Author: Eduard Nalbandian

French lawmakers visit Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan

Eduard Nalbandian

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 12:28, 3 May, 2022

YEREVAN, MAY 3, ARMENPRESS. The delegation led by Chair of the France-Armenia Friendship Group in the French Senate Gilbert-Luc Devinaz visited the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan on May 3.

The delegation was accompanied by Head of the Armenia-France Parliamentary Friendship Group Vladimir Vardanyan, the Parliament’s press office said.

The French deputies laid flowers at the Eternal Flame perpetuating the memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide, observed a one-minute of silence and paid homage to the memory of the Holy Martyrs.

The guests also visited the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, got acquainted with the documents certifying the Genocide.

The Chair of the France-Armenia Friendship Group Gilbert-Luc Devinaz left a note in the Memory Book.

2022 Armenian Night at the Pops to feature violinist Diana Adamyan in Boston Pops debut

Eduard Nalbandian
May 9, 2022 Guest Contributor Music, Announcements 0

Diana Adamyan (Photo: Bauer-Schmitz)

BOSTON, Mass. – The Friends of Armenian Culture Society will present the 69th annual Armenian Night at the Pops on Wednesday, June 8 at 8:00 p.m. 

This year, violin sensation Diana Adamyan will appear as soloist with the Boston Pops Orchestra. The 22-year-old virtuoso, winner of the prestigious 2018 Menuhin International Violin Competition, will join the orchestra and music director Keith Lockhart in a performance of a romantic masterpiece – the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E-minor by Felix Mendelssohn. 

Adamyan is quickly gaining an international reputation as one of her generation’s most outstanding violinists. After winning first prize at the Menuhin International—the world’s most prestigious prize for young violinists—she went on to receive first prize in the 2020 Khachaturian Violin Competition, held online due the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adamyan gave her London debut playing Bach’s Double Concerto with Pinchas Zukerman and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2015. She has also appeared at Seiji Ozawa’s Matsumoto Festival in Japan, at Yerevan Perspectives International Music Festival, and at HIMA Festival in Iceland. Adamyan is no stranger to the Boston community, having performed spectacularly with a group of young and talented musicians at Longy School of Music in 2016 in a concert presented by the YerazArt Foundation. Her upcoming engagements include recitals in Tokyo and France and debut appearances with the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester and Göttinger Symphonie Orchester, as well as a performance at the Aspen Music Festival this summer.  

Tony Awards nominee Christopher Jackson will round out the program on June 8, joining Lockhart and the Boston Pops for an unforgettable evening at Symphony Hall. Best known for originating the role of George Washington in Hamilton, Jackson will perform music from Harry Belafonte to In the Heights, drawing from his favorites in pop, soul, Broadway and his own original music, including his Emmy-award winning songs for Sesame Street and The Electric Company. 

Tickets for this concert are available online.




Russian aviation agency extends restrictions on flights to eleven airports until May 13

Eduard Nalbandian

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 12:09, 5 May, 2022

YEREVAN, MAY 5, ARMENPRESS. The Russian Federal Agency for Air Transport has extended restrictions on flights to 11 airports in the southern and central part of the country until 3:45 am May 13, 2022, TASS reports citing the statement of the agency.

Restrictions will be in force in the airports of Anapa, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Gelendzhik, Krasnodar, Kursk, Lipetsk, Rostov-on-Don, Simferopol, and Elista.

“Russian airlines are recommended to carry passengers by alternative routes using the airports of Sochi, Volgograd, Mineralnye Vody, Stavropol, and Moscow. The remaining airports of the Russian Federation operate as normal,” the agency added.

Russia closed part of its airspace in the country’s south for civil aircraft on February 24, 2022, amid the special military operation in Ukraine.

Resistance Movement to hold rally tomorrow in Vanadzor, women’s march to take place in Yerevan

Eduard Nalbandian
NEWS.am
Armenia – May 6 2022
Resistance Movement to hold rally tomorrow in Vanadzor, women’s march to take place in Yerevan
21:06, 06.05.2022

The resistance movement will hold disobedience actions in four directions in the coming days, Resistance Movement moderator, deputy parliament speaker from the opposition bloc “Armenia” Ishkhan Saghatelyan said.

According to him, in the coming days, the participants of the disobedience action “will take all of Yerevan.”  “We will organize the movement first by 4 groups, then by 8 groups, then by 12 groups, and as a result, on the same day, we will take the whole city… Today we showed that there are no closed streets for us, no closed squares,” Saghatelyan said.

He noted that these days the attention of the international press is focused on this square, on the events taking place in Yerevan. He told fellow citizens who have not yet joined the acts of disobedience about what Armenia will become after Nikol Pashinyan leaves. “There will be solidarity in Armenia without Nikol, and the citizen will live safely, freely and well,” assured the deputy speaker of the National Assembly.

According to him, the set tasks are 60-70% completed and they should continue their progress.  Saghatelyan highlighted the rally to be held in Vanadzor tomorrow, as well as the rally at 13:00 in that city. A women’s procession and car rally with music will be held in Yerevan at 12:00, followed by a cultural program with a rally and a procession in the evening (18:00-20:00). The opposition activist closed his speech with the slogan “Struggle! Unity! Victory!”.


Armenia Opposition Demands PM Resign Over Karabakh

Eduard Nalbandian
International Business Times
May 2 2022
By Mariam HARUTYUNYAN

Opposition parties in Armenia on Monday staged protests to demand Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s resign over his policy on the long-contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Arch-foe Caucasus neighbours Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a dispute since the 1990s over the mountainous enclave in Azerbaijan predominantly populated by ethnic Armenians.

Karabakh was at the centre of a six-week war in 2020 that claimed more than 6,500 lives before it ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Opposition parties now accuse Pashinyan of plans to give away all of Karabakh to Azerbaijan after he told lawmakers last month that the “international community calls on Armenia to scale down demands on Karabakh”.

Opposition parties in Armenia staged a second day of protests on May 2, 2022 over allegations that the prime minister plans to cede a disputed region to arch-foe Azerbaijan Photo: AFP / Karen MINASYAN

Waving Armenian and Karabakh flags and shouting demands for Pashinyan to step down, some 5,000 protesters marched on Monday evening in central Yerevan.  

“We are launching a popular protest movement to force Pashinyan to resign,” parliament vice speaker and opposition leader Ishkhan Saghatelyan told AFP ahead of the rally.

“He is a traitor, he has lied to the people,” he said, accusing the 46-year-old leader of wanting to hand over the contested region to Azerbaijan. “He has no popular mandate to do so.”

Saghatelyan said “protests will not stop until Pashinyan goes.”

On Sunday (May 1, 2022), thousands of protesters gathered in Armenia’s capital to protest against concessions to Azerbaijan over the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region Photo: AFP / Karen MINASYAN

One of the demonstrators, 53-year-old dentist Hripsime Mkrtchyan, said: “Nikol must resign. His poor policy has led to territorial and human losses.”

“Our people have never been in such a depressed mood. We don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

‘We are launching a popular protest movement to force (Prime Minister) Pashinyan to resign,’ parliament vice speaker and opposition leader Ishkhan Saghatelyan told AFP ahead of the rally Photo: AFP / Karen MINASYAN

Earlier in the morning, public transport was disrupted in Yerevan as small groups of protesters attempted to block traffic in the city centre.

Police intervened, briefly detaining dozens of protesters.

The Union of Journalists, a media advocacy group, criticised police tactics as heavy-handed, saying there were several instances of officers punching journalists covering the protests.

On Sunday, several thousand protesters rallied in central Yerevan to demand Pashinyan’s resignation.

Under the Moscow-brokered deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled for decades and Russia deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the truce.

The pact was seen in Armenia as a national humiliation and sparked weeks of anti-government protests, leading Pashinyan to call snap parliamentary polls which his party, Civil Contract, won last September.

In April, Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met for rare EU-mediated talks in Brussels after which they tasked their foreign ministers to “begin preparatory work for peace talks.”

The meeting came after a flare-up in Karabakh on March 25 that saw Azerbaijan capture a strategic village in the area under the Russian peacekeepers’ responsibility, killing three separatist troops.

Baku tabled in mid-March its set of framework proposals for the peace agreement that includes both sides’ mutual recognition of territorial integrity, meaning Yerevan should agree on Karabakh being part of Azerbaijan.

Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan sparked controversy at home when he said — commenting on the Azerbaijani proposal — that for Yerevan “the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not a territorial issue, but a matter of rights” of the local ethnic-Armenian population.

Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing conflicts claimed around 30,000 lives.

https://www.ibtimes.com/armenia-opposition-demands-pm-resign-over-karabakh-3491850

Opposition party slams violence, hate speech against journalists covering peaceful protests in Yerevan

Eduard Nalbandian
Panorama
Armenia – May 2 2022

The opposition Homeland Party led by Artur Vanetsyan has denounced the violence and hate speech against journalists reporting on the peaceful anti-government protests in Yerevan.

In a statement on Monday, the party stated that the mass civil disobedience campaign launched in Yerevan and other parts of Armenia on Monday was met with “disproportionate and brutal force” by the incumbent authorities.

“The ruling regime, which is ready to “lower the bar” on issues concerning the security of Artsakh and Armenia, has raised the bar of repressions against its own citizens, unlawfully detaining hundreds of peaceful protesters, including dozens of Homeland Party members,” it said.

“The acts of violence and hate speech against members of the media reporting on the peaceful protests which have been ordered and carried out by some top officials are particularly noteworthy.

“The Homeland Party strongly condemns as unacceptable the unlawful steps of the ruling regime in Armenia,” the party said, drawing the attention of the international community and human rights groups to such incidents and urging law enforcement officers to defy the “illegal orders”.

It stressed that the nationwide movement “cannot be stopped and will definitely succeed.”

Belgian MPs visit Armenian Genocide monument in Brussels vandalized earlier this week

Eduard Nalbandian
Public Radio of Armenia
Armenia – April 28 2022
April 28, 2022, 21:10

 Less than a minute

The staff of the Armenian Embassy in Belgium once again honoured the memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide at the khachkar-memorial in Henri Michaux Square in Brussels.

The monument had recently become a target of cultural vandalism, but was restored within hours thanks to Ixelles authorities.

Members of the Belgian Parliament from the New Flemish Alliance – Allessia Claes, Karl Vanlouwe, Andries Gryffroy and Mark Demesmaeker also honoured the memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide, while protesting against the act of vandalism towards the memorial.

Human Rights Defender of Armenia: Impunity creates and justifies new crimes

Eduard Nalbandian
ARMINFO
Armenia –
Alina Hovhannisyan

ArmInfo. Tomorrow is the 107th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, but justice has not still been restored.  This is stated in the statement of Human Rights Defender  of Armenia Kristina Grigoryan on the occasion of the 107th  anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

“The rights of murdered and mutilated men, women and elderly,  orphaned children, of Armenians forcibly displaced from their homes,  and of people who have been subjected to inhuman, degrading treatment  and punishment due to their ethnicity and religion have not been  restored. Many of them died, carrying all those brutal scenes in  front of their eyes, they died missing their relatives and homeland,  expecting that at least future generations would witness the  restoration of justice.

The denial policy of indisputable events, which Turkey has been  conducting for more than a century, continues to challenge the  effective implementation of international law aimed at establishing  universal norms for the condemnation, prevention and prosecution of  crimes against humanity.

Efforts to establish and improve human rights, the rule of law, and  universal international mechanisms for justice newly promoted after  World War I continue to be overshadowed by this condemnable policy of  Turkey.

Impunity creates and justifies new crimes.

Unfortunately, the dangers of genocidal policy based on ethnic and  religious hatred has not disappeared for our people. The gravest and  most recent evidence is the documented Azerbaijani-Turkish joint  crimes against ethnic Armenians during the 2020 war. The  state-sponsored propaganda of ethnic and religious hatred and the  criminal acts are still carried out by Azerbaijani state against the  Armenians of Artsakh, aiming to annihilate Artsakh from its native  people, destroy the monuments and samples of the centuries- old  Armenian culture, erase the Armenian traces, to make impossible the  life of Armenians in their homeland.

Today we pay tribute to the memory of the innocent victims of the  Armenian Genocide, reaffirming that condemnation of crime, punishment  of the guilty, and restoration of justice can prevent future crimes,”  the statement reads.  

Pashinyan addresses reactions to speech on international community’s calls to lower the bar on NK status

Eduard Nalbandian

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 16:47,

YEREVAN, APRIL 22, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addressed the discussions that were prompted by his speech where he said that the international community is calling on Armenia to lower the bar in the issue of the Nagorno Karabakh status.

Speaking at the Cabinet meeting, Pashinyan said the reactions to his statement are perplexing.

“The proposals presented by the OSCE Minsk Group in 2016 on the Nagorno Karabakh resolution are none other than a document on lowering the bar because the key meaning of that document was the indefinite delay of the status issue of Nagorno Karabakh. By saying indefinite it was meant decades, if not longer. In the 2016 proposals, the proposal on delegating the Nagorno Karabakh status issue to international bodies was also a similar lowering of the bar, moreover the kind of bodies that had already previously expressed a position around the issue within the framework of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity. Such call to lower the bar was also the OSCE 1996 Lisbon summit and the 1999 idea of a ‘common state’. The 2001 Key West process was such a call to lower the bar, so were the 2007 Madrid Principles, upon which the 2016 January, July and August proposals were based. Various documents adopted by various international bodies since the 1990s contained direct or indirect calls for lowering the bar. And the fact that the meaning of these facts were carefully hidden from our public doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist,” Pashinyan said.

“In the short-term, mid-term and long-term our tactics is the following: to ensure the kind of situation or solution that Artsakhis live in Artsakh, and like I’ve said in my April 14 speech to parliament, for them to live in a way that they feel themselves Karabakhi, Artsakhi and Armenian. Any resolution of the Nagorno Karabakh issue or any development established in Nagorno Karabakh that not only would not ensure these conditions but also won’t guarantee it is unacceptable for us and will never be acceptable for us,” Pashinyan said. He said that this is the key part of the issue, everything else are “toasts”.

“And the forces that want the Armenian government to adopt toasts that would result in a new war being unleashed and the exodus of Armenians of Artsakh, these forces are the ones who surrendered and are surrendering not only Artsakh but also the Republic of Armenia. But we can also be sure that we will not allow this, the people of Armenia will not allow it. We will also not allow various instigating statements that seek to deviate us from the peace agenda. We will not allow it because we are convinced that the peace agenda would ensure the future of the Republic of Armenia and Artsakh,” Pashinyan said.

Russia Accuses U.S. and EU of Undermining Karabakh Settlement

Eduard Nalbandian
by Asbarez Staff

 

 

 

in Armenia, Artsakh, Featured Story, Latest, News, Top Stories

Russian peacekeeping forces stationed in Artsakh

Russia on Thursday accused the United States and its European allies of effectively undermining efforts to find a settlement to the Karabakh conflict and usurping Moscow’s initiatives to advance relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The United States and France have not signaled their readiness to resume the activities of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Thursday in a statement.

“We have not received such signals, and do not even expect it,” said her statement posted on the ministry’s website.

Zakharova accused Washington and Paris of “actually paralyzed the work of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs by refusing the cooperation with Russia’s involvement.”

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week said that the U.S. and France, driven by their “Russophobia” have excluded Moscow from the co-charing process, citing the West’s rebuke of Russia over the Ukraine conflict. All three co-chairing countries—Russia, France and the U.S.—have confirmed this through their diplomatic channels but have maintained that the group has a role to play in advancing a settlement of the Karabakh conflict.

In separate visits to Moscow, both Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said Yerevan wants the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs to mediate a settlement to the Karabakh conflict and assist in advancing so-called “peace talks” with Azerbaijan.

The Co-chairs of France and U.S., Brice Roquefeuil and Andrew Shofer, visited Yerevan in recent weeks and emphasized the key role their countries are willing to continue to play in the Karabakh settlement process. Meanwhile the Russian co-chair, Igor Khovaev was named the special envoy for the normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Zakharova went on to accuse Brussels of overtly usurping Russian efforts to advance relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“Such coincidences are not accidental,” said Zakharova. “Like the overt attempt by Brussels to make the well-known Russian-Azerbaijani-Armenian high-level agreements (demarcation of the state border between Azerbaijan and Armenia, restoration of transport communication) and the agenda proposed by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs last year (urgent humanitarian issues, reparation of a peace treaty between Baku and Yerevan) their own.”

“In this context, we reaffirm our unconditional commitment to consistently implement the statements of the leaders of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia of November 9, 2020, January 11, November 26, 2021,” Zakharova emphasized.

“At the same time, we are determined to contribute in every way to the conclusion of a peace treaty between Azerbaijan and Armenia, with which we have historically been linked by friendship, allied and partnering relations,” Zakharova said.