Author: Baghdasarian Karlen

EU READY TO STEP UP EFFORTS TOWARDS NAGORNY KARABAKH SETTLEMENT, SAYS ASHTON

ENPI Info Centre
July 7 2011

Armenia and Azerbaijan need to redouble their efforts to find an
agreement on Nagorny Karabakh before the end of this year, and the
EU should be prepared to take on significant responsibilities in the
implementation of a settlement, EU High Representative for Foreign
Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton has told Members of the
European Parliament.

In a speech in Strasbourg on 6 July, she said the EU was “ready and
committed to step up its efforts in support of the work of the Minsk
Group Co-Chairs.”

The EU foreign affairs chief expressed regret that President Aliyev
of Azerbaijan and President Sargisyan of Armenia had not taken the
opportunity to reach a compromise at recent talks in Kazan, Russia,
and urged them to continue efforts towards an agreement on the Basic
Principles of the settlement as “the first step in a process leading to
the drafting of a formal peace agreement, and then its implementation.”

Ashton emphasized that the agreement on the Basic Principles should
be reached before domestic priorities take over next year: elections
in Armenia in 2012, and in Azerbaijan in 2013.

She said the peaceful settlement of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict
was a key strategic interest of the EU. It would transform the South
Caucasus region, pave the way towards political and regional stability,
and new economic opportunities, and the South Caucasus could finally
become what it should have been already – a gateway between Europe
and Asia, said Catherine Ashton.

She underlined that the EU had an ambitious agenda for the countries
of the South Caucasus, namely new Association Agreements, as well as
Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas, including improved access
to the EU’s internal market.

The High Representative concluded by saying: “I also believe more
confident, attractive and modern countries with ambitious reform
agendas are in a stronger position to overcome the difficult legacies
of the past.” (ENPI Info Centre)

From: Baghdasarian

KARABAGH FM DISMISSED

news.am
July 7 2011
Armenia

STEPANAKERT. – Karabakh President Bako Sahakyan dismissed Georgy
Petrosyan from the post of Karabakh Foreign Minister according to
his own request.

Deputy FM Vassily Atajanyan was appointed an acting FM, President’s
press service informs Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Georgy Petrosyan was appointed an adviser of Nagorno Karabakh President
according to another decree signed by the president.

From: Baghdasarian

LANDMARK ECHR RULING RECOGNIZES RIGHT TO CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION

Amnesty International

July 7 2011

The ECHR ruled that states must respect the right to conscientious
objection

A landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for the
first time explicitly recognizing the right to conscientious objection
to military service has been welcomed by Amnesty International.

Today’s court judgement found in favour of Vahan Bayatyan, a Jehovah’s
Witness in Armenia who received a two and half year prison sentence
in 2003 after he refused to perform military service on the grounds
of conscientious objection.

The court ruled that states must respect the right to conscientious
objection as part of their obligation to respect the right to freedom
of thought, conscience and religion.

“With today’s decision, European law is now clearly in line with
international standards on conscientious objection,” said Michael
Bochenek, Amnesty International’s Director of Law and Policy.

“Azerbaijan and Turkey – the only European states that do not provide
for this right- should now move immediately to do so.”

Vahan Bayatyan refused to perform military service when he was called
up in 2001. He was convicted of draft evasion, although he said that he
was prepared to do alternative civilian service, and he was sentenced
to one and a half years in prison.

In 2003, his sentence was increased to two and a half years after the
prosecution appealed, claiming that his conscientious objection was
“unfounded and dangerous”.

He was released on parole in July 2003, after serving ten-and-a-half
months of his sentence. He filed his case with the European Court
later the same month.

When Armenia joined the Council of Europe in 2000, it committed to
the Alternative Service Act of 17 December 2003, which made provision
for conscientious objectors to military service including the creation
of an “Alternative Civilian Service”.

At no time was Bayatyan given the option of performing this service.

Jehovah’s Witnesses who have since opted for the alternative service
found that it was not clearly civilian in nature and included
requirements such as the swearing of a military oath and the wearing
of military uniforms. As such it does not comply with international
standards.

From: Baghdasarian

IN KARABAKH, THE FIRST POST-SOVIET WAR
By Will Englund

Washington Post

July 7 2011

STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh – Nothing blindsided Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s more than the outbreak of intense
national feeling among minority populations in the Soviet Union,
much of it laced with religious antagonism.

In Dagestan, Muslims angry about restrictions on the hajj, or
pilgrimage to Mecca, stormed a government building. In Ukraine,
Eastern Catholics demanded independence. But nowhere was the tension
more acute than in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous redoubt in the
South Caucasus, famous for mulberries, honey, ancient monasteries,
precipitous gorges and centuries of warfare.

It is populated overwhelmingly by Armenians but was assigned, by
Joseph Stalin, to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921.

Stalin was, at the time, the commissar for nationalities, and in
a divide-and-rule strategy, he frequently drew borders to divide
ethnic groups. Those borders, in the Caucasus and Central Asia,
still bedevil current efforts to maintain peaceful relations.

Armenians, for instance, have been Christians for nearly 1,700 years,
and Azerbaijanis are Muslims, closely related to the Turks. Harsh
Soviet rule suppressed their mutual hostility and distrust, but when
Gorbachev’s reforms relaxed the constraints, the old hatreds reemerged.

In 1988, Karabakh’s leaders said they wanted to be joined to Armenia
proper, just to the west. Moscow never really answered, but in
Azerbaijan, pogroms were launched against ethnic Armenians in response,
with dozens killed. The Soviet army sent in troops, Azerbaijanis fled
Karabakh, and Azerbaijan deported more than 5,000 Armenians. By 1991,
nearly 1,000 people had been killed in sporadic fighting.

A state of emergency helped to keep the lid on. But in July,
Gorbachev decided to pull Soviet troops out. Gun battles erupted
almost immediately. On July 7, 1991, reports reached Moscow that
Armenian villages along Karabakh’s border were under attack and at
least three people were dead.

The president of the Armenian republic, Levon Ter-Petrossian, accused
Gorbachev of trying to blackmail Armenia into joining a new Soviet
treaty of union, thus forgoing independence, by showing that it was
helpless without the protection of the central government.

This new treaty was scheduled for signing on Aug. 20, but by early
July, only nine of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics had shown any
interest in it, and Gorbachev’s hard-line critics said he was risking
the dissolution of the country. He desperately wanted more republics
to sign on.

Armenia wasn’t to be one of them, nor was Azerbaijan. Both went on to
declare independence, as had Nagorno-Karabakh itself, and by 1992,
they were engaged in a full-scale war – the first war connected
to the Soviet collapse. When it ended in a cease-fire in 1994,
Nagorno-Karabakh had broken free.

But no nation has ever recognized it. It is a de facto republic, with
close ties to neighboring Armenia but a firm sense of independence.

Karabakh today is a prickly place, immensely proud of its victory over
Azerbaijan, confident in the face of continuing Azerbaijani threats of
renewed war, and irritated that it hasn’t been given a place at the
negotiating table, where its interests are represented by the nation
of Armenia – and where little progress has been made over the years.

The latest attempt to hammer out a framework peace deal, under the
sponsorship of Russia, France and the United States, came to nothing
at a meeting in the Russian city of Kazan on June 24.

Sidelined, Karabakhis would appreciate international recognition, but
they’re not about to beg for it. “Unrecognized? So what. We’re used to
it by now,” says Tevan Poghosyan, formerly Karabakh’s representative in
the United States. People here are convinced that if the international
community had refused to recognize what they view as Azerbaijan’s
artificial Soviet-era borders back when the U.S.S.R.

broke up, Azerbaijan wouldn’t have been emboldened to attack and
their history would have been very different.

Instead, thousands died under bombardment, Stepanakert was
half-destroyed, and the legends of the “martyrs” of Artsakh, the
traditional name for Karabakh, took hold. There’s still plenty of
shooting across the line of contact: 43 incidents in one recent 24-hour
period. Seven people on the Karabakh side were reported killed in 2010,
and, says Defense Minister Movses Hakobyan, “We always shoot back.”

Karabakhis aren’t inclined to make concessions for peace, of territory
or anything else. “We liberated those lands. They are historic
Armenian lands. We shed the blood of our sons for those lands,”
said Robert Baghryan, who today heads the Union of Freedom Fighters
of the Artsakh War.

Now a lieutenant colonel in the Karabakh reserves, Baghryan got his
military training in the Soviet army, where he served as a sergeant.

The biggest difference in outlook between the two armies? Combat
readiness, he says. The Soviets never paid much attention to it.

From: Baghdasarian

ARMENIA: ‘CITY OF CHILDREN’ VIDEO ONLINE

ESC Daily

July 7 2011

The special fan-made video, “Yerevan: City of Children”, went online
last night and is now avaliable to watch on YouTube. The six-minute
video provides a snap tour around the host city of the 2011 Junior
Eurovision Song Contest and a look inside the venue. It was made &
produced entirely by Armenian fans ahead of the December event.

You can watch the video below:

From: Baghdasarian

CHAIRPERSON: OSCE TO CONTINUE EFFORTS TO RESOLVING NAGORNO-KARABAKH CONFLICT

Trend
July 7 2011
Azerbaijan

The OSCE will continue its work to resolve protracted conflicts,
including Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office,
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Audronius Ažubalis, today told 300
Parliamentarians from 53 OSCE participating States and four partner
countries gathered in Belgrade for the Annual Session of the OSCE
Parliamentary Assembly, the official statement reads.

“The OSCE will continue its efforts, including confidence-building
measures to reduce tensions in and around Nagorno-Karabakh and
contribute to positive results,” he said.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988
when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Armenian
armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan since 1992,
including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and 7 surrounding districts.

Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994. The
co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group – Russia, France, and the U.S. –
are currently holding the peace negotiations.

Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. Security Council’s four
resolutions on the liberation of the Nagorno-Karabakh and the
surrounding regions.

From: Baghdasarian

ARMENIANS FOUND GUILTY OF SPYING FOR RUSSIA

news.am
July 7 2011
Armenia

Georgian court has delivered verdict against nine people accused of
spying for Russia. All of them are found guilty, RFE/RL reported.

Five defendants are citizens of Georgia and four Russians, including
two of Armenian origin. They were sentenced to prison terms ranging
from 11 to 14 years.

As Armenia News – NEWS.am reported earlier, 13 people were detained
last November by Georgian Internal Ministry suspected of links
to the Russian intelligence department. Among those detained were
general director of Seybord company Armen Gevorgyan and his deputy
Ruben Shikoyan.

From: Baghdasarian

PROTESTORS SEE NO RESULTS FROM VISIT TO ARMENIAN PRESIDENT’S RESIDENCE

epress.am
07.07.2011

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan is lying when he says that people
live well, that everything is good. This simply isn’t true, head of
Property Rights Protection NGO Vachagan Hakobyan told Epress.am while
participating in the protest outside the government building today.

Recall, the head of the NGO assisting residents who were evicted
from buildings 4/14 to 4/24 Amiryan St. had told Epress.am earlier
that MP Melik Gasparyan, who died from a car accident two years,
had purchased the property in question from city hall 4 years ago
and had apparently promised the residents new homes.

Today, Hakobyan said that a few members of their group, along with
pilots with disabilities who say compensation owing to them has not
yet been paid and the mothers of deceased soldiers who protest every
Thursday, last week went to the presidential residence to present
their concerns.

“A delegation of ours went in, and, as always, they said they will
send the issue to the necessary bodies. The issue here is that
[Armenian President] Serzh Sargsyan, who stands up in Strasbourg or
congratulates us on Constitution Day, tells lies… Everywhere he
says that we’re good, everything is good. I’m going to also go talk
with the Armenian National Congress not to go but to say that we
are demanding pre-term elections; we have to simply say resign and
the people stand until these guys come. This is what remains. [These
authorities] do nothing; they only have formal speeches on television.

The country’s president is lying and the sooner we become free from
these authorities, the sooner the people will begin to live well,”
said Hakobyan.

The head of the Property Rights Protection NGO also recalled that
when Serzh Sargsyan was still prime minister, he met with them and
publicly promised to find a solution to their issue. This visit,
however, has not yet yielded any results, he said.

From: Baghdasarian

BARDAKJIAN AND SUNY UNDERMINE INTERESTS OF ARMENIA AND DIASPORA
By Appo Jabarian

Executive Publisher/Managing Editor
USA Armenian Life Magazine
July 6, 2011

On the Diaspora Front

In an effort to inject confusion about the timely concept of getting
the Armenian Diaspora better organized, Kevork Bardakjian, Professor
of Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, attempted to throw
the monkey wrench in the visionary process of “Elective Diaspora
Leadership.”

In a July 1 interview with Azg.am, referring to the democratic
representation of the Diaspora and Armenians as a whole, Prof. Suny
stated: “It’s an eternal problem [as to] who shall speak first,
who last. They’re saying, let’s hold elections. Harut Sassounian was
proposing, let every 20 thousand Armenians have one representative;
let them form a central council. In my opinion, that is utopia. … No
such thing is possible. The [political] parties would not allow [it].

If the parties do not have a ruling position, they would oppose
anything.”

But Prof. Suny contradicts himself by cheerleading its necessity,
saying: “For example, they’re saying, if Turkey acknowledges the
Genocide, we will seek the defense of our rights. Who is going to
present our demands? Who is going to speak on Diaspora’s behalf?

Through such questions, answers are created, that we need to unify.

But how?”

On the Home Front

In an interview with Azerbaijan’s propaganda mouthpiece az.apa.az,
Professor Ronald Grigor Suny of Michigan University and Director
of Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies, sounded more like a
political operative than a scholar.

Injecting the Armenian psyche with a sense of self-defeatism, Prof.

Suny said: “The facts that Armenians are the majority and ought to
be able to rule themselves in Karabakh has to be reconciled with the
territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, possibly though a federal status
that is real, gives Karabakh full autonomy but maintains a de jure
association with Azerbaijan.”

By propagating “a de jure association with Azerbaijan,” Suny shamefully
chooses to ignore the facts of history relating to Stalin-era carving
of Armenian territories of Artsakh (Karabagh) and Nakhitchevan from
then newly Sovietized Armenia; and forcibly ceding them to the then
newly Sovietized Azerbaijan.

Adding insult to injury, Suny added: “How those attitudes will be
overcome is very difficult to say, but it is a first important step
toward integration into the Euro-Atlantic structure, which is based
on forgetting the negative aspects of the past.”

A study of Prof. Suny’s biography points to the fact that during
the Soviet era, when it was needed to weaken the Soviet Empire,
certain academics amplified the need to recognize the “nationalist
movements of the non-Russian Soviet peoples” such as Armenians,
Azeris and Georgians.

After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, several nationalist
movements propelled the soviet republics to independent statehood.

Many of the newly freed states became the “darlings” of some circles
in the West for petroleum considerations, except for Armenia and
others. Georgia and Azerbaijan led the pack of “darling” nations. And
as such, they continue to “benefit” from the support lent by professors
such as Ronald Grigor Suny. In Suny’s interview, the beneficiary
continues to be none other than war-mongering Azerbaijan.

Twin “Open-minded” Professors

Suny has no qualms about obstructing justice for freedom-seeking
Armenians in Artsakh (Karabagh) seeking self-determination in a
reversal of unjust and forcible Armenian land giveaway by Stalin. And
Bardakjian does not hesitate to filibuster the right of Diaspora
Armenians seeking to be better organized through democratically-held
elections.

Both are very knowledgeable academics, but they put their expertise to
counter-productive uses, effectively seeking to demoralize Armenians
both in the Homeland and Diaspora; and to undermine the interests of
both Armenia and Diaspora.

From: Baghdasarian

IN KARABAKH, THE FIRST POST-SOVIET WAR – THE WASHINGTON POST

Tert.am
07.07.11

Nagorno-Karabakh – Nothing blindsided Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
in the late 1980s more than the outbreak of intense national feeling
among minority populations in the Soviet Union, much of it laced with
religious antagonism.

In Dagestan, Muslims angry about restrictions on the hajj, or
pilgrimage to Mecca, stormed a government building. In Ukraine,
Eastern Catholics demanded independence. But nowhere was the tension
more acute than in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous redoubt in the
South Caucasus, famous for mulberries, honey, ancient monasteries,
precipitous gorges and centuries of warfare.

It is populated overwhelmingly by Armenians but was assigned, by
Joseph Stalin, to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921.

Stalin was, at the time, the commissar for nationalities, and in
a divide-and-rule strategy, he frequently drew borders to divide
ethnic groups. Those borders, in the Caucasus and Central Asia,
still bedevil current efforts to maintain peaceful relations.

Armenians, for instance, have been Christians for nearly 1,700 years,
and Azerbaijanis are Muslims, closely related to the Turks. Harsh
Soviet rule suppressed their mutual hostility and distrust, but when
Gorbachev’s reforms relaxed the constraints, the old hatreds reemerged.

In 1988, Karabakh’s leaders said they wanted to be joined to Armenia
proper, just to the west. Moscow never really answered, but in
Azerbaijan, pogroms were launched against ethnic Armenians in response,
with dozens killed. The Soviet army sent in troops, Azerbaijanis fled
Karabakh, and Azerbaijan deported more than 5,000 Armenians. By 1991,
nearly 1,000 people had been killed in sporadic fighting.

A state of emergency helped to keep the lid on. But in July,
Gorbachev decided to pull Soviet troops out. Gun battles erupted
almost immediately. On July 7, 1991, reports reached Moscow that
Armenian villages along Karabakh’s border were under attack and at
least three people were dead.

The president of the Armenian republic, Levon Ter-Petrossian, accused
Gorbachev of trying to blackmail Armenia into joining a new Soviet
treaty of union, thus forgoing independence, by showing that it was
helpless without the protection of the central government.

This new treaty was scheduled for signing on Aug. 20, but by early
July, only nine of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics had shown any
interest in it, and Gorbachev’s hard-line critics said he was risking
the dissolution of the country. He desperately wanted more republics
to sign on.

Armenia wasn’t to be one of them, nor was Azerbaijan. Both went on to
declare independence, as had Nagorno Karabakh itself, and by 1992,
they were engaged in a full-scale war – the first war connected to
the Soviet collapse. When it ended in a cease-fire in 1994, Nagorno
Karabakh had broken free.

But no nation has ever recognized it. It is a de facto republic, with
close ties to neighboring Armenia but a firm sense of independence.

Karabakh today is a prickly place, immensely proud of its victory over
Azerbaijan, confident in the face of continuing Azerbaijani threats of
renewed war, and irritated that it hasn’t been given a place at the
negotiating table, where its interests are represented by the nation
of Armenia – and where little progress has been made over the years.

The latest attempt to hammer out a framework peace deal, under the
sponsorship of Russia, France and the United States, came to nothing
at a meeting in the Russian city of Kazan on June 24.

Sidelined, Karabakhis would appreciate international recognition, but
they’re not about to beg for it. “Unrecognized? So what. We’re used to
it by now,” says Tevan Poghosyan, formerly Karabakh’s representative in
the United States. People here are convinced that if the international
community had refused to recognize what they view as Azerbaijan’s
artificial Soviet-era borders back when the U.S.S.R.

broke up, Azerbaijan wouldn’t have been emboldened to attack and
their history would have been very different.

Instead, thousands died under bombardment, Stepanakert was
half-destroyed, and the legends of the “martyrs” of Artsakh, the
traditional name for Karabakh, took hold. There’s still plenty of
shooting across the line of contact: 43 incidents in one recent 24-hour
period. Seven people on the Karabakh side were reported killed in 2010,
and, says Defense Minister Movses Hakobyan, “We always shoot back.”

Karabakhis aren’t inclined to make concessions for peace, of territory
or anything else. “We liberated those lands. They are historic
Armenian lands. We shed the blood of our sons for those lands,”
said Robert Baghryan, who today heads the Union of Freedom Fighters
of the Artsakh War.

Now a lieutenant colonel in the Karabakh reserves, Baghryan got his
military training in the Soviet army, where he served as a sergeant.

The biggest difference in outlook between the two armies? Combat
readiness, he says. The Soviets never paid much attention to it.

The Washington Post

From: Baghdasarian