Author: George Mamian

A Russian pilot who went missing after his jet was shot down by Turkey over Syria was rescued by the Syrian army, Russia’s ambassador to France said, the BBC reports.

Alexander Orlov told Europe 1 radio the pilot had been taken to a Russian base. However, this report has not yet been confirmed by the authorities in Moscow.

The second pilot, and a marine involved in their rescue operation, were killed, Russia’s defence ministry says.

NATO’s chief said it stood by member Turkey but echoed calls for calm.

Nato’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said he backed the Turks’ assessment, but added “diplomacy and de-escalation are important to resolve this situation”.

Turkey said the jet had strayed into its airspace but Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted the Su-24 had been hit by an air-to-air missile while flying over Syrian territory.

President Putin described the downing of the plane as a “stab in the back.”

Turkey’s pro-Kurdish opposition leader Selahattin Demirtas was unharmed after his car was hit by a bullet on Sunday in an apparent assassination attempt, a spokesman for his political party said, Reuters reports.

The rear window of Demirtas’s bullet-proof car was hit once as he and his security team were driving in the city of Diyarbakir in the largely Kurdish southeast of the country, the spokesman said.

Demirtas told the Firat News Agency that the bullet dent was noticed when they got out of the car. He also said the car was taken away by police, but no bullet cartridge was found.

“Death is God’s command,” Demirtas tweeted after the incident.

Demirtas led his People’s Democratic Party (HDP) through a highly successful election campaign in June, seeing it cross the threshold to enter parliament as a party for the first time and depriving the ruling AK Party of its majority. The AK Party won back a majority in a rerun this month, but the HDP remained above the 10 percent threshold to stay in parliament.

HDP supporters have been attacked three times over the past few months. One of the attacks, believed to have been carried out by Islamic State sympathizers, killed more than 100 people in the Turkish capital, Ankara.

A two-year ceasefire between the Kurdish militant group PKK and Turkey collapsed in July this year. The PKK insurgency, largely fought in southeastern Turkey, has killed some 40,000 people since 1984.

Demirtas’s party had been a facilitator in the ceasefire negotiations, which angered nationalist Turks who demanded a harsher military crackdown on the Kurdish militants.

The Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has applied to the Russian Foreign Ministry with a request to arrange the transportation of the bodies of the pilots that died in South Sudan crash through its Embassy in Uganda and South Sudan.

The Ministry says further information will be provided.

A cargo plane crashed Wednesday morning along the banks of the Nile River after taking off from South Sudan’s capital of Juba. The crash killed 36 people and left an infant clinging to life.

Six of the plane’s crew members — five Armenians and a Russian — were among the dead.

Photos by Christie Goodwin

By Pierre Perrone

Three songs into what turns out to be a lengthy, 2-hour long set you’d hardly expect from a 91 year-old, now officially the oldest performer to headline the regal London venue, Charles Aznavour takes off his slate-coloured jacket and flings it on the grand piano as he reveals a pair of bright red braces.

The most diminutive chanson legend means business and punches the air after dramatically hitting the high note at the end of ”Paris Au Mois D’Août“ (Paris In The Month of August), the title song of a doomed love affair film he made with Susan Hampshire five decades ago. In fact, he’s not just singing to the French expats who have wandered up from South Kensington with a glass of rosé – fact! – the British and the London-based Armenian community love him too, and with good reason.

He makes fun of the téléprompteur that enables him to give a masterclass in song-writing in between duetting with his daughter Katia on ”Je Voyage” and delivering a sublime ”She”, the 1974 chart-topper revived by Elvis Costello for the Notting Hillsoundtrack 15 years later. If this is your entrée into the thousand-plus chansons Aznavour has composed, you’re in for a treat. After nonchalantly singing ”The Old Fashioned Way”, he returns for ”What Makes A Man A Man”, arguably the first song about homosexuality by a non-homosexual. Its message of acceptance is magnified by the bouquet of flowers he carries on the shoulder like a gun as he wanders off stage, an impish smile on his face. He promises to be back when he is 100. Don’t bet against it! Chapeau Monsieur Aznavour!

Intelligence analysis has ruled out that the Russian commercial airplane was struck by a missile, but the new information suggests that there was a catastrophic in-flight event — including possibly a bomb, though experts are considering other explanations, according to U.S. officials.

There are a wide range of theories on what made the passenger jet plunge to the ground, killing all 224 people on board, but Russian officials say it’s too soon to speculate on the cause.

Aviation experts agree, and officials have downplayed an apparent claim by Islamic militants that they brought down the Airbus A321-200, saying technical failure is the most likely reason for the crash.

The Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group (Ambassadors Igor Popov of the Russian Federation, James Warlick of the United States of America, and Pierre Andrieu of France), together with the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office Ambassador Andrzej Kasprzyk, traveled to the region October 26-28. We met with the Presidents and Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as the de facto authorities of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Co-Chairs released the following statement today:

The Presidents confirmed their commitment to hold a summit under the auspices of the Co-Chairs before the end of the year to discuss key elements of a settlement and other issues. We stressed to the Presidents the dangers of violence along the Line of Contact and Armenia-Azerbaijan border. The use of heavy weapons, such as mortars and rocket launchers, is unacceptable and presents a serious danger to the civilian population. We deeply regret the casualties and loss of life among innocent civilians and expect the sides to take every step to avoid violence. We raised existing proposals designed to stabilize the security situation and create a more constructive atmosphere for negotiations.

In Baku, we met representatives of the Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh. We encourage dialogue among all those affected by the conflict as an essential part of the peace process, and support programs that bring Armenians and Azerbaijanis together. We also met with the representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Yerevan to discuss the implementation of a data exchange on missing persons, a humanitarian measure we fully support.

Immediately after a routine crossing of the Line of Contact by the Co-Chairs, repeated gunfire from an undetermined location forced OSCE monitors to take cover. The sides have made an obligation to guarantee the safety of monitoring personnel. This incident represents a deliberate effort to undermine progress towards a settlement. It also underscores the need for the OSCE to have the ability to investigate violations of the ceasefire.

On 27 October Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan received OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs Igor Popov (the Russian Federation), Pierre Andrieu (France), James Warlick (the USA), personal representative of the OSCE chairman-in-office, Ambassador Andrzej Kasprzyk and accompanying them individuals.

Issues related to the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict settlement and situation along the borderline were discussed during the meeting.

President Sahakyan noted that Azerbaijan’s aggressive policy and gross violations of the ceasefire regime, rejection of any constructive proposals by official Baku endangered stability and peace in the region, as well as the mediatory mission carried out in the direction.

The President underlined that it’s necessary above all to give new impetus to the maintenance of the ceasefire regime and particularize responsibility mechanisms for its violation, adding that official Stepanakert is ready to take an active part in that process.

Canadian Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan newest work, Remember, was presented at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma last week and attempts to bring a material reality to the unfathomable tragedy of genocide, reports.

After success at the Venice Film Festival, the Oscar nominee presents a tale that revolves around Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer), a Holocaust survivor struggling with dementia. He tries to track down and kill the Nazi leader of his block at Auschwitz, who killed Zev’s family before escaping to North America under an assumed name.

Due to his failing memory, Zev must constantly be reminded of his mission through a letter written by Max (Martin Landau), a fellow Auschwitz survivor and the organizer for Zev’s journey.

“It focuses on the questions of memory and justice and how to deal with unresolved history. It’s fuelled by the notion of trauma. The two characters are both survivors,” said Egoyan.

Anti-Semitism and the formation of hate play a central role in Remember, exemplified in a powerful scene where Zev visits the home of a neo-Nazi (Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris). At first, the man believes Zev is a Nazi as well. After Zev is forced to admit that he’s Jewish, the man becomes furious, forcefully screaming threatening anti-Semitic profanities.

“It’s horrifying in that moment; we understand the mechanics,” Egoyan said. “We see what triggers hate. When the trust is betrayed, he has to find a reason for his sense of pain and it converts into this extraordinarily violent anti-Semitism.”

This is Egoyan’s second film with Plummer. Their first collaboration, Ararat, also focused on themes of genocide, specifically the Armenian massacre during World War I.

From 1915 to 1918, the former Ottoman Empire was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in what is now the Republic of Turkey. Many of the persecuted were burned alive, drowned or given poisonous drugs. Others were subjected to death marches, where they were forced to wander toward the Syrian Desert, deprived of food and water. Raphael Lemkin used these events as a reference when he first coined the word genocide in 1943.

Egoyan said that as an Armenian, he can relate to Remember’s theme of mass murders left unresolved, especially since the institutional perpetrators have never admitted guilt, and the Turkish government still hasn’t recognized the methodical mass murders as genocide.

“I’m bringing my own sort of history, but I’m also understanding the persistence of what fuelled the Holocaust,” he said.

The Ottomans committed the Armenian genocide with the oversight of the German government. During his reign, many of Hitler’s key friends and policy makers could be directly connected to perpetrators in World War I. Evidence suggests that Hitler used tactics gleaned from the Armenian genocide as a template when executing his Final Solution.

More and more institutions are recognizing the Armenian genocide. Within the past year, Pope Francis acknowledged the genocide at his service in Rome, going as far as to say: “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it.”

Egoyan is proud that the Catholic Church supports the plight of the Armenians, though he’s more pleased to hear that the German and Austrian governments have acknowledged their roles. He feels that their admission of responsibility has opened a new constructive dialogue.

“Some extraordinary things happened this year,” he said. “People are beginning to understand [the genocide] as a template for things that happened afterwards.”

“I used to always boycott Turkey,” said Egoyan.

As a young man, the Canadian director was passionately involved in a political Armenian student group at the University of Toronto, dedicated to bring awareness to issues of genocide and a destructively selective state memory. This year, however, Egoyan attended a wedding in Turkey for the daughter of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist assassinated by a Turkish nationalist in 2007.

When the director entered Turkey for the first time, he discovered a community of Armenians that were never driven out, a people on the frontline of forming a new dialogue around the genocide. At the time, these groups gave Egoyan hope for a new dynamic in the conversation between the Turkish government and Armenians.

“When I went in the summer all this seemed very possible. Literally three weeks after I got back it all went to hell. It’s very scary what’s happening in Turkey right now.”

Though the dialogue process may have broken down as political tensions in Turkey increased, Egoyan believes that there are enough progressive forces to shift the discussion, just as he has witnessed in the 28 countries who acknowledge the genocide around the world.

“Since I was a student, Canada has recognized the genocide,” he said. “That was an extraordinary moment. There’s a huge shift in contagiousness.”

A masked man attacked a school in southern Sweden on Thursday before being shot by police. Health authorities said one teacher was killed and two students seriously wounded in the attack, the Associated Press reports.

Students fled Thursday morning from the Kronan school in Trollhattan, near Goteborg, Sweden’s second-largest city. In a statement, police in Trollhattan said the attack took place in the school’s cafe area.

Health authorities in Trollhattan said in a statement that one teacher died after being wounded in the attack and two students, aged 11 and 15, were seriously wounded with cuts. They said the attacker was also in serious condition.

Police earlier said four students had been wounded. It was not possible to immediately rectify the differing accounts.

The school has 400 students, ranging from pre-school to high school.

Swedish media say the school held a meeting Thursday morning to discuss teachers’ worries that the school was too open, with a cafe for adults that meant the school could not control who comes in.

The Dagens Nyheter newspaper said students must go through the cafe to reach the school’s own cafeteria and other parts of the building.