secretarial
school but soon also took humanities courses through Harvard’s
Division of Continuing Education, ultimately earning a “bachelor
equivalent” degree. Early in adulthood, Pilibosian also experienced
depression that required psychotherapy and shock treatments. She
married an Armenian man, whom her parents recommended and who worked
as a typesetter, and she traveled abroad with him as part of trips
to visit his family in Lebanon. She gave birth to two children,
got editorial work at an Armenian-American newspaper and the Harvard
University Printing Office, and wrote poetry that got published. As a
young mother, she experienced cardiac arrest during routine surgery,
resulting in four days of lost consciousness. Later, in middle age,
while walking in a cemetery, she experienced a mystical lifting of
mood. Now in retirement, she and her husband run the small press
they founded, and her memoir concludes with a discussion of poetry
and other writing. Pilibosian sets out to cover a lot of ground in
this expansive memoir. Her overview of Armenian cultural history and
descriptions of literary studies hold some interest, though at times
they also sit rather awkwardly alongside the underlying drama of her
medical and mental health issues, which remain a bit mysterious.

Pilibosian clearly loves poetry, and her discussions in this area
represent some of the more heartfelt expressions in this book. Indeed,
there’s something rather haunting about this somewhat stilted memoir,
with Pilibosian acknowledging that only later in life did she learn the
value of humor, “because my upbringing had been humorless.”Ambitious
amalgam of ethnic and personal history.

Publication Date: 2010-06-01 Publisher: Ohan Press Stage: Indie ISBN:
978-1929966080 Price: $15.00 Author: Pilibosian, Helene

RUSSIAN SOLDIER SUSPECTED OF KILLING SIX IN ARMENIA DETAINED

Big News Network
Jan 13 2015

RFE Tuesday 13th January, 2015

A Russian soldier suspected of murdering six members of a single
family near Russia’s military base in Armenia has been detained and
handed over to the authorities at the base.

A spokesman for the Russian Federal Security Service’s border guards
in Armenia said Valery Permyakov was detained on January 13, shortly
after midnight, while trying to cross the border into Turkey dressed
in civilian clothing.

Permyakov is accused of killing six members of a family in Gyumri,
the city where Russia’s 102nd Military Base is located, after deserting
on January 12.

A six-month-old boy was wounded but survived the attack, whose
victims were a couple, their son and daughter-in-law, a 2-year-old
granddaughter, and an unmarried daughter.

Authorities have not spoken publicly of a motive.

Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian met with senior law enforcement
officers on January 12 and stressed “the importance of discovering the
details of this tragedy very swiftly” and punishing those responsible
“to the full extent of the law.”

Russia has about 3,000 troops at the base in the South Caucasus nation,
one of its largest military installations abroad.

Armenia is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Union, two Russian-dominated groups
of former Soviet republics.

With reporting by RFE/RL’s Armenian Service and Interfax

STAFF CHANGES IN ARMENIAN GOVERNMENT

Vestnik Kavkaza, Russia
Jan 13 2015

13 January 2015 – 5:26pm

There are staff shifts in the Armenian government among deputy
ministers. The deputy minister of finances Suren Karayan was appointed
the first deputy minister of international economic integration
and reforms.

Stepan Barsegyan was dismissed from the position of the deputy minister
of territorial management. Karen Isakhanyan was appointed the deputy
minister of territorial management and emergency situations.

The first deputy minister of territorial management, Vache Terteryan,
became the first deputy minister of territorial management and
emergency situations. Another deputy minister of territorial
management, Artashes Bashshyan, stayed at the same position in the
ministry, as well as deputy ministers of emergency situations David
Karapetyan and Aykaram Mkhitaryan, according to the press service of
the government.

RUSSIA EXPRESSES CONDOLENCES TO RELATIVES OF FAMILY KILLED IN GYUMRI

Vestnik Kavkaza, Russia
Jan 13 2015

13 January 2015 – 9:27am

The Russian Foreign Ministry has expressed condolences to relatives
of the family killed in Gyumri yesterday. The ministry noted that
Russia will do its best to assist Armenia in penalizing the people
responsible for the tragedy.

SIBERIAN CONSCRIPT ‘ADMITS’ KILLING SIX MEMBERS OF AN ARMENIAN FAMILY IN SHOCKING ATTACK

The Siberian Times, Russia
Jan 13 2015

By The Siberian Times reporter
13 January 2015

Baby boy aged six months, the sole survivor of massacre, fights for
his life.

Russian conscript Valery Permyakov, 18, has admitted killing a family
with his military Kalashnikov machine gun, say Armenian prosecutors.

He left his post and called at a house close to Gyumri at 6am on the
pretext of asking for a drink of water. The door was opened by Asmik
Avetisyan 51, who was shot dead on the spot.

Then the killer rushed inside and shot dead her husband Serzh
Avetisyan, 53, their daughter Aida, 35, son Armen, 33, and
daughter-in-law Araksiaya, 22.

Armen and Araksiya’s daughter Asmik, two, was stabbed with an army
knife in her bed. The conscript wounded the couple’s second child
Serezha, aged six months.

The massacre was discovered some hours later when a relative called
at the house. Miraculously the baby was still alive, but was said to
be in a ‘grave’ condition.

The child underwent emergency surgery on 12 January, and is on an
artificial lung. He has a knife wound to the chest, say medics.

The soldier left his army boots and Kalashnikov in the house,
along with his uniform, and fled the house in casual clothes. He was
arrested later by guards close to the Armenia border with Turkey. He
was handed to the commander of his military base, and is now held in
the camp’s jail.

Deputy Head of Armenian Police Hunan Poghosyan said that the Russian
serviceman had admitted to the murder of the Avetisyans’ family.

‘The suspect of the Avetisyans family murder in Gyumri, common soldier
of the 102nd Russian military base, Valery Permyakov, gave the first
testimonies and admitted to the murder,’ said Poghosyan.

He faces up to 20 years in jail if convicted, said experts.

The Defence Minister of Armenia Seyran Ohanyan met with the Deputy
Defense Minister of Russia Arkady Bakhin to discuss the case.

A protest outside the Russian Embassy in Yerevan with some demand
for Vladimir Putin to apologise to the Armenian people.

A friend of the detained man in Chita, called Andrei, was quoted
as saying: ‘I am shocked. Honestly, I do not think he is capable
of murder.’

Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper in Russia reported that Permyakov had
a mental disorder in the past but still he was recruited to serve in
the army, where he was a tank driver.

RUSSIAN SOLDIER CONFESSES TO MASSACRING ENTIRE ARMENIAN FAMILY

The Moscow Times, Russia
Jan 13 2015

An 18-year-old Russian soldier suspected of waging a deadly attack
against an Armenian family, killing every member except a 6-month-old
baby, has reportedly confessed to the crime after being detained near
the Turkish border.

“[Valery] Permyakov, the suspect in the killing of six members of the
Avetisyan family in Gyumri, confessed his guilt. He said that he left
his military base to take a walk through the city and accidentally
wound up in the Avetisyans’ home,” Unan Pogosyan, deputy head of the
local police department, said in comments carried by state news agency
RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

It remains unclear what motivated the killings, but Permyakov said
he entered the family’s home because he wanted something to drink,
the report said.

Permyakov is suspected of killing six members of the family, which
lived near a Russian military base in the Armenian city of Gyumri,
including a 2-year-old child. The 6-month-old baby, who miraculously
survived the attack, remains in critical condition in a nearby
hospital.

The Kommersant newspaper reported that Permyakov first shot and killed
the 53-year-old father before shooting the remaining family members
while they slept. He reportedly stabbed the 2-year-old with a bayonet.

The incident seems to have caused some alarm among top officials in
the Defense Ministry, which is setting up a commission to investigate
the case that will be headed by Deputy Defense Minister Arkady Bakhin,
state news agency TASS reported.

The Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reported that Permyakov previously
suffered from an undisclosed mental illness, though acquaintances
of the suspect who were interviewed by Armenian media expressed
shock at the heinous crime and said the young soldier could not have
committed it.

AZERBAIJAN’S PRESIDENT SAYS DOUBLE STANDARDS POLICY BEHIND UNRESOLVED KARABAKH CONFLICT

ITAR-TASS, Russia
January 10, 2015 Saturday 10

BAKU January 10.

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has said in 2014 there was no
progress in settlement of the Karabakh conflict

He spoke on Saturday at an expanded cabinet meeting focusing on
results of the country’s social and economic growth in the past year.

“Last year there was no progress in the settlement of the Karabakh
conflict,” Aliyev said.

He blamed Armenia for not “wanting peace” and reproached international
mediators that their words about inadmissibility of the current status
quo in the conflict remain “just words, lacking serious politics
behind them.”

Aliyev recalled four resolutions on the Karabakh conflict adopted by
the UN Security Council that had remained unimplemented over the past
20 years.

Also, the Azeri president said documents like these tackling other
international problems often come into force without delay.

“It is injustice and a policy of double standards,” he said. “There
seem to be such forces which are interested in the conflict to be
frozen or half-frozen so that it could be used as a tool to pressure
Azerbaijan.”

In 2015 Azerbaijan will beef up its military potential, Aliyev said.

The mountainous area of Nagorno-Karabakh remains a so-called ‘frozen
conflict’ on the post-Soviet space as it is the subject of a dispute
between Azerbaijan where the region is located and its ethnic Armenian
population.

In 1988 a war broke out there between Azerbaijani troops and Armenian
residents, which resulted in the region’s de facto independence. In
1994 a ceasefire was reached but the relations between the two states
are still strained.

Russia, France and the U.S. co-chair the Minsk Group of the
Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which attempts
to broker an end to hostilities and the conflict. –0-mil/

CROWE’S WATER DIVINER IS OUT OF HIS DEPTH

January 13, 2015

By Anthony McAdam

Leaving aside aesthetic considerations, the fact is the film’s lack
of any historical context is breathtaking. There are many, but there
is one really glaring omission.

It so happens that the well-documented genocide of the Armenians at
the hands of the Turks was initiated on the day immediately before
the Gallipoli landing, an overlap that traditionally receives hardly
a mention from Australian historians, and no reference whatsoever in
this film.

The Spectator – To much fanfare, Russell Crowe’s first film as a
director, The Water Diviner, was released on Boxing Day. It appears at
a key moment – the focus of the film, Gallipoli, is about to become
the centrepiece in an elaborate nation-wide commemoration to mark
the centenary of the landing in 1915.

If intentions are taken seriously, the film is a huge disappointment.

Its release came packaged to suggest that it presents a more honest
and more understanding appreciation of our then enemy, the Turks.

Besides being the director, Crowe is the star and driving force in
the film’s conception, and hence fully responsible for the result. His
intention: ‘It is time to teach our children the other side [i.e. the
Turkish side] of the Gallipoli story’.

Many of the media reviews have been just as presumptuous and
wrong-headed. The Age, for instance, tells us ‘This is perhaps the
first Australian war movie to deal honestly with the Turks and that
is one of its achievements’.

Well, not really. This highly sentimentalised and rather pointless
attempt to depict the human dimension of the Gallipoli campaign, as
experienced by an Aussie father (Crowe) searching for the bodies of
his three sons, fails both as plausible drama and as an honest attempt
to confront the actual behaviour of the enemy (the Ottoman empire),
not to mention the moral justification for the terrible sacrifice of
Allied lives.

On that last point, distinguished British historian Jeremy Black
recently wrote: ‘The current fashion for commemorating the dead
by honouring their struggle does not in fact honour them unless we
explain why they were fighting and facing the personal, moral and
religious challenges of risking and inflicting death. Why did men
volunteer in 1914? Why did they advance across the ‘killing ground’?

To mark the struggle without recalling its point and value is both
to lack a moral compass and, indeed, not really to seek one’.

And for those who believe, as Crowe seems to, that Britain and
Australia entered the war for ignoble reasons, or no reason at all,
it is worth ‘remembering’ that Britain was responding to a clear act
of German aggression against a neutral country, Belgium, with which
it was honour bound by treaty to defend, a decision overwhelmingly
supported at the time by the Australian government and the Australian
people. Turkey threw in its lot with the Germans and made itself
the enemy.

Not only does the film fail to show the slightest inkling of interest
as to why the allies fought and, for that matter, why the hero’s sons
died, but Crowe bathes the whole story in a painfully mawkish and
barely credible tale of a heart-broken water diviner (Crowe himself)
who miraculously emerges as a body diviner rambling around the rocky
cliffs of Gallipoli ‘bonding’ with the very soldiers responsible
for his sons’ deaths, with of course the now obligatory Aussie sneer
directed towards a British officer made out to be a right pompous git
(shades of Weir’s Gallipoli?).

Leaving aside aesthetic considerations, the fact is the film’s lack
of any historical context is breathtaking. There are many, but there
is one really glaring omission.

It so happens that the well-documented genocide of the Armenians at
the hands of the Turks was initiated on the day immediately before
the Gallipoli landing, an overlap that traditionally receives hardly
a mention from Australian historians, and no reference whatsoever in
this film.

What happened to the Armenians? Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, author of
The First World War in the Middle East (2014) paints the basic picture:

The Armenian genocide started in earnest on 24 April 1915 with the
arrest and deportation of thousands of Armenian political leaders
and intellectuals. This act triggered widespread massacres that
subsequently killed an estimated 1 million Armenians. The combination
of the outright killings and the forced marches through the Syrian
Desert constituted one of the earliest examples of a ‘crime against
humanity’…

The mass murder of this ancient Christian community made no exception
for women and children and was conducted with a barbarity that
shocked even officers of the Ottoman’s German allies, some of whom
witnessed the gruesome scenes first hand, as did missionaries and
other outsiders.

The legacy of what happened a hundred years ago in Turkey this April
is now taking on all the characteristics of a diplomatic perfect
storm. Obviously, the Australian centenary commemorations at Gallipoli
will be more elaborate than anything previous, the worldwide protests
by the Armenian Diaspora will be more vociferous than ever, and the
Turkish government’s fierce opposition to even the mention of the
word genocide will be as aggressive as ever.

This combination of factors is now coming to a head with Turkey
virtually ruling itself out of any hope of having its stalled
application to join the EU accepted, its position on the Armenian
issue being a major factor. If all this were not enough, more evidence
is emerging that highlights Turkey’s current machiavellian position
vis-a-vis the Islamic State’s forces on its borders, a savage army
currently trying to murder what’s left of Iraq’s and Syria’s Christian
communities, and other demonised faith communities.

Where does Australia sit in this gathering storm with its myriad
strategic and moral conundrums? Not well. While Opposition Leader
Tony Abbott did not hesitate to condemn the Armenian genocide, last
June Foreign Minister Julie Bishop issued a statement that called
the Armenian killings ‘a tragedy’ but added, quite unnecessarily,
‘we do not recognise the events as genocide’ for which, according to
(former Speccie Diarist) Geoffrey Robertson QC, ‘she was duly lauded
in Turkey as a genocide denier’.

The moral issue at stake is neatly captured in the subtitle of
Robertson’s recently published book on the genocide: ‘Who now remembers
the annihilation of the Armenians?’ It was Hitler’s comment to his
generals on the eve of the invasion of Poland urging them to show no
mercy as there would be no retribution. It’s all part of ‘the other
side of the Gallipoli story’ that Russell Crowe somehow didn’t get
around to even hinting at.

SEYRAN OHANYAN: OIL PRICES GRADUALLY BRING TO NAUGHT AZERBAIJAN’S ECONOMIC ADVANTAGES OVER ARMENIA

by David Stepanyan

ARMINFO
Tuesday, January 13, 12:04

Baku escalates tensions on the border with Armenia and NKR for
domestic and foreign policy reasons. This bears no relation to the
winter call-up, Defense Minister of Armenia Seyran Ohanyan said on
the Public Television of Armenia.

“The authorities in Baku try to distract the attention of their our
citizens from their domestic problems that are arousing serious concern
among the people. These are, first of all, problems with democracy,
human rights, freedom of speed, and national minorities.

All these problems, undoubtedly, come from the ruling totalitarian
regime of Azerbaijan. Furthermore, Azerbaijan’s leadership has to
somehow justify the billions it spends on the arms race it launched
for nothing but self-affirmation,” the minister said.

In this light, Ohanyan believes that the authorities in Baku need to
prove the people that army is ready to settle the tasks set to it.

They need to test the combat efficiency of their army, considering
that the falling oil prices gradually bring to naught their economic
advantages over Armenia. Nevertheless, the minister believes that
even the diminishing oil dollars have not reduced the social gap
between the very rich and very poor in Azerbaijan.

“Baku tries to keep the situation on the borders tense also to somehow
influence the events timed to the centennial of the Armenian Genocide.

In Baku they are very much concerned over possible normalization of
relations with Turkey in the light of the world community’s aspiration
to remove dividing lines between our countries,” Seyran Ohanyan said
for conclusion.

ARMENIAN MIGRANTS HAVE NO PLACE TO RETURN

Naira Hayrumyan, Political Commentator
Business – 13 January 2015, 12:34

The head of the Russian Federal Migration Service Constantine
Romodanovsky announced that in early 2015 the number of migrant
workers is down by 70% compared with the same period of last year.

This is a huge number and is determined by both tougher migration
legislation and economic problems in Russia, including the devaluation
of the dram, declining investments, construction and other projects.

The citizens of Armenia who worked in Russia for many years are now
waiting. Optimists are waiting until the situation in Russia improves;
pessimists are considering doing something in Armenia.

For the time being, there is no official information on the number
of arrivals and departures from Armenia but the fact that buying
Yerevan-Moscow tickets is easier than return tickets is evidence that
the citizens of Armenia are returning and not intending to leave.

Though on January 2 Armenia became a member of the Eurasian Union,
and the citizens of Armenia can freely leave and work in Russia,
the economic situation in Russia makes export of labor to this
country meaningless.

Encouraging migration to Russia is one of the priorities of the
Armenian government. First, it allows shedding state obligations for
employment on those “drowning”, second, push the civil-revolutionary
potential out of the country and, most importantly, receive remittances
which amount to the state budget.

Armenia exports labor and imports almost all consumer goods. And
as long as export exceeds import, Armenia can keep its political
and economic balance. As soon as the export gets closer to import,
the balance will be broken.

Now it is a time when the government may start thinking on how to fill
in the gap of remittances and address the people who will understand
that leaving for Russia is meaningless.

Thousands of people who earned their living while working in Armenia
cannot stay in Armenia jobless and they will first of all make claims
to the government. Does the government have any plan of actions for
this case or is the solution of these problems also delegated to the
Eurasian Commission?

The Armenian society underwent an invisible transformation last year.

The representatives of the Armenian government state with confidence
that there cannot be a revolution in Armenia because Armenians protest
with their suitcases and feet.

However, recently the government has started speaking about this
much lesser seeing the situation in Russia. Perhaps, the government
is trying to understand how the labor migrants will behave, whether
they will rally in front of the government or find another way out.