Author: Badalian Vardan

The Providence Journal
April 18 2015

Musical tribute to victims of Armenian genocide at RIC

It was about three years ago that Rhode Island College pianist Judith
Lynn Stillman started thinking about staging a musical tribute for the
centenary of the massacre of more than a million Armenians at the
hands of the Turks.

By Channing Gray
©Journal Arts Writer
Posted Apr. 19, 2015 at 12:01 AM

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — It was about three years ago that Rhode Island
College pianist Judith Lynn Stillman started thinking about staging a
musical tribute for the centenary of the massacre of more than a
million Armenians at the hands of the Turks. She felt she needed to
turn what for most of us is an abstract moment in history into
something “visceral.”

So she set out to immerse herself in Armenian culture, attending
church services, learning the unique style of the nation’s music, even
patronizing an Armenian butcher shop. She also turned to volumes of
Armenian poems spanning more than 1,000 years that were translated and
in some cases written by the grande dame of Armenian poetry, Diana
Der-Hovanessian.

And from her research came a 30-minute score composed by Stillman
called “When the Music Stopped.” Her “tapestry of songs and texts,” as
she calls the piece, was written in just a couple of weeks last
summer.

“The Armenian genocide is a story that needs to be told,” said
Stillman. “It has been described by some historians as the forgotten
Holocaust that inspired Hitler.”

For her concert Wednesday, Stillman is bringing in Armenian-American
TV actor Armen Garo, from “The Departed” and “American Hustle,” to
narrate, along with a couple of opera singers, and an expert on the
duduk, a recorder-like instrument with a reed that makes a plaintive,
wailing sound.

Trinity Rep’s Curt Columbus will direct and “straighten out the
logistics,” said Stillman.

Stillman’s piece follows something of an arc. The poems and texts she
has chosen begin with the miracle of childhood, then segue into the
horrors of the 1915 massacre, then emerge on a note of hope,
celebrating the resilience and creativeness of the Armenian people.

“I thought about writing a little encore,” said Stillman, “but the
words were so glorious and captivating I couldn’t stop.”

Two free performances of “When the Music Stopped” are slated for
Wednesday in Rhode Island College’s Sapinsley Hall, one at 1 p.m. and
the other at 7:30 p.m. The event will also contain some prayers and
opening remarks from Family Court Chief Judge Haiganush Bedrosian.

Mher Khachatryan’s massacre-inspired paintings, which echo much of
Stillman’s text, will be on view. Stillman said Khachatryan, who lives
in the New York area, will also be on hand painting along with the
music. His images will then be projected on large screens.

But the event is mostly a concert, she said. With a Khachaturian Trio
and Stillman’s own piece, written in 13 parts interspersed with text.
The final three triumphant sections employ choirs.

The 1915 massacre, which lasted for two years and led to the deaths of
1.5 million Ottoman Armenians, over half the population, erupted after
the ethnic group was blamed for the defeat of the Ottomon Empire at
the hands of the Russians in an area that sided with the Russians.
They were considered traitors.

Intellectuals, artists, doctors and businessmen were rounded up and
killed, while women and children were driven into the Syrian desert
with little chance of survival.

The spirit of this sad chapter in history has been captured by
Stillman, longtime artist-in-residence at RIC who seems to have found
her voice as a composer in recent years.

Stillman joined the RIC faculty in 1980 after becoming the
then-youngest pianist to earn a doctorate from Juilliard. She has
played at festivals all over the country and toured Europe and the Far
East.

“From the age of 3,” she said, “I was groomed to be a concert pianist.”

But more and more she has turned to composing, lush tuneful scores
laced with hints of Rachmaninoff and Chopin. In 2012, she produced a
set of songs about the Holocaust based on poems written by children
imprisoned in the Terezin concentration camp that were performed on
public television. And she has just been asked to write the music for
a Canadian documentary.

The title of Stillman’s piece, “When the Music Stopped,” was, by the
way, inspired by a Der-Hovanessian poem by the same name. It’s about
the beloved Armenian composer-priest Komitas, who was so emotionally
scarred by witnessing the genocide of his students that he never again
sang and later died in an institution.

Remembering the Armenian massacre is a powerful reminder not to let
such a tragedy happen again, said Stillman. But she said she wasn’t
interested in getting into politics in her “Armenia 100” event. She
just wanted to honor those who died and celebrate the richness of
Armenian culture.

Wednesday’s concerts, at 1 and 7:30 p.m. in Sapinsley Hall, are free
on a first-come-first-served basis, although a $10 donation is
suggested.

Irish Independent
April 19 2015

Genocide in Armenia and death in the Mediterranean

Le Pen refuses to quit politics, Pope Francis highlights the awful
plight of migrants, and France provokes the See

Pope Francis sparked a diplomatic row last Sunday by calling the
massacre of up to 1.5m Armenians 100 years ago “the first genocide of
the 20th Century,” prompting Turkey to accuse him of inciting hatred.

Muslim Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians died in clashes
with Ottoman soldiers beginning in 1915, when Armenia was part of the
empire ruled from Istanbul, but denies hundreds of thousands were
killed and that this amounted to genocide.

At an Armenian-rite Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica to mark the 100th
anniversary of the mass killings, Francis became the first head of the
Roman Catholic Church to publicly pronounce the word “genocide” to
describe them.

Spain’s anti-austerity Podemos would win an election by a razor-thin
margin if it were held now, a poll showed, but the new leftist party
has lost some support in recent months and is running virtually
neck-and-neck with the two mainstream parties.

Podemos (“We Can”) surprised by taking five seats in elections for the
European Parliament last May, just months after its formation,
demonstrating how austerity-weary Spaniards were turning away from
establishment parties. Podemos led the poll, carried out for El Pais
newspaper, for the fourth month in a row, garnering 22.1pc support.
However, the opposition Socialists regained lost ground to come second
with 21.9pc of the vote.

Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders attempted , last Monday, to
boost the German anti-Islam movement PEGIDA with a speech that mocked
Chancellor Angela Merkel for saying Muslims “belong to Germany”, but
the demonstration failed to draw huge crowds.

Wilders offered to take Merkel back to the Netherlands with him,
provoking chants of “Merkel must go!” from the audience of mostly
middle-aged and elderly white men. Some waved flags and held banners
saying “Stop the Islamisation of Europe!”.

Hungary’s Jobbik party denied it was racist or anti-Semitic, after
softening its far-right rhetoric and seizing a parliamentary seat from
the ruling party in a weekend by-election amid a surge in support.
Jobbik has gained support as voters drift away from mainstream parties
like Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz, which is battling a public
view that some of its leaders have used their posts to enrich
themselves.

Jewish groups say they are sceptical that Jobbik has changed. World
Jewish Congress chairman Ronald S Lauder said last Sunday that the
party’s rise was hurting Hungary’s image.

Jobbik chairman Gabor Vona, 37, said at a news conference in Hungary’s
parliament, that his party’s shift to the centre was genuine and vowed
to trim what he called its “wild off-shoots”.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right National Front, said
he would not seek its ticket to stand in regional polls, taking some
of the sting out of a damaging public row with his daughter Marine,
the party’s current leader.

But the 86-year-old former paratrooper told Le Figaro in an interview
that he was disappointed by his daughter and would not quit politics,
showing that the family feud that could emerge as a threat to the FN’s
bid for power is not necessarily over.

Marine Le Pen, who in 2011 took over as FN party leader from her
father, has been trying to persuade him to retire both from the
December regional polls and from politics altogether.

Jean-Marie Le Pen last week reiterated his view that Nazi gas chambers
were a mere “detail” of war and defended Philippe Petain, the leader
of the war-time government that cooperated with Nazi Germany.

Last November Pope Francis, in an address to the European Parliament,
said “we cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast graveyard,”
referring to the thousands of migrants who drown every year seeking to
reach southern Europe from north Africa and the Middle East.

Last week, hundreds of people desperate to be rescued from a packed
migrant boat in the Mediterranean pushed to one side when they saw a
ship approach, capsizing the craft and pitching everyone into the sea,
where hundreds died.

Survivors’ accounts suggested at least 500 people were on the boat
when it sank on Monday evening, some 120 km (75 miles) off the Italian
island of Lampedusa. With 145 people rescued, that leaves at least 350
unaccounted for – probably drowned.

Joel Millman, spokesman for the International Organization for
Migration (IOM), said: “According to testimonies, at least one-third
were women and children.

“At the time of the shipwreck, they were staying in the hull of the
boat to be better protected from the cold.

“When the men on the deck became restless and started moving about
because a rescue boat was beginning to approach them, the boat
capsized and water flooded the hull. Women and children died
immediately.”

France is standing by its nominee to be ambassador to the Holy See, an
official said on Friday, despite the Vatican’s failure to confirm his
posting for more than three months, a delay that French and Italian
media said was due to his sexuality.

Francois Hollande’s government nominated the president’s head of
protocol, Laurent Stefanini, for the post on January 5, but has still
not heard back from the Vatican.

French Catholic daily La Croix cited an unnamed source as saying the
Vatican considered it “provocation” that France’s Socialist
government, which in 2013 passed a law permitting gay marriages, had
proposed a homosexual for the post.

There was no official Elysee comment and the Vatican also declined to
comment on the nomination of Stefanini, who has previously occupied
the number-two post at the French embassy to the Holy See. The affair
risks becoming an embarrassment to Pope Francis, who has maintained
Church teaching on homosexuality but has struck a more sympathetic
personal tone towards gay people.

He has given no sign of easing rules against gay unions or changing
the Church’s teaching that homosexual acts are sinful, even if
homosexuality itself is not.

But he has shown a more conciliatory attitude than many others in the
Church, remarking that he could not judge gay people of good will who
were seeking God, and meeting members of a Catholic gay rights group
in the Vatican as recently as February.

Saudis will face crushing response: Iranian commander

Sun Apr 19, 2015 9:45PM

Commander of the Iranian Army’s Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad
Reza Pourdastan

The commander of Iranian Army’s Ground Forces has warned Saudi Arabia
of facing a crushing response from inside Yemen if the ongoing
aggression against the Arab country continues.

“The Saudi Arabian army has no war experience and is very fragile and
if it is confronted with a war of attrition, it should await crushing
blows and it will suffer heavy defeat,” Brigadier General Ahmad Reza
Pourdastan said Sunday in an interview with Arabic-language news
channel al-Alam.

The Iranian commander further recommended the Saudi government to stop
what he called “fratricide,” adding that Saudis’ past experiences in
Yemen have proven that they will have no easy job winning the war on
the impoverished country.

Commander of the Iranian Army’s Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad
Reza Pourdastan (L) speaks in al-Alam’s “From Tehran” show on April
19, 2015.

Saudi Arabia’s air campaign against Yemen started on March 26 –
without a UN mandate – in a bid to restore power to the country’s
fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, and to undermine
the popular Ansarullah Houthi revolutionaries.

Pourdastan highlighted the boosted morale of the Yemeni people in the
face of the ongoing aggression against their country, saying Saudi
airstrikes against Yemen have created more “unity and solidarity”
among the Yemeni people.

“Such solidarity paves the ground for huge blows to Saudi Arabia and
through such solidarity they managed to defeat most of forces loyal to
Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and took control of Yemen,” he said, adding
that if Saudi cities are targeted by the Yemenis, Riyadh will have
serious difficulty dealing with it.

A picture taken on April 17, 2015 shows people walking past buildings
that were damaged the day before in an air strike by Saudi Arabia at a
market in the port city of Aden. (AFP)

Pourdastan rejected some claims that Iran is part of the crisis in
Yemen or accusations that Tehran is sending weapons to the Yemenis,
saying, those making such claims themselves know the unreal nature of
such accusations as they are monitoring the roads and the seas
constantly.

He said Iran’s sole concern for Yemen is to send humanitarian aid to
the people in order to “reduce part of their suffering.”

According to reports, over 2,500 people, including women and children,
have so far lost their lives in the attacks.

Iran not willing to confront Saudis

He also touched upon an ongoing mission by an Iranian fleet near
Yemen’s southern coasts, saying that the fleet’s presence in the area
was planned before the Saudi aggression on Yemen started. He said the
fleet is on a mission to protect Iranian ships against the potential
terrorist threats in the Gulf of Aden and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.

The high-profile Iranian commander further said that Iran is not
interested in getting involved in a confrontation with Riyadh,
describing Saudi Arabia as a friend of Iran and an ally.

“Saudi Arabia’s military attaché is currently in our country and we
invited him to attend a (ceremony) on the Army Day. We want to have
ties with Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Commander of the Iranian Army’s Ground Forces Brigadier General Ahmad
Reza Pourdastan (R) attends a speech by Leader of the Islamic
Revolution Ayatollah Khamenei (unseen) on April 19, 2015 on the
occasion of Iran’s Army Day.

Elsewhere in his comments, Pourdastan highlighted the role of the
United States in supporting terrorist groups like the ISIL, saying
that the war waged by ISIL, the al-Nusra Front, and Boko Haram in
Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria are all proxy battles waged in favor of the
US and Israel.

Since the very beginning of ISIL’s advances in western and northern
Iraq, Iranian army defined a 40-kilometer red zone into the Iraqi
territory to warn the terrorists of any potential move towards the
Iranian borders, he said.

Meanwhile, the Iranian commander also referred to a recent decision by
Russian President Vladimir Putin to lift a long-existing ban on
delivering the advanced S-300 air defense system to Tehran, saying
that the development should be viewed as a “step forward” in promoting
the defense capabilities of Islamic Republic.

Pourdastan also said that five major military drills are planned for
the Iranian army in the current Iranian calendar year which started on
March 21.

MS/NT/AS

KVUE , TX
April 19 2015

Hundreds march down SoCo Saturday for Armenian Genocide

AUSTIN — Hundreds marched down South Congress Avenue Saturday to
remember the Armenian Genocide.

Organizers said their main goal is to raise awareness and prevent
further genocides from occurring.

100 years ago, the Ottoman Turkish Empire killed approximately 1.5
million Armenian Christians.

McClatchy Washington Bureau
April 19 2015

So much to settle to reopen the Turkish-Armenian border

By Roy Gutman
McClatchy Foreign StaffApril 19, 2015

2015-04-19T20:32:35Z
By Roy Gutman

GYUMRI, Armenia — The train to Turkey hasn’t left the station in
Armenian border town of Gyumri for 22 years, and many here fear it
never will. But if Turkey should unexpectedly reopen the gates, a lot
of Armenians will be on board, eager to see the country their
ancestors fled 100 years ago amid massacres and mass deportations.

“The soil there, I want to go back and farm it,” Stepan Bagouryan, 30,
a machinist from Gyumri, said as he boarded a ramshackle passenger
train to Yerevan, the Armenian capital. His great grandfather fled the
city of Mus, in eastern Turkey. “Why shouldn’t we go back? It is our
homeland.”

Turkey closed the link in 1993 to show solidarity with its regional
ally, Azerbaijan, after Armenian troops occupied the tiny enclave of
Nagorno Karabach. It’s been closed ever since.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened in 2009 to resolve
the matter, and Armenia and Turkey agreed to establish diplomatic
relations and reopen the border. But the agreement fell victim to the
region’s many conflicts and has yet to be implemented.

Azerbaijan, which shares religious and linguistic ties with Turkey and
is a major outside investor in its Turkish economy, cried betrayal.
Armenia still had troops inside territory Azerbaijan claimed. It also
had captured a buffer zone surrounding the enclave, whose population
of 130,000 is overwhelmingly Armenian.

So Turkey asked Armenia make a show of goodwill and abandon at least
one of the buffer zone’s seven districts. Armenia refused.

The 2009 accords also called for an international commission to look
at the historical record and assemble facts that would enable
discussion of the two countries’ very different interpretations of the
deportations and massacres of 1915 that killed perhaps a million
Armenians and which Armenia labels genocide. But after leaders of the
Armenian diaspora accused President Serzh Sargsyan of betraying
Armenian interests by agreeing to discuss the history, that initiative
died as well.

After four years, neither side had submitted the twin protocols to
their respective parliaments for approval, and on Feb. 16, Sargsyan
formally withdrew them, blaming a lack of will by Turkey.

Although both sides have made gestures in the past – Sargsyan, for
example sent his foreign minister to Erdogan’s inauguration as
president last year – neither side is willing to contemplate taking a
bold unilateral step to end the impasse.

“We think the blockade is illegal, and we do think it needs to be
eliminated as soon as possible, and the earlier the better,” said
Vigan Sargsyan, chief of staff to President Sargsyan (he’s not related
to the president. He said Armenia has no preconditions.

“We don’t think that to open a border you need to reconcile. We think
that reconciliation or friendship are future steps.”

“We want regular relations with Armenia on the basis of bilateral
interests, but on the basis of realpolitik, it’s not so easy,” a
Turkish official told McClatchy in Ankara. “If they will retreat from
one or two (districts), it will give us the possibility of de-blocking
everything,” said the official, who spoke only on the condition of
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The U.S. says the ball is in Turkey’s court. “Responsibility for
moving forward lies with the Turkish government,” the new U.S.
ambassador, Richard Mills, said at his confirmation hearings in
September. He called for final approval of the two accords “without
pre-conditions or linkage to other issues.”

But agreement, on anything, seems a distant hope.

For one, Armenia is incensed that Turkey chose April 24, the day of
Armenia’s long planned commemoration of the centennial of the Armenian
exodus from Turkey, to invite the world’s powers to Turkey mark
another 1915 event, the failed allied landing at Gallipoli. The
Ottoman Empire repulsed the April 25 landing by Russia, France and
Britain, and the battle went on for eight months. The Turks think of
it as a defining moment in their fight to remain independent after the
collapse of the Ottomans.

In January, Erdogan invited his Armenian counterpart to attend the
Gallipoli commemoration. Sargsyan rejected it, and in an open letter
to Erdogan, chastised him for not even responding to the invitation
that Armenia had sent to the Yerevan ceremonies months earlier.

He charged that Turkey was continuing “its traditional policy of
denialism” surrounding the Armenian genocide and accused Erdogan of
setting the date for the Gallipoli events “to distract the attention
of the international community” from Armenia’s commemoration.

If the aim was to upstage Armenia, Erdogan appears to have succeeded.
At least 21 heads of state have agreed to attend the Gallipoli events,
according to Turkey’s foreign ministry; only two, the presidents of
France and Russia, are expected at Yerevan.

But Armenia hasn’t finished. At the end of January, Sargsyan, together
with other leading politicians and members of the Armenian diaspora,
issued a “Pan-Armenian” declaration that referred to the 1920 Treaty
of Sevres and an arbitration by then President Woodrow Wilson, which
awarded an enormous part of Turkey to a new Armenian state. The
declaration called for preparing a file of legal claims to restore
“individual, communal and pan-Armenian rights and legitimate
interests.”

Turkish officials said the declaration could be read as a claim on
Turkish lands. Many Armenians agree.

“It would be strange if we did not lay out our grievances” on the
centennial of the slaughter, said chief of staff Sargsyan, when asked
about the declaration.

And in the view of Suren Manukyan, the deputy director of the Armenian
Genocide Museum in Yerevan, that region – about one seventh of the
landmass of today’s Turkey – should be restored to Armenians.

“It was the decision of President Wilson, who was chosen for
arbitration after the Sevres Treaty,” he said. “The implementation of
the decision of Wilson will be good compensation for all the killings,
all the tragedy.” Then, he added, “the real host of the land will come
back.”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, believe it or not, efforts are under way
to restore the dialogue – after the twin commemorations of April 24
and after the Turkish elections on June 7.

According to U.S.-born Richard Giragosian, a former Capitol Hill aide
who directs the Regional Studies think-tank in Yerevan, Turkish
foreign ministry officials plan to come to Yerevan in mid-June during
a meeting of the NATO parliamentary assembly.

In landlocked Armenia, which has normal ties but rudimentary transport
links with Georgia and Iran, an opening to Turkey would be a welcomed
jolt to a moribund economy.

Today a resident of Yerevan who wants to visit Istanbul, where at
least 40,000 and possibly 100,000 Armenians are working illegally, has
few options for travel. There are twice weekly charter flights that
depart both countries in the middle of the night, a 36-hour bus trip
or one can make the six-hour drive to Tblisi, capital of neighboring
Georgia, over a swerving, potholed secondary road, then catch a flight
on to Istanbul.

Giragosian believes that may not be the situation for long. Based on
contacts he’s had with both the Turkish and Armenian governments, he
predicts the border will be open by 2017.

Dutch MEP: Current Turkish government bears great responsibility for
wounds of history

15:39, 19.04.2015
Region:World News, Armenia, Turkey
Theme: Politics

The Turkish government bears a great responsibility for wounds of
history, the Dutch MEP from European People’s party Esther de Lange
told Armenian News – NEWS.am, referring to the European Parliament
resolution on Armenian Genocide and Turkey’s continuing denial policy.

“We believe that in a democracy it is necessary to deal with one’s
past and come to terms with it. It was not the current Turkish state
but the Ottoman Empire that was responsible for what happened to the
Armenians 100 years ago, but the Turkish government should realize
that it bears a great responsibility to help heal the wounds of
history,” Esther de Lange said.

On April 15, the European Parliament adopted a resolution by a
majority vote, urging Turkey to recognize the Armenian Genocide in
order to contribute to the “reconciliation of the Armenian and Turkish
people.” The document calls on Turkey to restore its diplomatic ties
with Armenia, open the border and strive for economic integration.

ALALAM, Iran
April 16, 2015 Thursday

Mass Killing Between 1915-1917 is Genocide

A picture released by the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute dated
1915 shows soldiers standing over skulls of victims from the Armenian
village of Sheyxalan in the Mush valley, on the Caucasus front during
the First World War(Getty)

The European Parliament has ruled that 1915 mass killings of some 1.5
million Armenians by the Istanbul-ruled Ottoman Empire amount to
genocide.

The decision was made one week before the 100th anniversary of the
killings, which falls on 24 April.

The lawmakers stated that the “tragic events that took place in
1915-1917 against the Armenians in the territory of the Ottoman Empire
represent a genocide”, Reuters reported.

Armenia’s Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said the resolution is a
move towards defending human rights.

“The resolution contains an important message to Turkey to use the
commemoration of the centenary of the Armenian genocide to come to
terms with its past, to recognise the Armenian genocide and thus pave
the way for a genuine reconciliation between Turkish and Armenian
peoples,” he said in a statement.

However, Turkey did not agree with the resolution and accused the
Parliament of attempting to “rewrite history”.

Turkey’s foreign ministry said lawmakers who backed the decision were
partners of “those who have nothing to do with European values and are
feeding on hatred, revenge and the culture of conflict”.

One day before the ruling, Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan warned
that his country would ignore any view by the Parliament regarding the
mass killing. “Whatever decision they may take, it would go in one
ear and out the other,” Erdogan was quoted by Reuters as saying.

The resolution comes as tensions rose between Turkey and the Vatican,
after Pope Francis referred to the killings as “the first genocide of
the 20th Century” during a Mass at St Peter’s Basilica.

The pontiff spoke about three tragedies in the last century. “The
first, which is widely considered the first genocide of the 20th
century, struck your own Armenian people,” he said, and added that the
other two mass killings were perpetrated by “Nazism and Stalinism.

More recently there have been other mass killings, like those in
Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia. It seems that humanity is
incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood”,IB
Times reports.

Turkey denies that the mass killings amount to genocide and argues
that the figures have been inflated.

Following Francis’ remarks, the Middle Eastern country recalled its
envoy to the Vatican and warned the pontiff not to “repeat the same
mistake”.

A top Turkish Islamic cleric has also warned the Vatican that it has
more to lose by digging up the past.

“If societies start to interrogate each other over past sorrows, the
Vatican will suffer more than anyone else,” Mehmet Gormez, Turkey’s
head of religious affairs, said.

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE BANNER RETURNS TO WEST HARTFORD GREEN

Hartford Courant, CT
April 17 2015

By Suzanne Carlson

WEST HARTFORD — A banner commemorating the Armenian genocide was
removed from the town green Wednesday, but was replaced by the end
of the day Thursday.

Public works Director John Phillips said the banner did not comply with
town regulations, which require such signs to notify the public of a
specific event. The banner was modified to include notification of a
100th anniversary commemoration ceremony at the Capitol in Hartford on
April 25, sponsored by the Armenian Genocide Commemoration Committee
of Connecticut.

The banner, which had only included a general message commemorating
the mass killings of Armenians that began in 1915 under Ottoman rule,
“slipped through the cracks” and was installed Monday before the
error was corrected, Phillips said.

Lauren Varjabedian, commemoration committee chairperson, said the
group is pleased the banner was to be returned to the town green.

Because the initial banner was approved by the town and the group
was not notified of the error, Varjabedian said the banner is being
modified and reinstalled at no cost to the committee.

“The town of West Hartford has been great to work with in rectifying
the situation,” Varjabedian said.

Groups can apply to have a banner displayed on the north end of
Goodman Green at the intersection of South Main Street and Farmington
Avenue. Banners may also be placed at the south side of the bridge
on Park Road over Trout Brook, as well as the town auditorium on the
day of an event.

Phillips said town officials and representatives from the genocide
remembrance committee met Thursday to discuss the issue, and
Varjabedian said the banner will remain on the town green until Monday.

The Armenian Genocide Commemoration Committee of Connecticut has been
active for about 15 years. Although the group works with four Armenian
churches in the state to hold regular programs throughout the year,
the centennial remembrance is an especially important event for the
Armenian diaspora, Varjabedian said.

“We just make sure that we get the word out … and just really make
sure that not only the Armenian community is aware but the community
at large,” Varjabedian said.

The remembrance ceremony at the Capitol is scheduled for 11 a.m. to
1 p.m. on April 25, with keynote speaker Chris Bohjalian.

PESKOV: PUTIN COULD VISIT YEREVAN ON APRIL 24

Vestnik Kavkaza, Russia
April 17 2015

17 April 2015 – 2:50pm

Russian President Vladimir Putin could visit Yerevan on April 23-24,
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

At the same time, he noted that there is also a possibility of a
meeting of the Russian leader with French President Francois Hollande.

“As far as we understand, Putin and Hollande’s arrivals in Yerevan
coincide, they will both be there at the same time, so a meeting
between them can’t be excluded on the sidelines of the program that
is planned by the Armenian side,” TASS cited Peskov.

THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND HAGIA SOPHIA

Kathimerini- Greece
April 16 2015

By Nikos Konstandaras

Pope Francis’s declaration that the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman
forces 100 years ago was “the first genocide of the 20th century”
will hasten the conversion of the Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque,
the top Muslim official in Ankara responded. The Turkish government
has long wanted to turn the symbol of Orthodox Christianity into a
mosque, and last Friday – Good Friday for the Orthodox – verses from
the Koran were recited at the opening of an exhibition at Hagia Sophia,
84 years after it was converted from a mosque into a museum by the
founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The statement by
mufti Mefail Hizli, reported by the Hurriyet Daily News on Thursday,
suggests that Turkey’s rage at its inability to stop a growing tide
of recognition of the Armenian genocide is encouraging autocratic
tendencies and bigotry. It is not only the country’s few remaining
Christians who will suffer but Turkish society as a whole.

It is difficult to comprehend how a papal statement on the Armenian
issue should weigh on Hagia Sophia, seeing as the roads of Catholic
and Orthodox Christians separated nearly 1,000 years ago (in 1054).

Today’s Turkish government shows the arrogance of a conqueror
who believes that all he sees is hostage to his will. The Ottoman
conquerors did convert the Hagia Sophia church into a mosque, but they
also commissioned their best architects to build grand new mosques –
the Fatih, Suleyman and Sultan Ahmet mosques – honoring Hagia Sophia
by trying to outdo it. In his conviction that Turkey had to be built
on secular foundations, Ataturk turned Hagia Sophia into a museum,
acknowledging the building’s ecumenical significance.

Under the dominance of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was prime minister
from 2003 until his election as president last year, Turkey is at the
crossroads between East and West, between autocracy and democracy,
between tolerance and bigotry. In next June’s parliamentary elections,
the AKP party which Erdogan founded and still controls, could triumph
with about 50 percent of the vote, according to recent polls. After
the election, Ergodan aims to strengthen the office of the presidency
and will do all that is necessary to achieve this. Converting Hagia
Sophia into a mosque will please the AKP’s religious voters and also
make clear that the secular regime founded by Ataturk is dead.

Recently, Erdogan has shown increasingly autocratic tendencies. Now,
the government’s inability to prevent international recognition of
the Armenian genocide is driving him to greater displays of anger,
arrogance, greed and envy. He will learn that he can neither ignore
history nor subject an ecumenical symbol to his will.