The National Security Service of Armenia refutes news that a group of foreigners have allegedly crossed the Armenian-Turkish border from the Armavir sector and that the National Security Service and Russian peacekeepers are conducting search operations.
In response to Armenpress news agency’s inquiry, the press center of the National Security Service reported that the news is inaccurate.
11:17,
YEREVAN, MAY 12, ARMENPRESS. Over 5.5 million novel coronavirus cases and over 90,000 deaths were registered worldwide in the past week, which is 4% less than during the previous seven-day period, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a weekly bulletin released in Geneva early on Wednesday, reports TASS news agency.
“The number of new COVID-19 cases and deaths globally decreased slightly this week, with over 5.5 million cases and over 90 000 deaths”, the organization said in its COVID-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update. “Case and death incidence, however, remains at the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic”.
On May 3-9, the global organization was informed about 5,517,602 new cases all over the world, and 90,242 COVID-related deaths. As of May 9, a total of 157,362,408 cases of the infection and 3,277,834 COVID-related fatalities were reported worldwide.
The most noticeable growth in cases (up 6%) was registered in Southeast Asia, which, according to the WHO classification also includes India. Cases declined by 23% in Europe, by 13% in Eastern Mediterranean, by 5% in Africa, by 4% in North and South America.
Mortality spiked in Western Pacific (up 34%) and Southeast Asia (up 15%), but declined in Europe (down 18%), Eastern Mediterranean (down 13%), North and South America (down 4%) and Africa (down 3%).
In the past seven days, over 919,000 people contracted the infection in Europe, over 19,000 patients died. The number of cases in North and South America increased by over 1.2 million in the reported period, while fatalities grew by 33,000. In Southeast Asia, doctors registered over 2.8 million new cases of the novel coronavirus, over 28,000 patients died.
India accounts for the majority of cases registered on May 3 – May 9 (2.7 million new cases), followed by Brazil (over 423,000 new cases), the United States (over 334,000), Turkey (over 160,000), Argentina (over 140,000), Iran (over 124,000), France (over 122,000), Colombia (over 108,000), Germany (over 103,000), Italy (over 67,000) and Russia (over 57,000).
Austrian Ambassador Johann Markgraf von Pallavicini was making his final preparations to leave the Venetian Palace in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu in November 1918. He had moved to this embassy building, which was once the home of the Venetian bailo (a resident ambassador of the Republic of Venice), in 1908. He was born in Padova, Venice as an Italian nobleman. However, he studied in Vienna and served this state for years as the ambassador of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Istanbul.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire had sided with Turkey during World War I (1914-1918) and was defeated now. Istanbul was occupied by allied opponents, and Italian Count Carlo Sforza was waiting for him to leave the building in front of the Venetian Palace. The victorious European powers were represented by the high commissars in Istanbul; Count Sforza would also carry out this task on behalf of Italy.
The first thing Count Sforza did when he entered the Venetian Palace was to place a Venetian Lion figure on the front facade of the building. The 46-year-old count was a member of the loyal Sforza dynasty, the Duke of Milan related to the Pallavicini family as well as other Italian black noble families such as the Medici and Orsini.
Count Sforza did not visit Istanbul for the first time in 1918. His first visit was in 1901 and also stayed in the city from the beginning of 1907 until July 1909. As a diplomat, he was a regular of Cercle d’Orient building, which is known as Serkildoryan in Turkish back then. He even met his wife in Istanbul as his father-in-law, coming from an old Belgian family related to the Habsburg dynasty, was Belgium’s ambassador to Istanbul.
Count Sforza witnessed both the revolution of the Young (Jeune) Turks in Thessaloniki in 1908 and the capture of the Turkish Sultan Abdülhamid II by the Action Army (Army of Freedom), established by the Young Turks in April 1909. He was a fan of Italian Mason Giuseppe Mazzini, the founder of Young Italy. Therefore, he also sympathized with the Young Turks, who were organized according to Mazzini’s Young Italy model.
However, he thought that these Young Turks, who revolted for constitutionalism, did not know what constitutionalism meant. They only learned the history of the French Revolution in the lodges of the secret societies of Thessaloniki, where Italy was very active. The count mentions in his book “Fifty Years of War and Diplomacy in the Balkans” that he also got to know Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the Turkish Republic who was a 28-year-old young officer, at those times. He would meet the pasha once again in Istanbul.
Since Enver, Talat and Cemal Pashas, the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), fled abroad after the Armistice of Mudros was signed in 1918, the Unionist Young Turks were left leaderless. The owner of the villa where Sultan Aldülhamid II was taken captive was the Italian Jewish Allatini family. The unionists gathered at the Galata branch of the Thessaloniki Bank, which belonged to the Allatini family. During the meetings, they proposed that Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who returned from the Sinai and Palestine campaign – the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I, be the head of the CUP.
Count Sforza met Mustafa Kemal Pasha in his house and he was aware of this pasha’s dislike for Germans. According to Mustafa Kemal’s claim, Sforza wanted to meet with him first, while Sforza claimed that Mustafa Kemal came to him to get his support against the British who wanted to drive him to Malta. It was a great chance for the pasha to contact Count Sforza, regardless of whom the first offer came from.
Mustafa Kemal Pasha and Count Sforza met at least twice in Istanbul. The first meeting was shortly after the pasha arrived in Istanbul. His friend Fethi Bey was also with him. In the report he sent to the Italian Foreign Office on Dec. 11, 1918, Sforza claimed that he “got two Turkish officers” without specifying names. But a later report on Dec. 17, he mentioned the details about his meeting with Mustafa Kemal and Fethi Pashas.
Sforza told the pashas that Izmir and its surroundings would be occupied by the Greeks and that they had to form a national armed resistance against this invasion. He promised that Italy would support them with all kinds of weapons and materials and reassured the Italian Embassy’s backing for them. The friends of Mustafa Kemal strictly recommended him to be the head of the organization. Mustafa Kemal and Fethi Bey thought that CUP should continue in the future of Turkey as they were planning to establish the United States of Turkey. Therefore, they wanted Italy’s support if they accede.
Sforza believed in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s principles. He knew that the era of land occupation for colonialism ended with World War I. In his “Makers of Modern Europe,” he asserted that military power was of no use to Italian influence; a national movement for long-term business interests had to be supported. On Feb. 11, 1919, he wrote a letter to Elia, who led the Italian army in the Aegean Sea. In his letter, he explained that the British and French, through their expert spies, organized pro-Anglo-French independence movements in Arab countries. A similar movement had to be organized “very urgently” in the places occupied by Italy. According to him, it was impossible for Turks to create an independent state without the support of European power. And for their long-term benefit, Italy should be this European power.
Occupying commissioners in Istanbul used to meet once a week to discuss issues related to the administration of the city and the country. Count Sforza did not allow the Greek commissioner to attend these meetings. Right after the Greek army landed in Izmir, Mustafa Kemal Pasha started the journey that would mark his name in history. Upon the request of Count Sforza, he left Istanbul with the visa given by the British and reached Samsun by ship, where he was welcomed by the British troops. Ostensibly, he was the 9th Army Troops Inspector, and the count also had a hand in his assignment to this task in Anatolia.
But the pasha’s main intention was to organize the resistance against the Greek Army and to establish a new state. First, he participated in the congress held in Erzurum on behalf of the eastern provinces. In the congress, the National Forces, the irregular Turkish militia forces, were recognized as the only force. The pasha was elected as the head of the Committee of Representation, which represented the Associations for Defence of Rights, the regional resistance organizations established in the Ottoman Empire between 1918–1919 in eastern Anatolia.
Then on, he went to Sivas to attend another congress that convened on behalf of the whole country. Italian Professor Biagio Pace, in his article written in February 1920, named the Sivas Congress which he attended as the “September Revolution” and defined the purpose of the revolution as “to establish a new state that resists the possible decisions of the Paris Peace Conference.”
Italy had a great contribution in the organization of resistance to the Greek invasion, up to the first bullet fired in Izmir. Although the Italians occupied Anatolia before the Greeks, there was no armed resistance against them; in fact, an armed struggle had been started against Greece from the very first day.
Italy had occupied the Mediterranean basin, especially Antalya. The Italian Carabinieri, or the gendarmerie organization, known as “Arma” in short, was working in this occupied area. The most active of these units brought to Anatolia was the 379th Gendarmerie Team in Kuşadası and was led by Lieutenant Ugo Luca.
Luca was the chief of the Italian intelligence service in Anatolia, who happened to be quite adept at guerrilla warfare and spoke well Turkish. Later on, he would become famous as the “Lawrence of Anatolia.” First National Forces against the Greek were established with the support of the organization headed by Luca.
Italy also tolerated the smuggling of weapons and people from Istanbul to Anatolia. On Jan. 17, 1919, the Ottoman police force was affiliated with the Control Committee administered by the Allies. In February, Colonel Count Balduino Caprini, from the Italian Carabinieri, was appointed as the head of this committee.
The world war, which resulted in the occupation of the capital Istanbul, started with the murder of the Austro-Hungarian Prince by a gunman named Gavrilo Princip. Princip was a member of the Young Bosnians, founded on Mazzini’s Young Italy model, and worked for the secret military “Black Hand” organization. Young Turks in Istanbul had also established a similar organization: Black Arm. Colonel Caprini, who was highly experienced and knew Unionist Young Turks closely, was allowing the organization to smuggle weapons and people to Anatolia and was protecting them.
In addition to the weapons and humans, Italy was also transmitting crucial news and events to Ankara. They foretold that parliament would be occupied in Istanbul in March 1920. According to their briefing, a major operation was launched by the allies in Istanbul. The assembly was raided and some of the Unionist Young Turks were exiled to Malta under British rule. The Committee of Representation in Ankara protested this occupation in the international arena by using the station of the Italian representation in Antalya. Yet, this harsh intervention of the Allies served in the favor of Ankara. Young Turks such as Ismet Inönü, and Halide Edip went to Ankara with the help of Colonel Caprini. Thanks to those who escaped from Istanbul, the Committee of Representation was turned into a Grand National Assembly.
After Mustafa Kemal Pasha passed to Anatolia, Sforza was called back to Italy to become the foreign minister of the newly established government. Sforza continued supporting the Kemalists, while he initiated the first official talks between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Italy. The Bolsheviks, who overthrew Tsarism by a revolution, were providing arms and money to Ankara, which was also revolutionary. It’s because their communist leaders’ path once passed through Italy.
Joseph Stalin worked as a ringer at the Armenian monastery on the island of Saint Lazarus in Venice in 1907. This monastery belonged to the sect founded by the Armenian Mekhitar of Sebaste, or modern-day Sivas. The ideas of nationalism were imposed on the Ottoman Armenians from this island. The nickname of Stalin in Venice was “Jozef from Ice,” meaning Jew from the cold land. Perhaps for this reason the Bolsheviks sided with Ankara alongside the Italians.
As Italy was the greatest supporter of the Young Turks, the first unofficial representation of the Ankara government abroad was opened in Piazza dell’Esquilino in Rome. Count Sforza was again the first statesman to defend the revision of the Treaty of Sevres, which was signed in 1920 between the Allies of World War I and the Ottoman Empire and thoroughly discredited the government in Istanbul.
On top of that, he invited the Ankara government to the London Conference held in February 1921, while only the Government of Istanbul was invited as it was not possible to invite Ankara as an unofficial government. In this way, he gave the Ankara government an international formality.
Thereafter, the Kemalist delegation representing the Ankara government first went to Antalya and went to Italy with the Italians. After meeting with Count Sforza and receiving the necessary instructions, they went to London.
After the opening of Parliament in Ankara, Count Sforza also made successful diplomatic attempts to release the Young Turks who were exiled to Malta and managed to set them free. These Turks attended the Ankara government and reinforced Ankara against Istanbul.
The Greek army, which had been convinced by Komitadji Venizelos from Crete in 1919, stepped into Izmir and moved further into Anatolian lands. However, upon Venizelos’ resignation in 1920, the army lost British support. The Italian Commercial Bank opened some loans to Ankara in March 1921; therefore, Ankara was getting stronger by purchasing weapons. According to writer Fabio L. Grassi, Italian merchant Mario Pellegrini was supplying laundry, weapons and ammunition to Ankara’s army. Moreover, Pellegrini reported to Ankara that volunteers from Italy landed in Kuşadası to fight in the Kemalist army. According to this claim taken by the author Grassi in his book, these Italian volunteers fought against the Greeks in the İnönü Battle together with the army of Ankara.
The Greek army could not resist against the Ankara government anymore as it was supported by Italy, France, the U.S. and Russia. The Greeks retreated from Turkish lands in September 1922. The victorious Ankara surely did not forget these favors provided at a time of struggle for existence. After the Greek army left Izmir, Fethi Bey made the following statement to foreign newspapers on Sept. 11: “Turkey is pleased that Italy defended our rights in the name of humanitarianism. Italy was the first to argue that we should continue our existence right after the armistice. Count Sforza will not be forgotten.”
11:35, 26 April, 2021
YEREVAN, APRIL 26, ARMENPRESS. Acting Foreign Minister of Armenia Ara Aivazian held a private meeting with Foreign Minister of Lithuania Gabrielius Landsbergis, Armenian foreign ministry spokesperson Anna Naghdalyan said on Facebook.
The Armenian and Lithuanian FMs will also hold a joint press conference as part of Gabrielius Landsbergis’ visit to Yerevan.
Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
The Nobel prizewinner’s latest novel is set during a pandemic
Books & arts May 1st 2021 edition
Orhan pamuk has had two pandemics to worry about. One confined him and millions of other Turks to their homes for long stretches of the past year. The other struck over a century ago, germinated in his mind for years, and eventually spread through the pages of his new novel, “Nights of Plague”.
Mr Pamuk, Turkey’s most celebrated author, says he began writing the book five years ago. (At his home in Istanbul, he sits a good 20 feet from your correspondent; he turns 70 next year and takes social distancing seriously.) He set the novel on a fictional Ottoman island in the Aegean in the early 1900s, amid an outbreak of bubonic plague. Just as he began to wrap it up, covid-19 hit Turkey. Reality intruded on fiction. “Suddenly my private world was gone; everyone was using my words,” he says. “Everyone was talking about quarantine, like they were researching this book.”
The resulting writer’s block lasted two weeks. Then the disease raging around him, plus anxieties about his own health, made the author reimagine the pestilence his characters had to endure. He rewrote swathes of the book. (Given the magnetic view from his desk, of the ferries and container ships criss-crossing the Bosporus and the rolling Istanbul skyline beyond, it is a wonder that he manages to get any work done at all.)
“Nights of Plague” has just been published in Turkish and comes out in English next year. Mr Pamuk is intent on discussing it—but cannot help talking about the state of Turkey. A chat between two Turks about music or literature no longer seems possible without politics elbowing in; the stench of repression is everywhere. His next appointment, says Mr Pamuk, is with Murat Sabuncu, a journalist who recently spent over a year in prison on bogus terror and coup charges. Days earlier, one of Mr Sabuncu’s guests on an opposition television channel stumbled into the studio with his fingers broken. A critic of the government, he had just been attacked by nationalist thugs. “They put everyone in jail, but this is not enough, so they beat [people] up,” says Mr Pamuk, shaken.
In 2005, a year before he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, Mr Pamuk had his own brush with prison when prosecutors charged him with “insulting Turkishness”. His offence was to have spoken a few words to a Swiss newspaper about the slaughter and forced deportation of over a million Armenians by Ottoman forces during the first world war. He faced up to three years behind bars, but the charges were eventually dropped. Even now he periodically receives death threats because of those and later remarks. He still has a police bodyguard.
“I was always in trouble because of my interviews, not because of my novels,” he says. With his latest book, that might change. Already he has had to deny a popular columnist’s claim that he has mocked Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, in the person of a character. He may face more heckling for his treatment of Abdulhamid II, a sultan who sought to prevent the Ottoman Empire’s collapse by mixing autocracy with pan-Islamism.
Modern Turkish Islamists—including the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan—have reinvented Abdulhamid as a hero of the late Ottoman era. A period drama about the sultan’s final years in power, aired on state tv, goes further, depicting him as an archetype for Mr Erdogan and a victim of European and Zionist intrigues. Words spoken by Mr Erdogan one week regularly come out of Abdulhamid’s mouth in the next week’s episode. His portrayal in “Nights of Plague” is less charitable. “Abdulhamid closed parliament, did not care about free speech, and made Ottoman Istanbul a police state,” says Mr Pamuk.
He is a famously meticulous writer, recalling the Ottoman miniaturists in one of his earlier books, “My Name is Red”, a murder mystery set in 16th-century Istanbul. Though such forensic attention to detail can lead to impenetrable prose, for the most part Mr Pamuk’s shimmers. He pores over old maps, photos and manuscripts, drawing sketches and painting watercolours of his characters. After writing “The Museum of Innocence”, a novel about a lovesick hoarder, he assembled the everyday objects described in the book and enshrined them in a small, remarkable museum. For “Nights of Plague” he devoured all the pandemic literature he could find. He studied cholera’s progress from China and India to Ottoman lands, aboard steamships packed with Muslim pilgrims heading to Mecca and Medina, and the resistance to quarantine measures across the empire.
But it took the mounting toll of today’s pandemic—the way heads turned when someone coughed or sneezed on the metro or at a nearby table—for him to realise that something was missing. He sensed that omission again when Istanbul, a city of 15m people, sank into morbid silence during its lockdowns, and when he prowled its empty streets at night with his bodyguard and his camera, flanked by stray cats and dogs. “I had imagined my world, but the one thing I couldn’t imagine”, he says, “was fear. My characters in the book were more fearless before the coronavirus.”
Mr Pamuk likes to joke that he used to have three bodyguards and now has only one, which means that Turkey must be improving. A more plausible reason is that he is no longer at the centre of the country’s political storms. That, he says, is because the centre has vanished.
Liberals in Turkey have generally been a lonely, endangered species. But a decade or two ago they could at least hope to be heard. Now they have been muzzled. In 2017 Mr Pamuk gave a long interview to what was once Turkey’s newspaper of record, in which he said he opposed constitutional changes that granted Mr Erdogan sweeping new powers. Fearing the government’s wrath, the paper killed the story. Mr Pamuk has since stopped speaking to the big Turkish news outlets. They have stopped asking him.
Now, he says, there is no room for truly free speech. “A unique thing that I haven’t seen in this country before is these silences when the name of our president comes up,” he observes. “Before, you could say something nasty in a taxi or a supermarket. Now it’s silence.” ■
This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline “Orhan Pamuk’s plagues”
April 22, 2021
Glendale Unified School Board of Education chair Shant Sahakian
The Glendale Unified Board of Education completed its annual rotation of officers on Tuesday and Shant Sahakian assumed his new role as Board President for the 2021-22 year. He takes over the position from outgoing Board President Dr. Armina Gharpetian.
Sahakian was elected in April 2017, becoming the youngest School Board Member elected in Glendale history. This is the first time he will serve as Board President.
In March, 2019, the Armenian American Museum Board of Trustees appointed Sahakian as Executive Director, responsible for leading the organization’s development and community relations as well as collaborating with the Museum’s principal architect, exhibition design consultant, and construction team.
Sahakian is a lifelong resident of Glendale and has deep roots in the community. In the past, he has served as the Chair of the City of Glendale Arts & Culture Commission, Chair of Glendale Youth Alliance, President of the Glendale Parks & Open Space Foundation, and Vice President of Glendale Kiwanis. Sahakian’s professional career began at the age of 14 when he founded his own digital agency serving businesses and non-profit organizations with design and technology services.
Sahakian became the first Armenian American to be honored with the prestigious Man of the Year Award from the Glendale Chamber of Commerce in 2016. He is also a recipient of the Hope Diamond Award from the Glendale Educational Foundation, Community Award from the Character & Ethics Project, and the inaugural Hero Award from Glendale Youth Alliance.
Sahakian holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design with a Marketing Minor from California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and a Certificate in Marketing from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA Extension).
Shant and his wife, Suzanna, reside in Glendale and have two children.
Public Radio of Armenia Azerbaijan should deliver information on the number of Armenian POWs and their health conditions – Portuguese MP Azerbaijan is not only violating the trilateral Joint Statement, it is also violating several major international conventions, Portugal’s delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Paulo Pisco said at the current-affairs debate on Armenian prisoners of war and other captives. “Maybe our colleagues from Azerbaijan may not like that we are holding this discussion on Armenian prisoners of war today, but it is here in this forum for peace and human rights that we should discuss and insist that until all Armenian prisoners of war, military and civilian, are released, and all other questions related to this issue are fairly solved,” Mr. Pisco said. He stressed that Azerbaijan is not fulfilling its part of the agreement established in the joint statement signed by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia to put an end to war. “Paragraph 8 of this statement is very clear on the compromise assumed by both parts to exchange all prisoners of war, hostages and other detained persons including the carried out dead bodies. Armenia accomplished its part of the agreement in releasing all prisoners. Azerbaijan, after all this time, is remaining silent,” the lawmaker said. “Azerbaijan is not only violating the referred Joint Statement, it is also violating several major international conventions. I only refer to the Geneva Convention that provides a wide range of protection for prisoners of war and the international humanitarian in law,” he added. “It is of major importance that Azerbaijan delivers all relevant information concerning the number of prisoners and their health conditions. There are justified concerns that they were being submitted to inhumane and degrading treatment, including the use of torture as several humanitarian organizations have denounced,” Mr. Pisco stated. “It is our duty and our mission in the Council of Europe to do everything we can to promote dialogue and help to restore peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, demanding full respect for international law and humanitarian principles. We must appeal therefore to the goodwill and to the good faith of Azerbaijan to accomplish their objectives,” he concluded.
The Human Rights Ombudsman Gegham Stepanyan, took part on Friday in an action in the yard of Holy Mother of God Cathedral in Stepanakert dedicated to the International Day of Monuments and Sites.
The Ombudsman presented the international legal agenda for the protection of cultural monuments, as well as the work carried out by the Artsakh Republic Ombudsman’s staff during and after the war documenting cases of vandalism of the cultural property in the occupied territories of Artsakh and cooperation with international organizations in the field.
In his speech, Gegham Stepanyan mentioned that according to international legal rules, damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, therefore each state shall protect cultural values in its territories or outside it, even during military occupation.
He stressed that in the current situation when, in fact, the Armenian side does not have the opportunity to defend its cultural property, the international community should assume that responsibility and make Azerbaijan to abandon its policy of distorting the history.