Author: Dabaghian Diana

Leicester City have won the Premier League title in one of the greatest sporting stories of all time, the BBC reports.

Tottenham’s 2-2 draw at Chelsea on Monday confirmed a stunning achievement for Claudio Ranieri’s side.

Leicester started the campaign as outsiders for the title after almost being relegated last season.

But they have lost just three league games in what has been described as a “fairytale” and the “most unlikely triumph in the history of team sport”.

Closest challengers Spurs, Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United and last year’s champions Chelsea, have all failed to match the Foxes’ consistency across the season.

The Azerbaijani side kept violating the ceasefire regime all along the line of contact with Karabakh forces last night, NKR Ministry of Defense reports.

The rival used artillery weapons of various caliber, as well as 60, 82 and 120 mm mortars.

Serviceman of the NKR Defense Army Ashot Shavarsh Zohrabyan (born in 1991) was killed a result of firing in the eastern direction (Martuni) of the frontline.

The NKR Defense Ministry shares the sorrow of the heavy loss and expresses its condolences to the family and friends of the killed serviceman.

The front divisions of the NKR Defense Army undertook relevant measures to pressure the activeness of the rival.

s – Thousands of Armenian-Americans and their supporters rallied in front of the Turkish Consulate on Sunday, the 101st anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide, demanding formal recognition and reparations following a march in Little Armenia.

Some carried large Armenian flags. Others carried signs of a closed fist that read “Justice” or simply “Shame on Turkey.”

“Everybody thought that with the centennial that would be the end of it, but our struggle has only begun,” said Nora Hovsepian, chairwoman of the National Armenian Committee of America’s Western Region, before the Rally for Justice on Wilshire Boulevard.

Many speakers featured at the rally expressed anger not only at Turkey for refusing to acknowledge the genocide by Ottoman Turks that killed up to 1.5 million Armenians more than a century ago but also at President Barack Obama who failed to use the word genocide again this year despite campaign promises to the contrary.

The U.S. Congress has also failed to pass a proposed resolution in recent years that would formally recognize the events from 1915-1923 as a genocide.

“The United States of America has openly condemned the atrocities committed by ISIS as genocide,” Tamar Poladian told attendees on behalf of the Armenian Genocide Committee. “The time has come for the United States of America to recognize the atrocities committed by the Turks against the Armenians as genocide.”

Poladian said they demand from the government of Turkey full compensation for all they have lost. That includes 1.5 million lives, billions of dollars in properties and priceless cultural and religious monuments as well as the return of historical Armenian lands located in eastern Turkey, she said.

Turkey has long denied that there was a systematic killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a century ago.

Organizers estimated that as many as 60,000 people rallied in front of the Turkish Consulate on Sunday. A small plane continuously flew over the protest with a banner of the Turkish flag, which prompted the crowd to chant “Shame on Turkey” several times.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Burbank, whose district includes a large contingent of Armenian-Americans, called Obama’s decision not to use the term genocide last week in his final year in office “a grave disappointment.”

“How many administrations must be intimidated into silence before we realize it never changes Turkish behavior for the better and only emboldens their increasingly authoritarian regime?” Schiff asked to loud applause.

Christians in Syria, including Armenians who are descendants of those killed in the genocide a century ago, also are facing genocide today at the hands of “a terrorist scourge in Syria,” Schiff said. Turkey has “aided and abetted” the destruction of these Christians by failing to close its border to weapons, foreign fighters, oil and money, he said.

Meanwhile, the Eurasian country of Azerbaijan — which is aided by Turkey — has instigated “the worst violence in years” with tanks and heavy artillery and aircraft against Armenians struggling for self-determination in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, he said.

In addition to Armenians, a contingent of some 200 Assyrians waved their white national flags in a sea of Armenian flags at the rally.

The ancient Christian community that originally hailed from Mesopotamia, now present-day Iraq, lost some 750,000 of its people at the hands of Ottoman Turks a century ago — which was about three-quarters of its pre-war population, according to historians.

Earlier in the day, many thousands — most of whom were wearing black — also marched in Little Armenia in Hollywood in commemoration of the somber anniversary. Among them was Armenian-American Hermine Chobanyan of Sherman Oaks, who has marched every year here for at least the last four years.

“My mom’s grandmother is a survivor of the genocide,” she said. “We want justice. We want America to recognize (the genocide), Turkey to recognize it and to give our lands back.”

Her aunt Mareta Melkonyan said her grandmother was a child when she witnessed her parents killed with swords before her eyes by Ottoman Turks a century ago. Her family had a lot of wealth that they had buried and had to leave behind, something her grandmother never got to see returned to her before she passed away.

“We want everything back,” Melkonyan said. “We’re going to fight until the end.”

George Clooney visited the  Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex on the hill of Tsitsernakaberd in Yerevan to lay flowers in memory of the 1.5 million Armenians who perished during the first genocide of the 20th century. He also visited the  

In the evening of April 24, Armenian Genocide Memorial Day, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Co-Chair, George Clooney, will present the $100,000 grant to the inaugural Aurora Prize Laureate.

The Laureate will then invite his or her nominated organization(s) to the stage to receive the $1 million award.

On behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide, and in gratitude to their saviors, the Aurora Prize celebrates the strength of the human spirit that compels action is the face of adversity.

The Aurora Prize will be awarded annually on April 24 of each year in Yerevan, Armenia.

 

 

 

A number of findings uncovered in the village of Yervand, Syunik Province date back to the Urartian times. The 200 items unearthed by a treasure hunter include poleaxes, works of art, bronze statuettes, etc.

“The findings date back to 8-6 centuries BC, the era of the Kingdom of Van,” Hakob Simonyan of the Ministry of Culture told reporters today.

The story came to light, when the treasure-hunter tried to sell the findings.

Archaeologist, art critic Hakob Simonyan says the collection is of great value and should be showcased not only in Armenia, but also the best known museums of the world.

Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan will visit Moscow April 12-13 to participate in the sitting of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council.

PM Hovik Abrahamyan is expected to meet with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon plans to make his first official visit to Azerbaijan and Armenia and a second visit to Georgia at the end of April, a source from the UN Secretariat told on Thursday.

The source could not give the exact dates, but said the trip would be made shortly after the signing ceremony for the Paris Agreement convened by Ban Ki-moon on April 22.

Secretary-General’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric neither confirmed nor denied the information on Thursday.

On March 11, Georgia’s First Deputy Foreign Minister David Zalkaliani said Ban Ki-moon was planning an official visit to his country.

“The Georgian Foreign Ministry is paving the way for this visit, it is a working process, the concrete date will become known shortly,” he told reporters, marking the importance of the visit for Georgia.

Ban Ki-moon visited Georgia in June 2007, making a short stopover in Tbilisi on his way from Afghanistan to Europe and meeting with the then president, Mikhail Saakashvili.

According to information on the website of the UN Secretariat, Ban Ki-moon has never visited Azerbaijan and Armenia since he took office in 2007.

Photo: Aris Nalci

 

Architects, art historians and engineers from Turkey, Greece and Armenia have come together to review Turkey’s Greek, Armenian and Jewish heritage.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, project coordinator, Cagla Parlak, said that they aimed to reach an estimated 140 structures across Turkey which are at risk.

The group will document findings from their visits to sites in seven regions across Turkey, including the central Anatolian province of Kayseri, the southern region of Adana and Aegean Izmir.

Financed by the U.S. embassy in Ankara, the project took a year to come together and ran parallel with the foundation of the association in 2014.

The project has publicized its first results by publishing a book called ‘Kayseri: With Its Armenian and Greek Cultural Heritage’ in February.

The team conducted a risk assessment of 18 Greek and Armenian buildings in Kayseri such as the Surp Asdvadzadzin Church, Surp Stepanos Church, Sakis Gümüşyan School, the School in Molu and the Agios Georgios Church.

Kayseri, like many other parts of the country, was home to various minorities until the beginning of the 20th century but their numbers fell after the Armenian Genocide.

The Armenian population in the city was around 15,000 at the end of the 19th century, the book states. Today only one Armenian lives there, according to local media.

The group uses an inventory prepared by the Istanbul-based Hrant Dink Foundation, registration decisions by local heritage Protection Boards and literature reviews, Parlak said.

The Hrant Dink Foundation was founded in the name of a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated by a Turkish nationalist in front of his Agos newspaper in 2007.

The foundation worked for more than two years making an inventory to gather information about Turkey’s cultural heritage.

It found out more than 10,000 monuments across Turkey. According to the research, there are 4,600 Armenian, 4,100 Greek, 650 Assyrian and 300 Jewish structures across the country.

“Each structure is ranged in according to its risk rating,” she said: “If a structure is at the top of the list, this means that this building should have priority for restoration in that region,” Parlak added.

“Our main aim is to ensure the protection of ‘abandoned’ structures,” she said.

The Armenian Research Center at the University of Michigan-Dearborn will host an unprecedented, multi-disciplinary, international academic conference on “Armenians and the Cold War” on the university’s campus from April 1-3. Thirty scholars from North and South America, Europe, and Armenia will participate in the conference, the reports.

On the international arena, the Cold War extended from the end of Word War II in 1945 to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Armenians around the world, however, had become divided between pro- and anti-Soviet factions as soon as Communists had gotten hold of Eastern Armenia in late 1920’s. The first panel of the conference (featuring speakers Garabet K. Moumdjian, Vahe Sahakyan, and Hazel Antaramian Hofman) will focus on the period from the 1920’s to 1947, and will attempt to explain the political dynamics among Armenians, especially in the diaspora, before the rest of the world formally entered the Cold War era. Discussions during this panel will constitute an important step toward finding out what exactly changed in the Armenian Diaspora and in the relations between the Soviet Armenian homeland and the diaspora with the onset of the global Cold War in the mid-1940’s.

The Cold War inevitably affected the Armenians, not only in Soviet Armenia, but also in the many Armenian communities scattered across the world. This time period will be discussed at the conference through a series of regional panels: Levon Chorbajian, Gregory Aftandilian, and Benjamin F. Alexander will focus on North America. Jirair Jolakian and Astrig Atamian will present papers on conditions among the Armenians in France. Developments in South America will be covered through presentations by Vartan Matiossian, Heitor Loureiro, and Khatchik DerGhougassian. Furthermore, there will be five separate papers on the Armenian communities in the Middle East by Hratch Tchilingirian, James Stocker, Khatchig Mouradian, Eldad Ben-Aharon, and Emre Can Dağlıoğlu. These panels are structured in such a way so as to generate discussion on comparing the specifics of the Cold War fault-lines in various Armenian-inhabited localities and determining the differences in Cold-War-era, intra-Armenian conflict and rivalry from one continent to another. There will also be a separate panel on relations between Soviet Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora during this period (speakers: Nélida Boulgourdjian and Gevorg Petrosyan). A roundtable discussion comparing the chronologies of the global Cold War and the Armenian “Cold War” will cap the political history debate at the conference.

The last two panels will deal with case studies of the impact of the Cold War on Armenian historiography (speakers: Samvel Grigoryan and Anush Hovhannisyan), arts (Neery Melkonian), and popular culture (Tigran Matosyan). Thereafter, the conference will conclude with a second roundtable discussion that will tackle the legacy of the Cold War on Armenians today and make recommendations for future research in this domain.

Panel chairs and discussants also include Cam Amin, Kevork Bardakjian, Tamar Boyadjian, Richard G. Hovannisian, Asbed Kotchikian, Simon Payaslian, Pam Pennock, Ara Sanjian, and Sally Howell.

The goal of the conference organizers is to shed light and encourage further research on a pivotal period in modern Armenian history, the study of which is still in its infancy. By approaching the topic from various angles and disciplines, they hope that this gathering will encourage others to delve into the details of Armenian history in the Cold War era. Moreover, themes like the impact of the Cold War on Armenian literature, migration to and from Soviet Armenia, or the involvement of individual Armenians in espionage on both sides of the international political divide of the Cold War era should also be tackled in the near future. These topics were among those listed in the conference’s call for papers, but the organizers did not receive any proposals.

The conference, which is open to the public, is being supported by the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR); the Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is providing assistance to participants from Armenia. The Armenian Review will devote a special issue to academic articles based on the papers to be delivered at this conference.

The Armenian Research Center was established by Dr. Dennis R. Papazian in 1985, with financial support from the Knights of Vartan organization and particularly from the late Edward and Helen Mardigian. It remains devoted to documentation, research, and publications in the field of Armenian Studies.

 

 

 

PACE President’s statement in Baku contradicts the wording used by the OSCE Minsk Group, as well as the spirit of the proposals on the settlement of the Karabakh conflict and are not conducive to the resolution of the issue, MP Samvel Farmanyan told

The comments come after PACE President Pedro Agramunt declared in Baku that “it is essential that solutions are found to the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and other regions of Azerbaijan.”

“It’s a pity that the President of the Parliamentary Assembly goes against the opinion of the international community and uses the wording used by official Baku.  In this regard, this is a problem not only for us, but also other Council of Europe member states, as Pedro Agramunt’s views do not reflect the opinion of the international community,” said Samvel Farmanyan, who is a member of the Armenian delegation to PACE.

“We must continue working, aware that Azerbaijan uses the statements of international organizations or their leaders for domestic purposes, especially under the conditions of the current socio-economic crisis. We should bring to our international partners that unilateral views are not conducive to the perspectives of the conflict settlement. On the contrary, they can serve a pretext for the Azerbaijani authorities for destabilizing the situation at the line of contact and the Armenian border,” Farmanyan said.