Author: Emil Lazarian

The recent escalation caught many by surprise, emboldening voices among the political opposition. 

Ahmad Mammadli had been a vocal critic of Azerbaijan’s authorities since his student years. It was a call for peace with neighbouring Armenia and condemnation of President lham Aliyev, however, which  put the 21-year-old chair of the pro-democracy group Democracy-1918 (D18) on the police’s radar.

“Ilham Aliyev will definitely answer before the international courts one day for the crimes he committed not only against the Azerbaijani people, but also against the Armenian people,” Mammadil wrote on September 15, adding “The first task of democratic Azerbaijan will be to punish those who make nations hostile to each other.”

Five days later, on September 20, he was taken into custody on charges of resisting police. 

While still rare, Mammadli’s outspoken stance is in line with an increasing number of public figures questioning Aliyev’s recent military decisions.

On September 12 fighting re-erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan, claiming the lives of more than 200 servicemen over two days. It was the deadliest outbreak of violence since the 2020 six-week war the two countries fought over Nagorny Karabakh, the region internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but populated and controlled by ethnic Armenians since the mid-1990s. Back then, Azerbaijani society and nearly all political opposition supported the government’s decision to go to war to regain the control of the de facto statelet. 

Fears of new fighting are gaining traction on social media as the Russia-brokered ceasefire is holding by a fine thread. For decades, Russia has been the security guarantor in the region but its role has faded as its fortunes reverse in Ukraine. This time Azerbaijani forces shelled inside Armenia, with troops remaining inside its sovereign territory, including on heights around the resort town of Jermuk.

Following the most recent spike in violence, Mammadli tweeted, “Those who have seen the horrors of war and lost their loved ones are against the current military conflicts, while the bloodthirsty ones behind the keyboard push people to their deaths. Understanding this seems to have become quite a difficult task for those in euphoria.”

Plain clothes police officers subsequently abducted the activist, who was sentenced to 30 days in jail on charges commonly used in Azerbaijan to silence critics. Speaking from a police van in a video filmed by a fellow D18 member, Mammadli said he was arrested because of his pro-peace posts. 

“If I’m a criminal for speaking out about peace, I’m proud of it,” he said. He has since gone on hunger strike.

CALLS FOR PEACE

Support for the war against Armenia over Karabakh is strong and the loss of the region is an open wound in society, not least for about 869,000 Azerbaijani who were displaced as a result of the conflict. 

Voices calling for peace are few and far between, and Mammadli’s arrest was cheered on social media. 

“We are the only political organisation coming out and calling for peace. We knew these [reactions] would happen,” Afiaddin Mammadov, a board member of D18, told IWPR.  “We are trying to shape a new society and making efforts for peacebuilding…The other people’s lack of support for us doesn’t concern us. We will stand for our position, keep talking about peace…Our goal is to play a main role in building peace between the two nations in a democratic environment.” 

The most recent escalation caught many by surprise, emboldening more voices among the political opposition. 

Political youth organisation NIDA Citizen Movement stated that “ending the ethnic conflict that has been going on for more than 30 years and establishing lasting peace between peoples cannot be ensured through war and force. War serves no other purpose than to intensify mutual aggression, hatred and suffering, and to fuel enmity between nations”. 

As casualties increased – Azerbaijan lost 80 servicemen over two days, with 281 injured – critical voices spoke out, questioning the government’s legal and moral grounds for the fighting. Among them were the two main opposition parties, who supported Aliyev in the 2020 war.

“Now every Azerbaijani is thinking about this question, why did we lose so many?” Ali Karimli, leader of the Popular Front Party, wrote on Facebook. “Fifty people in just a few hours of battle with the ‘starving’ enemy? So many losses were made without gaining anything.”

Arif Hajili, chairman of the Musavat Party, posted, “What was the purpose of this? What is the result?”

Azerbaijanis living in exile added their voices to the criticism.

“Azerbaijan is stepping over Armenia’s internationally recognized border and is stepping into a new war,” said Tural Sadigli, the editor-in-chief of social media-based news outlet Azad Soz (Free Speech), who lives in Germany.

 In a Youtube discussion with other anti-war activists, US-based journalist Sevinj Osmangizi asked,”

“Why do we have to fight on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border while there are separatists [in Nagorno-Karabakh], and move forward on to Armenia’s territory? What does it accomplish? What kind of logic is it?”

The increasing war fatigue was not directed to Karabakh however, which largely remains under Armenian control with 2,000 Russian peacekeepers deployed as part of the November 2020 ceasefire agreement.

Writer Samad Shikhi pointed out that “the incident is happening in the territory of Armenia, not ours? The world will call us invaders”. He maintained that opposition figures began to criticise the entry of the Azerbaijani army into the territory of Armenia “out of necessity”.

“Taking into account the international pressures, they considered it right to oppose it,” he told IWPR, referring to wide condemnation of Azerbaijan’s incursion inside Armenian territory. In a bold diplomatic sign, US House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Armenia on September 17, becoming the highest-ranking American official to visit the South Caucasus nation since it gained independence 30 years ago.

On the same day, Gənclər Birliyi, the youth wing of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party (YAP) posted a video of anti-war figures on Facebook, with the hashtag “#xainləritanı” – “know the traitors”.

“A part of the population believes in the state narrative of ‘we are in our own land, we have not crossed into the territory of Armenia,’” Shikhi explained. “Some know about the occupation, and a part of them are against it, and others support it. The latter are usually government officials and nationalists.

“But to answer which is the majority, I would say that the majority is in favour of capturing more land from Armenia,” he continued. “Aliyev also gains the upper hand from this and is able to shape public opinion.”

The Milwaukee Rep is bringing back its production of Titanic The Musical this fall after the final two weeks of its original production had to be canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Managing director Melissa Vartanian’s family was supposed to come from all over the country to see it, and not just because she works at The Rep. She has a uniquely personal connection to the Titanic — her great-grandfather was a survivor.

Her great-grandfather, David Vartanian, fled the Ottoman Empire when young Armenian men were being drafted by the Turkish army and military.

When Melissa was growing up, she used to beg her grandparents to tell her the fantasy-like stories of their lives. At the time, she didn’t understand the weight that accompanied those stories.

Some of the questions she would ask her grandmother were: “‘Tell us about the time that your dad was on the boat and … how he jumped off, or tell us a story about the genocide and your mom and, you know, that time she had to hide in the pile of dead bodies.”

“As a kid, it was a story. The gravity of the horrors that they went through did not hit us at the time,” Melissa shares.

Later, those horrors sank in. On the night the Titanic sunk, David had been playing card games and gone to bed. He was woken up in the middle of the night by a thud and was directed to the ship’s back end. He watched women and children board lifeboats, but as the number of boats left dwindled, it became apparent it was every person for themselves.

David and a few others spotted a boat on one of the upper decks. They cut it down, and despite not speaking the same language, they released it into the water and, after, jumped into the water. However, after getting the boat into the water, David didn’t immediately board the boat — he sank two times, and the third time he came up from underwater, he swam with all his might towards the boat. Other passengers pulled him up, paddling to get as far away. The ship sank when they got about 20 yards away from the Titanic.

“And he said that it made a horrible noise that he heard shrieking and moaning and horrible, horrible noises that were coming from the people and just everything around them,” Melissa shares.

Because the boat David had boarded was so close to the Titanic when it sank, the water from that washed him out of the boat he was in and he made his way to another boat. He recalled everyone being in a state of shock.

It was hours before the Carpathia found him and the others. David suffered from nerve damage in his legs for the rest of his life, walking with a limp, a cane and a blue hue along his calves. After his three-day stay at the hospital, David was given new clothes, $10 and a ticket to Branford.

“April 15th, which is when Titanic sank, is also my great-grandfather’s 22nd birthday. So he spent his birthday sort of fighting for his life, but thankfully survived it,” Melissa explains.

While David did not like to talk much about his harrowing experiences on the Titanic, Melissa says her grandmother says it is important. She says that everyone on that ship has a story and people who love and care about them. “And if we don’t talk about those stories, and we don’t honor the memory, we’re doing a real disservice to those that came before us that went through so much,” Melissa says.

With that sentiment in mind, Melissa looks forward to The Milwaukee Rep’s production of Titanic The Musical this fall. Melissa believes with the company’s stage direction and score, people will be taken to a new place.

“So it’s not just about telling the story of the sinking, but it’s about giving you a true glimpse as to who the humans were on the boat, and where they were coming from, and what their hopes and dreams were, and what everybody was trying to attain when they came here,” she says.

The Milwaukee Rep’s production of ‘Titanic The Musical’ is on stage September 20 through October 23, 2022.

https://www.wuwm.com/2022-09-21/as-titanic-the-musical-returns-milwaukee-reps-managing-director-shares-her-personal-connection 

A five-minute walk from the imposing 204-year-old St Andrew’s Church in central Kolkata, is a narrow bylane, so short that it would not take longer than a minute to reach the other end of it. Amid the overwhelming chaos of the heart of the city, it is easy to overlook Sukeas Lane.

This week, Armenia celebrated 31 years of independence, but it also faced renewed attacks from neighboring Azerbaijan in a contested region. Armenians in the United States and politicians condemned the attacks, and called for steps to be taken against Azerbaijan.

The Eastern Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church wrote an editorial condemning both Azerbaijan and Turkey for their roles in the current conflict, and historic ones, including the Armenian Genocide. The Watertown-based Armenian Weekly ran a column about the geopolitics of the conflict, saying that it goes beyond Armenia and Azerbaijan, and how it relates to the situation in Ukraine and the Russian invasion.

Massachusetts Sen. Edward J. Markey, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today joined several Senate colleagues in calling to prevent any U.S. security assistance from going to Azerbaijan until Armenia and Azerbaijan reach a permanent, lasting resolution to ensure peace and stability in Nagorno-Karabakh. In their letter, the Senators raise strong concerns that despite statutory limitations on U.S. security assistance to the country, Azerbaijan is benefitting from security assistance as it continues to attack Armenia and ethnic Armenians.

“In light of Azerbaijan’s recent and repeated acts of aggression toward Armenia, the United States should cease providing any security assistance to Azerbaijan until Armenia and Azerbaijan reach a permanent and lasting resolution that respects the will of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh,” the Senators wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III. “This requires swift U.S. action to ensure we do not aid and abet Azerbaijan in sparking another large-scale conflagration. Azerbaijan must face the reality that there will never be a military solution that leads to peace and stability in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Congresswoman Katherine Clark, whose district includes Watertown, released the following statement in response to Azerbaijan’s unprovoked escalation of violence against Armenia on Tuesday.

“Once again, Azerbaijan is threatening the sovereignty of Armenia and attacking its innocent people. Forty-nine lives have already been lost. Their renewed assault on Armenia is unprovoked, lethal, and directly undermines the peace process between these two nations,” Clark said. “We cannot sit on the sidelines. The State Department must help secure peace and end U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan.”

Caroline Colarusso, a Republican running against Clark in the 5th Massachusetts District, released the following statement on the attacks on Armenia.

“This week, Armenian-American voters in the 5th Congressional District have brought to my attention what is happening in Armenia. I strongly, unequivocally condemn recent unprovoked military assaults by Azerbaijan upon the people and territory of the Republic of Armenia,” Colarusso said. “If you’re a Christian in the U.S., you should be concerned. Acts of aggression have resulted in needless death, injuries, and destruction in Armenia. I call for an immediate end to U.S. military aid to Azerbaijan and their proxy, Turkey, and ask that the Biden administration, Secretary of State Blinken, and Congress immediately impose strict penalties, including economic sanctions, on Azerbaijan. It is long past due for the United States to put its foot down and stop supporting and enabling the repressive, corrupt, and aggressive regime in Baku and their Turkish patrons.”

A dozen years ago, two inventive minds got together and launched the Starmus Festival, an international celebration of science and music. Its creators, astronomer Garik Israelian and astronomer/musician Brian May, envisioned a week in which anyone could easily attend talks by some of the greatest minds on the planet, touching all the sciences, and also some good fun with rock ‘n’ roll. 

“You have to use both halves of your mind,” May, the founding guitarist of the rock group Queen, likes to say.

We have just finished the sixth incarnation of Starmus, which generally happens every other year. Our group has been to the Canary Islands, to Norway, to Switzerland, and now to Armenia, ancestral homeland of the director, Garik. Some years ago Garik and Brian initiated me into the Starmus Board, and I was somewhat astonished this year when they named me President of the Board. Along with Brian, Garik, and me, the board consists of Richard Dawkins, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jill Tarter, Peter Gabriel, Tony Fadell, and Robert Williams.

Our plan this time carried us for a weeklong adventure to Yerevan, Armenia, the country’s capital, which boasts a population of just over a million. The country itself ranges over a mountainous area spanning about the size of the state of Maryland. Yerevan itself is one of the oldest continuously populated cities on Earth, and the country’s very old history of Christianity and early interest in science give rise to many unusual historical and archaeological sites through the region.

Yerevan’s central downtown area seems quite cosmopolitan, and you could whisk along believing you were in a section of New York, with crowds hustling along the sidewalks, shops of all kinds, and modern hotels and cafes. As soon as we soaked in the atmosphere a tad, and started our battle with jet lag, we heard news that a new feature of Starmus this time was up and running. Michael Bakich, this magazine’s contributing editor, traveled to Yerevan and ran a Starmus Astrophotography School, along with Scott Roberts, Oshin Zakarian, and Chris Go, teaching the 16 students all manner of techniques for capturing the sky on film.

As the astrophoto school wound down, the main Starmus wound up. And, as always, we discovered that despite our best intentions, the Starmus experience can be an exercise in sleep deprivation, with activities and catching-up with friends sometimes beginning in the mornings and cranking up again after the formal activities and lasting long into the night.

The opening concert on September 4 featured remarks by Garik, followed by a superb lecture on the brain and its function by Edvard Moser, Nobel-Prize-winning neuroscientist and director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim. We then heard terrific music by Derek Sherinian along with Simon Phillips and Ric Fierabracci, and then additional concert tracks by Tigran Hamasyan featuring Marc Karapetian and Arthur Hnatek. It was a spectacular way to start the week.

The second day, September 5, was also a short day compared with those to come. I commenced by giving the first of four talks I would present around the city, composed of ideas from my 2020 book Galaxies, and other speakers also provided these kinds of talks. We visited some schools and special learning academies, as well as a facility or two for the public, and spread the love for Starmus and our enthusiasm for science.

The evening of that day then cranked up the momentum significantly when our arena really filled up with the main Starmus attendees, approximately 5,000, and we presented a multimedia show, talks, and concert centered on the Stephen Hawking Medals for Science Communication. Backed by a superlative group that included the great Rick Wakeman, the greatest keyboard player in the history of rock, and the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra, we also featured tunes by Serj Tankian, and by the supergroup Sons of Apollo, consisting of Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal, Derek Sherinian, Jeff Scott Soto, Mike Portnoy, and Billy Sheehan.

The medals, in the name of our dear departed Stephen, who had been on our Starmus Board, went to Dr. Brian May, for his tireless promotion of science communication; the great Jane Goodall, the world’s leading expert on chimpanzee behavior; the accomplished science journalist Diane Ackerman, whose work has appeared in The New York Times and many other places; and the NASA Office of Outreach and Media.

A second gala night with blistering rock ‘n’ roll, amazing celebrity speeches (Jane Goodall’s remarks on life on Earth had quite a few in the audience in tears), and a general mayhem of fun, already had us a bit tired. And then the fun was really about to start.

Tuesday, September 6 saw the main Starmus talks commence in earnest. Our Board member and pal Tony Fadell, inventor of the iPod and co-inventor of the iPhone, got us started with a high-energy chat about how technologies on Earth and in space are linked. Another fellow board member and a Nobel Prize laureate, Emmanuelle Charpentier, then described to the audience her gene therapy techniques, known collectively as CRISPR technology. It is a breakthrough, on her watch, that may one day extend all of our lives.

Further, we heard a variety of talks that opened the mind to new and original lines of thinking. The former director-general of the European Space Agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain, walked us through an inventive exploration of Earth as a planet and how we humans had better pay attention to many of the things going on now with our home. The brilliant authority on artificial intelligence, Bernhard Schölkopf of the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, delivered a fascinating “state-of-the-union” glimpse at where artificial intelligence is in our world. And to top it off, a favorite pal, London science comic David Zambuka, delivered a festive round of audience-participation skits, bolstered with a dose of magic, “Are You a Martian?”

We topped it all off with a gala dinner in the city that went well into the night.

The talks on Wednesday, September 7 took a hard turn squarely into the planets. The theme of the conference, after all, was “50 Years on Mars,” harking back to the first two successful Mars missions, the Soviet Mars 3 mission and the American Mariner 9. Lou Friedman of the Planetary Society gave us a superb overview of Mars missions from those early days up to the present. JPL’s Bethany Ehlmann provided a tour of the most important scientific discoveries achieved on the Red Planet to date. Scott Hubbard, Stanford physicist and former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, provided a great overview of Mars exploration and where it’s going.

The afternoon sessions kept right on going with superb lectures. Our great Starmus friend Michel Mayor, Nobel Prize winner for his discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star, entertained us with a talk about the billions of planets inhabiting the cosmos. Taking things a step further, Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, described alien Earths to the audience, mesmerizing them with the almost limitless possibilities of what we may discover in times to come. And then our friend David Grinspoon, planetary scientist and among other things world-leading expert on Venus, issued a warning about climate catastrophes on Venus, Mars, and Earth.

It was an incredible day of dynamic talks. And it wasn’t over yet. The meaning of Starmus began to crystallize solidly: bringing incredible scientific knowledge about our world together with music, that which allows us to feel the human spirit.

To say that the concert to come that evening was a mind-blower kinda sells it a bit short. Queen’s Brian May was joined by a friend, Graham Gouldman, the co-founder, bassist, and singer of the group 10cc. Their all-star band also included Derek Sherinian, Bumblefoot Thal, Simon Phillips, and Ric Fierabracci. The band wowed the audience with Queen’s “The Show Must Go On,” 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” a blazing version of the classic “Smoke on the Water,” and much more. Significantly, they played a new song, “Floating in Heaven,” produced as a collaboration between Brian and Graham this year. Moreover, early in the show, the Children’s Choir of the Archdiocese of Tavish, Armenia, joined the orchestra to sing a medley of Queen songs. With a synced video of Freddie Mercury in the background, the kids knocked out songs including “We are the Champions,” leading to quite a number I saw around me tearing up.

After the show, our heads were spinning — we were at one with the cosmos. And then I was privileged to go to a late-night dinner with Brian, with Garik and family, and with our Apollo astronaut pal Charlie Duke and his lovely wife Dottie, and we talked astronomy and music and so on deep into the early morning hours. Sleep? Who needs it?

Thursday, September 8 brought new themes to the afternoon talks. Space exploration took on a more prominent role. Former NASA astronaut Jim Bagian, who is of Armenian ancestry, delivered a great talk on the medical and physiological challenges lying ahead in human space flight, particularly on long missions like going to Mars. Wu Ji, former director of the Chinese National Space Science Center, described the amazing and ambitious space program lying ahead for China. Xavier Barcons, Director General of the European Southern Observatory, laid out his thoughts on ESO’s first 60 years of discovery and what lies ahead.

The evening sessions were just as enthralling. The world’s leading expert on black holes, Caltech’s Kip Thorne, walked us through a presentation demonstrating the warped side of the universe, aided by the wonderful drawings made by his collaborator, artist Lia Halloran. Diane Ackerman, one of our Hawking Medal recipients, described for us her reflections about life on Earth and the meaning of the cosmos. Our good friend Mark Boslough, a Starmus regular and physicist at Sandia National Labs, told us about the threats by impacts from space, past and present.

And then we had a really wonderful experience. Many Starmus participants traveled a considerable distance outside Yerevan to the site of Garni Temple, a 1,900-year-old Greco-Roman structure, where we had a magnificent star party. Good pal Scott Roberts, CEO of Explore Scientific, brought a dozen large telescopes to Armenia for the event, and we had happy crowds spying the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and a few deep-sky objects, some getting their first-ever look through a telescope.

Exhausted, we had no choice but to carry on. On Friday I had the good fortune to serve as host for the day on the main stage, a role that my colleague Michael Bakich also played on a couple other days. The Festival’s final day began with a bang, with another old friend, and one of the remaining men who has walked on the Moon. Charlie Duke described his adventures on the lunar surface as part of the Apollo 16 mission, and recounted his much-celebrated role as CAPCOM of Apollo 11 as well. He is a national treasure, and so much fun. Astronaut and engineer George Nield told us about the future of space tourism, which is exploding in momentum and capabilities. The great visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin, a multiple Emmy winner, then delivered a highly entertaining talk about visual effects and the sciences. And Tony Donne, CEO of EuroFusion, described “Fusion: Creating a Star on Earth.”

And we finished with some memorable moments. Another Starmus regular and one of our heroes, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, enthralled the audience with his “Astronaut’s Guide to Walking in Space.” His energy and enthusiasm are impossible not to be moved by. Leon Stok, an engineer at IBM, looked us into the future by detailing recent advances in quantum computing.

Once again, Garik Israelian had pulled off the impossible. We were covered with incredible memories of great, eye-opening talks, superb musical moments that seemed like dreams, and new acquaintances and friendships that seemed as though they gave us new visions of the cosmos.

I certainly would have gotten nowhere with all I had to do, with the press conferences, hosting, talks off-site, backstage craziness, and everything else, without the assistance of the volunteer who drew my assignment, Sama Shamyar. I ended up giving multiple talks at various schools around the Yerevan area, sometimes accompanied by Michael Bakich and Scott Hubbard, as well as holding an initial press conference about the Festival and a press conference with Garik Israelian and Jim Bagian at Yerevan State University. Several of us also appeared before the Armenian Parliament to update the government on the Starmus plans. Whew.

Starmus left its 5,000 attendees pretty happy and looking forward to infinite possibilities of the future. We will have to see where Starmus goes next, and when we can make it happen. But one thing is for sure: Starmus will carry on, and will celebrate the marriage of science and music once again.