Author: Eduard Nalbandian

The South Ossetian parliament is considering the issue of a vote on recognizing Armenian genocide, citing the Armenian diaspora’s appeal, the parliament’s press release said Wednesday, citing one of the lawmakers, reports.

“The members of the Armenian diaspora are full members of the South Ossetian society, many of whom fought for the freedom and independence of our Republic, went through the harsh times of war with us, and some of them are the descendants of the Armenians who ran away from the genocide,” lawmaker Petr Gassiev was quoted as saying in the press release.

An Azerbaijani civilian – a woman who had crossed the international border into Armenia on 7 June – was repatriated today under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). She was handed over to Azerbaijani officials at the international border, on the road between Ijevan in Armenia and Gazakh in Azerbaijan.

The ICRC, acting as a neutral intermediary, helped the Armenian and Azerbaijani authorities carry out the repatriation. ICRC representatives visited the woman before she was sent back to Azerbaijan to assess her treatment and the conditions in which she was being held.

Based on its mandate under the Geneva Conventions, the ICRC has been present in the region since 1992 in connection with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

From his grandmother beginning at an early age, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Balakian heard occasional hints of a darker family history set in Armenia. And he began to explore a past that remains fought over to this day, the expulsion and killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. Many members of Balakian’s family died. Others, like his grandmother and aunts, survived after a horrific flight on foot.

Balakian would write about these events in history titled “The Burning Tigris” and in a family memoir, “Black Dog of Fate.”

“One of the reasons for my writing “Black Dog of Fate” was to try to make sense of growing up in a family in which a traumatic history was really repressed. It wasn’t spoken about. It was silenced. And yet the leakages that I experienced as a kid growing up in affluent suburbia were beguiling and weird and strange, and they stayed with me,” Peter Balakian said in an interview with

“I began writing poems with a kind of passion, and I never stopped. I was working my way as a young guy in his 20s writing lyric poems. And around the mid to late 1970s, for various reasons, the news of history started percolating in me,” Balakian said.

“And I started understanding more of the big picture of my own family’s historical experience as genocide survivors. The poem in its unique form, its form of compressed language and particular kinds of probe images, I like to call them, or incisive, compressed image language, is capable of going to history and its aftermath in ways that no other literary form can,” the poet added.

“Who drowned waiting in the reeds of the Ararat plain? There, the sky is cochineal. There, the chapel windows open to raw umber and twisted goats. There, the obsidian glistens and the hawks eat out your eyes.”

Many Armenians, including Balakian’s grandmother, fled into what is today Syria. Most were killed or starved to death along the way. In 2009, just before the civil war began, Balakian joined a “60 Minutes” crew in Syria for a report on their fate.

“It was extraordinary then to be there. Looking back at it now, I feel like it’s a dream. But for me, it was also exciting to be there, because there’s a very rich Armenian culture and community in Aleppo and a gorgeous church. And so all that was a kind of connecting with a diasporan culture,” Peter Balakian said.

“And then when the war started, when the war began to just destroy all of this, I would look on, on the screens and on the TV images and the computer images with pain and disbelief that, just in the little case of Armenian cultural life there, churches that were hundreds of years old were gone. Whole communities were disbanded. And if that was true just for the smaller Armenian population of Syria, we all knew what was happening to the broad Syrian population,” he added.

 

 

 

No document will be signed during a new round of talks on Karabakh in June, Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said during the discussions on the 2015 budget execution at the National Assembly.

“The agreements reached in Vienna refer to creation of an investigation mechanism, enlargement of the Office of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, and exclusion of new war,” Minister Nalbandian said.

“At this point we’re working to resume the negotiations. The Minsk Group Co-Chairs will hold separate meetings with the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan. During the meetings we’ll probably continue discussions on the agreements reached in Vienna,” the Minister said.

He added, however, that speaking about the signing of any document is untimely and senseless.

Minister Nalbandian said that the development and conclusion of any deal will be impossible without the participation of Nagorno Karabakh. He noted that Armenia always raises the issue of Artsakh’s involvement in the talks and the matter is included in all working documents that have been discussed up until now.

As for the agreement on mutual military assistance between Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh, Edward Nalbandian said “the steps in that direction have not been clarified. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been tasked with preparing the document, but the next steps will depend on the future developments,” he said.

Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian will meet with the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs in early June.

The Minister announced the plans at the National Assembly.

On Saturday 21 May, with the blessings of His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin will participate in the national event: “Museum Night.”

The Mother Cathedral Museum, and the Ruben Sevak Museum, will be open and free to the public from 14:00 to 24:00.

The results of the meeting of the Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan provide for a basis for cautious optimism on the situation in Nagorno Karabakh, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitryt Peskov has said.

The Presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev had a meeting in Vienna Monday mediated by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairing countries.

“Our Foreign Ministers gave necessary assessments to the situation. We hope there are grounds for cautious optimism that this will allow us to enter a more stable stage,” he said.

Armenia’s Iveta Mukuchyan has won the Wiwibloggs’ Eurovision Next Top Model 2016 contest.

Established in 2009, the competition has become the premier online modeling contest for women competing at Eurovision.

Iveta Mukuchyan received 31.45% (16,266 votes), followed by Samra of Azerbaijan with 22.71% (11,746 votes) and Poli Genova of Bulgaria with 6.95%  (3,596 votes).

Tamar Kaprelian — one-sixth of Armenia’s Genealogy at the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 —won the Wiwibloggs’ search for Eurovision’s Next Top Model last year.

President Serzh Sargsyan received today the Minister of State for European Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France Harlem Désir, President’s Press Office reports.

Welcoming the guest and his delegation, the President of Armenia noted that he recalls with special warmth his meeting with Mr. Désir in October 2015 in the framework of the Ministerial Conference on Francophonie during which they discussed in detail the agenda of the Armenian-French relations, possibilities to develop the Armenia-EU partnership as well as spoke about the NK peace process. The President noted with disappointment that Azerbaijan’s destructive stance and his predictions of the time regarding the possible consequences came true: at the beginning of April, during the aggression unleashed by Azerbaijan, servicemen of that country committed numerous crimes, targeting also civilian dwellings and peaceful population. The NK Defense Army not only held out but also gave a worthy counterblow to the enemy. Azerbaijan nevertheless continues its provocations, and the situation remains tense. At the request of the French State Minister, the President of Armenia presented his views regarding the causes and motives of the situation established at the NK line of contact, as well as regarding his views on its possible resolution.

At the beginning of the meeting, the Minister of State for European Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France Harlem Désir conveyed to Serzh Sargsyan warm regards and best wishes from the President of France François Hollande and reiterated the position of France, which is also a Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, on the resolution of the Nagorno Karabakh problem. He said that in his country they believe that there is no military resolution to this conflict, and France is interested in the resumption of negotiations for the benefit of a peaceful resolution of the problem.

The parties concurred that in this situation it is necessary to expeditiously establish mechanisms for the monitoring of the violations of the ceasefire regime and introduction of the confidence building measures to prevent aggressive interventions and to create a possibility for reaching at the table of negotiations mutually acceptable solutions.

According to Harlem Désir, presence in his delegation of the French Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Pierre Andrieu proves once again that France spares no effort to find a speedy and peaceful solution to the problem.

Romania has been expelled from the Eurovision Song Contest after its national broadcaster failed to pay outstanding debts dating back to 2007, the BBC reports.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) claimed the Romanian public service broadcaster Televiziunea Romana (TVR) owes 16 million Swiss francs.

The EBU described the action to exclude Romania from next month’s contest in Sweden as “regrettable”.

Romania has never won the contest, but came third in 2005 and 2010.

The EBU had called on the Romanian government to make satisfactory arrangements to repay the debt by Wednesday (20 April). The organisation regards the Romanian State as legally obliged to underwrite TVR’s debt.