News.am, Armenia
10:55, 22.03.2020
Author: David Nargizian
Armenian President receives French Ambassador
15:08,
YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. President Armen Sarkissian had a meeting with French Ambassador to Armenia Jonathan Lacôte, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.
The Armenian President and the French Ambassador discussed the current situation caused by the novel coronavirus around the world. The Ambassador presented the situation in France and the actions taken to prevent the spread of the virus. The sides discussed the possible cooperation on this direction.
Talking about the cooperation projects between the two countries in various areas, the President and the Ambassador in particular considered prospective the partnership in new technologies. In this context the President introduced the presidential initiative ATOM (Advanced Tomorrow) aimed at technology, science and education development in Armenia, as well as bringing high-tech companies to Armenia to be engaged in development of artificial intelligence, math modeling, etc. Soon memorandums of understanding will be signed with several famous French companies, and there are also preliminary agreements with others.
The sides also exchanged views on the cooperation opportunities with French scientific-educational institutions in the field of new technologies.
Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
Armenian PM holds phone talk with Russian counterpart
17:04,
KAPAN, MARCH 10, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan today held a telephone conversation with Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, Pashinyan said during a referendum campaign in Kapan town.
“During this period I had a telephone conversation with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. We have discussed our actions in the ongoing developments in the global market, the global economy”, Pashintan said during the campaign.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan today started the campaign for YES vote in the upcoming referendum which is scheduled on April 5.
Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
Armenia Charges Former Defense Minister With Embezzlement
The New York Times
March 4 2020
By
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March 4, 2020
YEREVAN — Armenian investigators have charged a former defense minister with the embezzlement of more than $2 million in state funds, the spokeswoman for the state investigation service said on Wednesday.
Seyran Ohanyan, who was the ex-Soviet republic’s defense minister from 2008 to 2016, was under investigation for alleged squandering of state property and has been banned from leaving the country while awaiting trial, Marina Ohanjanyan told Reuters.
Ohanyan is also being investigated on suspicion of acting unlawfully during the events of March 2008, when 10 people were killed in clashes between police and protesters following a disputed presidential election.
Ohanyan and his representatives were not reachable by Reuters for comment on the charges and the ongoing investigations.
Dozens of former Armenian officials, including former president Robert Kocharyan, have previously been arrested on different charges and are awaiting trial. Kocharyan denies wrongdoing.
Kocharyan’s successor, Serzh Sarksyan, is also under investigation on suspicion of exceeding his authority and embezzling of around $1 million in state funds.
Sarksyan stepped down in April 2018 following protests over him going back on a promise not to become prime minister of the South Caucasus country of around 3 million after two terms as the president.
Critics have accused Sarksyan and his former allies of cracking down on democracy, corruption and mismanagement during their time in power Armenia, a country that depends heavily on Russian aid and investment. They deny those allegations.
(Reporting by Nvard Hovhannisyan; writing by Margarita Antidze; Editing by Toby Chopra)
The United States Needs to Declare War on Proxies
The Foreign Policy
Feb 27 2020
The most important takeaway from the killing of Qassem Suleimani doesn’t just have to do with Iran.
By Svante E. Cornell, Brenda Shaffer | , 5:34 AM
A demonstrator holds a flag of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic as he is carried by fellow activists dressed as zombies outside the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev on March 17, 2015. SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images
There has been no shortage of debate about the killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani and its effects on U.S. foreign policy toward Iran and the broader Middle East. Not nearly enough has been said about whether it can broadly serve as a model for dealing with the problems posed by proxy forces elsewhere in the world.
By killing Suleimani, the United States indicated it would no longer tolerate Iran’s use of proxies to circumvent its responsibility for killing Americans and for other acts of terrorism and mass bloodshed. Washington decided to deal with the source of the terrorism, not its emissaries. The same principle should apply to the many proxy regimes established by various states—Russia most prominently—to circumvent responsibility for illegal military occupations.
Countries around the world are increasingly realizing that the most convenient way to occupy foreign territories is to set up a proxy with the ceremonial trappings of a state, including governments, parliaments, and flags. Why go through all that trouble? Because the norms of the liberal international order, which outlaw changing boundaries by force, risk leading to sanctions for the perpetrator state. Creating a proxy regime generates a convenient falsehood that obfuscates reality and helps states evade such consequences.
The most systematic user of this tactic is Russia. Since the early 1990s, it has manipulated ethnic conflicts in three different states and helped set up nominally independent entities over which it exerts control. Moscow’s practice began in Moldova’s Transnistria region and in two breakaway territories of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Following Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in the early 2000s, the Kremlin’s control of these territories became tighter. Putin appointed Russian military and security officials to ministerial positions in the governing structures of these territories, indicating their direct subordination to Russia. Following its 2008 war with Georgia, Russia established permanent military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and formally recognized the independence of the two territories. This allowed Moscow to create a fictive legal basis for its military presence, based on so-called interstate agreements it signed with its proxies.
But until the 2008 war, the United States and European Union treated Russia like an arbiter in these conflicts, long after it was clear it was in fact a party to them. Twice a year, for example, Western powers approved extensions to the U.N. monitoring mission in the Abkhazia conflict that included overt praise for a Russian “peacekeeping” force that in fact was part of Moscow’s effort to shore up Abkhazia’s separation from Georgia. Even today, only rarely do Western powers refer to these lands as what they are: occupied territories.
Moscow’s tactic proved so successful in undermining the statehood of Georgia and Moldova that the Kremlin decided to use the same tactic in eastern Ukraine. And it worked: Contrast the international reaction to any of these conflicts with Moscow’s invasion of Crimea. Unlike these other cases, Moscow annexed Crimea outright, thereby accepting responsibility for its actions. This led to serious sanctions that remain in force to this day. But where Moscow hid behind the fiction of a “Donetsk People’s Republic,” which it created from thin air, it has largely escaped those consequences.
Similarly, Armenia not only occupied a sixth of Azerbaijan’s territory in the war in the early 1990s but evicted 700,000 occupants of these lands. But Armenia is subject to no sanctions whatsoever, mainly because Yerevan hides behind the fiction that it is not really a party to the conflict at all but that the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh is. Never mind that Nagorno-Karabakh’s two most prominent leaders went on to serve as Armenia’s presidents for 20 years and that other senior officials rotate seamlessly between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The entity’s most recent foreign minister was an Armenian diplomat for several decades, and on completion of his term in Nagorno-Karabakh, he returned to the Foreign Ministry in Yerevan. Likewise, Armenia’s deputy chief of the general staff was immediately appointed to serve as the defense minister of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2015. As in Russia’s case, the fiction of a proxy regime seems enough to achieve impunity. Even a considerable Armenian effort to build settlements in the occupied territories has led to a yawn in the international community.
Still, the United States has entertained the notion that Nagorno-Karabakh is somehow separate from Armenia. The U.S. Justice Department record of foreign agents in the United States lists “Nagorno Karabakh” and allows the so-called “Nagorno Karabakh Republic” to present itself as a foreign government and not listed under the Armenia filing. Several members of the U.S. Congress host meetings with the proxy representatives, often visit the region and hold direct meetings with Armenians from the occupied territory, and some even refer to Nagorno-Karabakh as a state. Few, if any, Western leaders point out the exchange of personnel between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, let alone impose any consequences for it.
Through establishing proxies, occupying states succeed to not be labeled as such. U.S. officials rarely mention Armenia’s occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh or Russia’s occupation of Abkhazia and Transnistria the way they refer to Russia’s occupation of Crimea or Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights. U.S. government-funded media broadcasts like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty use awkward wording to avoid saying directly that Armenia’s forces occupy Nagorno-Karabakh: The “region has been under the control of ethnic-Armenian forces that Azerbaijan says include troops supplied by Armenia” and “Armenia-backed separatist forces,” ignoring the fact that they are official units of the military of Armenia and that Armenia’s press regularly reports that Armenian soldiers are killed in skirmishes in the conflict zone. The U.S. government-sponsored broadcasts also avert stating that Moscow occupies regions of Ukraine and Georgia, preferring “Moscow-backed separatists in Ukraine’s eastern regions of Donetsk” and “Moscow-backed breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”
Why this double standard? Maybe because the United States, EU, and the international system writ large are happy to have an easy way out. If accepting the fiction of a proxy helps reduce the load on their policy agenda, they appear happy to do so. The U.S. State Department does not challenge these fictions. It is a convenient non-truth that removes the issues from the State Department’s policy agenda. In Europe, however, the European Court of Human Rights has established that Russia exerts “effective control” in Transnistria and that Armenia does so in Nagorno-Karabakh. The EU has yet to allow these determinations to guide its policies, but at least, key institutions have begun to question the fiction of the proxy regimes.
Why do proxies matter? Are they not just one of the many inequities in international politics that, while regrettable, are just a fact a of life? There are two key reasons the United States should pay more attention to this problem. First, the fiction of proxies has directly caused greater instability in areas important to U.S. national interests. And second, they effectively serve to make conflict resolution impossible.
The danger of the use of proxies is that its effectiveness has made it increasingly popular. When weighing options in Ukraine in 2014 and onward, Putin no doubt operated on the basis of the Russian experience in Georgia and Moldova: Setting up proxies in eastern Ukraine would achieve the goal of undermining Ukraine and blocking its move toward NATO while carrying few costs for Russia. While Putin may have underestimated the tenacity of the U.S.-led sanctions regime, his calculation was essentially correct. Thus, because the West tolerated the proxy fiction in small states like Georgia and Moldova, it now has to deal with a threat to a much larger European state. If that works, the strategy will be used elsewhere, too.
Further, if the proxy model is allowed to continue, others will copy it. What is to stop Israel from telling the Palestinians to talk to the “Republic of Judea and Samaria” any time they have a problem with soldiers or settlers in the West Bank? Perhaps Israel would have spared itself a lot of headaches if it had declared a so-called independent state in the occupied territories. Why should Myanmar not blame Rakhine forces for the killing of Rohingya and thus evade international responsibility as a sovereign? It works for Russia and Armenia.
Similarly, the proxy fiction by design makes conflict resolution impossible. Whenever there is pressure on Armenia to make concessions in its conflict with Azerbaijan, for example, Armenian leaders emphasize that negotiations should really be held with the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, thus evading responsibility for their military occupation—and escaping any consequences for it. The fact that Armenia is not willing to even admit that its forces are actively at war with Azerbaijan is not a basis for confidence-building in the peace process.
The proxies also facilitate illicit activity. With no state formally acknowledging its control and therefore responsibility for activity in the proxy regimes, these regions have become centers of human trafficking, money laundering, and counterfeit goods production. They are also likely locations of sanctions violations, for Russia and for Iran.
In the Middle East, the Trump administration understood that Iran’s use of proxies was helping it undermine U.S. interests and the stability of a half-dozen states in its neighborhood. It is now working to put an end to this subterfuge. The time has now come for Washington to take steps to call the bluff in Eurasia as well and stop effectively rewarding the use of proxies that undermine conflict resolution efforts and the stability of key U.S. partners.
Svante Cornell is the director of the American Foreign Policy Council’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and co-founder of the Institute for Security and Development Policy. Cornell is the author, with Brenda Shaffer, of the report “Occupied Elsewhere: Selective Policies on Occupations, Protracted Conflicts, and Territorial Disputes,” published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Rustam Badasyan found it difficult to answer who will consider the issue of the legality of the results of the upcoming referendum
Arminfo, Armenia
Feb 25 2020
ArmInfo. Minister of Justice Rustam Badasyan found it difficult to answer the question of the deputy from the Enlightened Armenia faction Sergey Bagratyan, who would consider the legality of the results of the upcoming referendum on constitutional amendments.
He stated that this was a rather tricky question. “If there are statements, then we will certainly discuss them,” Badasyan assured. However, such an answer did not completely satisfy Bagratyan, who stated that the minister appeared in parliament precisely to clarify all tricky issues.
“The only ground on which parliamentary factions can appeal to the Constitutional Court are violations that can affect the course or results of the referendum. There are no other grounds for appeal to the Constitutional Court,” the minister emphasized.
Note that the referendum on constitutional amendments will be held on April 5. The campaign began on February 17 and will last until April 3. The draft amendments to the Constitution provides for the termination of powers of the Chairman of the Constitutional Court Hrayr Tovmasyan and members of the court appointed before the reform of the Constitution in 2015.
Alen Simonyan to participate in inauguration ceremony of newly elected President of Uruguay
15:42,
YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 22, ARMENPRESS. Vice President of the National Assembly of Armenia Alen Simonyan will participate in the inauguration ceremony of newly elected President of Uruguay Luis Lacalle Pou, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the parliament of Armenia.
Simonyan will leave for Uruguay from February 28 until March 3.
Robert Kocharyan: People have already resolved the Karabakh issue
Arminfo, Armenia
Feb 17 2020
ArmInfo. The portal of the second president of Armenia 2rd.am on its Facebook page published excerpts from the speech of the second president of Armenia Robert Kocharyan, which reflect his position on the Karabakh issue.
In particular, he notes: “Our people have already resolved the Karabakh issue. The negotiations today have one goal, to legitimize what we already have today on this land,” the second president of Armenia emphasizes.
“I would like to emphasize that the current situation around Nagorno-Karabakh is the consequence of the aggression of Azerbaijan in 1991-1992 with the aim of ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population, as well as Azerbaijan’s refusal to accept the latest proposals of mediators to resolve the conflict,” Kocharyan emphasized.
In response to a question from the head of the Azerbaijani delegation to PACE, the second president of Armenia stated: “The world recognizes the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and we recognize it. But the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic has nothing to do with the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. Because you never had it. “And you gained independence together with the Karabakh people. I participated in the hostilities and I am proud of the result that we have today.”
It should be noted that on February 15, during a security conference in Munich, a discussion took place between the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan and the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.
Aliyev, in particular, noted that Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan and the settlement of the conflict is possible only if it is returned to the AR. He also added that Artsakh’s belonging to Azerbaijan is recognized by the international community, and it is an integral part of Azerbaijan.
In turn, Nikol Pashinyan said: “Karabakh was never part of independent Azerbaijan. Karabakh was included in Azerbaijan only during the existence of the Soviet Union. Therefore, when we talk about the territorial integrity of the state, we must first decide which state we are talking about >, “he said, recalling that Artsakh left the Azerbaijan SSR and the Soviet Union in the same way as the Azerbaijan SSR left the USSR.”
Music: Greek-Armenian singer: ‘I have always wanted to represent Armenia in Eurovision’
Aravot, Armenia
Feb 12 2020
Greek-Armenian singer: ‘I have always wanted to represent Armenia in Eurovision’
February 12,2020 20:23 79
Greek-Armenian singer and participant in the British X-Factor, Athena Manoukian, said during a press conference at the Armenpress press club that she always wanted to represent Armenia in Eurovision. “I decided to participate in Eurovision so that Armenia can be proud of me,” the singer said. She also said that she knows the other singers and that they are all unique. She is convinced that everyone will have a good performance.
Regarding her song, Manoukian said that she produced it along with DJ Pako. But the main message of the song is that everyone has a diamond shining inside of them that other people try to take away.
Athena said that she would like to perform in Armenian. She said that she discovered Armenia within the framework of the program and she visited many places. She wants to see Swan Lake, the Armenian Genocide Memorial Museum, and the Geghard Monastery. However, she expressed pity that, despite the fact that many attempts have been made for her to visit these places, she does not have enough time.
This is the first time that Athena has been to Armenia. She held a concert at the Yerevan Mall. According to her, her family also would like to visit Armenia.
The singer said that she has experience performing on stage and that she is certain she will do her best in representing Armenia at Eurovision.
She wishes to write songs in Armenia and collaborate with representatives of the Armenian show business. She has already learned a few sentences in Armenian, such as “Hello,” “How are you?” “I am proud to be Armenian,” “Thank you,” “Goodbye,” and others.
At the end of the press conference, Athena Manoukian performed a small part of her song.
Gohar Hakobyan
Tigran Avinyan: Digitization is quickly progressing in Armenia
iTel.am, Armenia
Feb 10 2020
Deputy Prime Minister of Armenia Tigran Avinyan and Head of CoE office in Yerevan Natalia Voutova have discussion opportunities for cooperation in digitization, e-judiciary and cyber security during the meeting in Yerevan today.
The parties have also discussed AI-related matters in the context of human rights protection.
Tigran Avinyan has touched on the Armenia-CoE action plan for 2019-2022, launched last year.
He has noted that digitization is quickly progressing in Armenia and underlined the importance of Armenia-CoE cooperation in the areas of mutual interest.