What did Armenia, Azerbaijan FMs discuss?
YEREVAN. – A meeting between Edward Nalbandian and Elmar Mammadyarov, Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, took place Tuesday in Brussels, at the initiative and presence of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs Igor Popov, Stéphane Visconti and Richard Hoagland, and which was attended by Andrzej Kasprzyk, the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office.
During the meeting discussions were held on the modalities of advancement of the Nagorno-Karabakh negotiating process, press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia informed Armenian News-NEWS.am.
Nalbandian underscored the importance of stabilization of the situation on the Line of Contact, and, in this regard, emphasized the necessity to implement the agreements reached during the Vienna and St. Petersburg Summits.
The Co-Chairs asked the ministers to convey to the presidents their proposal on organizing a summit in the course of this year.
An agreement was reached to convene the next meeting between the ministers in September in New York, in the margins of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
‘Serzh Sargsyan is my military fellow, will remain my military fellow, it is an axiom, you understand?’ Sasun Mikaelyan
“Yelq” bloc boycotted and did not partake in the first session of the newly formed National Assembly, during Serzh Sargsyan’s and Catholicos’ speeches until Serzh Sargsyan left. And during Yerevan City Mayor Taron Margaryan’s inauguration day Serzh Sargsyan similarly made a speech and “Yelq” decided to participate, not to boycott. If the principle was that you boycott Serzh Sargsyan’s speech, why did you do that in the Parliament and not in the Municipality? To this question, “Yelq” bloc MP Sasun Mikaelyan answered: “Was “Yelq” present in the Municipality? I am not informed. Well, the Parliament is a little bit another tribune.”
Asked whether he neglects the case of the Municipality, Sasun Mikaelyan replied: “No, I do not neglect, but we have expressed our viewpoint from this common high tribune. I have told then as well, that this has somehow been a step of a discontent. I personally, would have not participated, forasmuch as we have seen in these years…”
Asked why he would have not participated, whether he disliked Serzh Sargsyan that much, Sasun Mikaelyan replied: “Serzh Sargsyan is my military fellow, will remain, my military fellow, it is an axiom, you understand? Another path we have passed together. But it does not mean that from the political standpoint, we should not do that, leave the principles.”
Hripsime JEBEJYAN
Entertainment: Peter Guekguezian: Armenian Jeopardy! Champion and Champion of Languages
Special for the Armenian Weekly
“On June 17, 1929, this airline’s first passenger flight left Dallas, making stops at Shreveport, Monroe, and Jackson. Thirty seconds, good luck,” says Jeopardy! host, Alex Trebek. Then the music starts: that ubiquitous tune signaling impatience, waiting and mounting pressure.
(L to R) Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek and Peter Guekguezian (Photo: Jeopardy!)
Peter Guekguezian is one of the contestants on the June 19th broadcast of the popular game show. Guekguezian is a linguist from Fresno, Calif., and a defending Jeopardy! champion, having won $18,401 on the previous show. This time, he is up against a history instructor from Tucson, Ariz. and a writer from Brooklyn, N.Y., whose score going into Final Jeopardy! is almost double Guekguezian’s.
Guekguezian feels the pressure and writes, “Southwest.”
“I heard Dallas and thought Southwest, but they’re too recent,” he recalls. “Then it hit me that Monroe, Shreveport, and Jackson are all in the Mississippi Delta… Most of the time they give you clues within the Final Jeopardy! question.” With time to spare, he crossed out “Southwest” and wrote “Delta” to win the round with $7,198.
Guekguezian went on to play twice more for a total of four games—and during his three-day winning streak, he earned $44,800.
He describes the airplane carrier question as one of the most memorable of his Jeopardy! run, and speaks with excitement about the experience:
“The other contestants and the production crew are all very intelligent, really nerdy, very funny. You have a good time there, ” Guekguezian says. He had auditioned three times for the show before being placed into the contestant pool. When he was called in for the show, he had a month to prepare: practicing with quiz games and reviewing almanacs, studying how to wager, and also preparing mentally for those high-pressure moments of competition.
Also of use to Guekguezian during the game was his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California; knowing a little bit about a lot of different languages and etymologies often helped in parsing the clues.
“I speak some Spanish, some Armenian, a little bit of French…and I have a working knowledge of the two languages I’ve done a lot of documentation on.”
These are Chukchansi Yokuts, a Native American language spoken in the central valley of California, and Saisiyat, a language spoken in Taiwan. Both are what linguists call endangered languages, or languages that are at risk of being lost in the near future. Languages can become endangered for different reasons, but the two Guekguezian studies are endangered because of colonization and displacement of the speakers.
In the fall, Guekguezian will head to the University of Rochester for a postdoctoral fellowship. In addition to continuing his research there, he plans to participate in a project aimed at using computational methods and natural language processing to make the collection and transcription of endangered language data more efficient.
Another endangered language Guekguezian is interested to explore at some point in his career is Armenian. He hopes to get funding to attend the Armenian Linguistics Conference in Yerevan this October to meet with other attendees about efforts to preserve varieties of Armenian that are less common.
“It’s a crisis that we don’t talk much about as a people: what’s going to happen to people who speak non-standard varieties of Armenian?” Guekguezian nasks. He says many of the languages and dialects of Western Armenia are already long-gone, while some still exist in places with enduring Armenian populations, such as Kessab, Syria. With those languages, we lose characteristics of those villages, and old-world Armenia.
Even Western Armenian is in what Guekguezian calls a “precarious position,” because there are no monolingual speakers—most speakers of Western Armenian also speak Arabic, English, French or Spanish, among others. To make sure these dialects survive, he says, we have to create spaces for the language to be spoken—and encourage its transition from generation to generation.
“It’s hard to pass on a language,” says Guekguezian, “One parent has to speak that language to the child most of the time in order for them to have a good grasp of it. They have to be able to speak to other kids their age. It has to be a functional language. Children are smart…if they can get by with a different language, they’ll learn that one.”
Guekguezian faces a similar challenge in his own life. Though he says he speaks very basic Armenian, he is working to pass the language on to his two-year-old son.
“He knows a few words. He can understand quite a bit,” says Guekguezian. “I’m giving him the foundation as best I can.”
Sports: Karabakh president receives Vic Darchinyan
STEPANAKERT. – President of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic Bako Sahakyan received world-famous boxer Vakhtang Darchinyan.
A range of issues related to the development of sports in Artsakh was discussed during the meeting.
Bako Sahakyan highlighted Vakhtang Darchinyan’s contribution to the development of Armenian sports and his active involvement in various pan-Armenian programs.
The President awarded Vakhtang Darchinyan “Mesrop Mashtots” order for significant achievements in the international sports.
Poyry wins Armenia hydropower project
Pöyry has been awarded an engineering and consultancy contract by Energy Invest Holding for the headworks rehabilitation project at the Dzora hydropower plant in Armenia.
The plant on the Dzoraget river has been operating since 1932. Pöyry will prepare an inventory of the observed damages to the concrete structures and hydromechanical equipment. It will also assess the reduced operability or the expectable durability of the hydro-scheme based on a risk analysis and clarify the geological/geotechnical potential causes for the damages in view of designing proper countermeasures.
“Delivering clean, renewable energy projects in this region further strengthens Pöyry’s position as one of the world’s leading hydropower engineering consultancies” said Richard Pinnock, president of Pöyry’s Energy Business Group.
Pöyry is involved in hydropower projects with a total installed capacity of over 100 GW worldwide.
Energy Invest Holding has four hydropower assets in Armenia as well as ArevEk, the first solar power plant in Armenia. With up to 1 MW capacity it being built at the highest elevation near the Makravan district of Hrazdan city. The first phase of construction is due to be completed this year.
Music: Narek Hakhnazaryan to perform at the first edition of “Armenia” international music festival
Armenian world-known cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan announced about his upcoming performance with State Youth Orchestra in Yerevan.
“As you can see I am back to Armenia, to my beloved Yerevan. I am very excited to be playing on July 5th at Aram Khachaturian Concert Hall on “Armenia” international music festival. I will be playig pieces by Alexey Shor and Camille Saint-Saëns,” Hakhnazaryan said in a video message, posted by the Armenia Music Festival Facebook page.
To note, an International music festival and competition called “Armenia” will be held in Yerevan for the first time from July 4 to 12. The organizers of the festival and competition are the State Youth Orchestra of Armenia (SYOA) and European Foundation for Support of Culture.
Pianists up to 34 years old will have a chance to compete in this competition. The total prize fund of the competition is 20 000 Euro (the 1st prize – 10 000 Euro, the 2nd prize-5000 Euro, the 3rd prize- 3000 Euro and special prize-2000 Euro).
The jury of the competition consists of 5 famous musicians and performers from different countries. In the competition, Armenia will be represented by Professor Armen Babakhanyan, a famous Armenian pianist.
Education: “VivaStart” – educational program that shapes service culture
The first graduates of this year’s “VivaStart” program have received certificates of completion. Considering high-level service as an important indicator of the quality, the company has provided an opportunity to just another group of students from different universities to get hands-on experience in sales and customer service.
As the press service of VivaCell-MTS reports, first, 21 students took part in theoretical trainings, then in a two-month period they strengthened their professional skills and attained practical knowledge in Yerevan and regional service centers.
“VivaStart” educational program has been conducted since 2015. Acknowledging the importance of customer satisfaction, VivaCell-MTS has equipped 124 students with professional knowledge and practical skills through this educational program. The participants have acquired effective communication skills for customer service, studied the products and services offered by the company and learned how to use marketing techniques for promoting those products and services. The uniqueness of this program is conditioned by its outreach not only to Yerevan, but also to regions.
“Regardless of one’s workplace or position, everyone should remember that communication is the key to human relations. The more civilized those relations are, the more the parties involved will benefit. This is the governance model of VivaCell-MTS: respect and readiness to support are our key values. The knowledge and experience you have gained during this period should guide you also in the future,” said VivaCell-MTS General Manager Ralph Yirikian.
During their meeting with the General Manager Ralph Yirikian, “VivaStart” graduates shared their impressions and opinions about the program, and emphasized the importance of the knowledge they had received.
Guided by a responsible business culture, VivaCell-MTS has been cooperating with universities in Armenia for over 12 years, by readily sharing its experience with students and giving them the best opportunities for development. So far, 12 graduates of “VivaStart” program have been hired by VivaCell-MTS.
“We have to strengthen Armenia, we have no other way.” Mikael Vardanyan
Please find the attached press release of the Ministry of Diaspora. Sincerely, Media and PR Department: ( 374 10) 585601, internal 805 ---------------------- Sincerely Department of Press and Public Relations ( 374 10) 585601, extension 805
225. RA Minister of Diaspora received Mikael Vardanyan.docx
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Bots, Blockades And Blackouts: How Armenia Media Copes
On the eve of Armenia’s parliamentary elections this April, journalist Gegham Vardanyan found himself in what would be a crisis for any reporter — his Twitter account had been suspended.
But he was not alone. Aside from Vardanyan, the editor-in-chief of media-industry monitor Media.am, the accounts of non-profit media outlet Civilnet.am, investigative-news site Hetq.am and political analyst Stepan Grigoryan were suspended, too. All had been providing active coverage of the elections.
The outage — the apparent work of a Russian bot attack — only lasted a few hours, Coda Story has reported, but it underlined, for many Armenians, the importance of online sources of news and information during major national events.
That status came not just from technological change, but, ironically, from blockades established by the government itself. While the government does not routinely restrict online access, its thinking can change in times of crisis.
And Armenians respond accordingly.
Chai Khana provides below a retrospective.
Screenshots of Armenian media outlets and journalists’ Twitter accounts that were suspended on April 1, 2017.
It all started with a hashtag. Active Armenian Twitter users had chosen #armvote2017 to disseminate coverage of the country’s April 2 parliamentary vote.
But a day before the elections, about a dozen fake Russian Twitter accounts began spreading fake news about the US Agency for International Development’s alleged intervention in the vote. They also used the #armvote2017 hashtag. Within a few hours, some of Armenia’s most active Twitter accounts covering the election and suspected violations of electoral law had been suspended.
That reaction is standard for accounts about which Twitter has received multiple complaints, noted Media.am’s Vardanyan. Nonetheless, it caused a shock.
“In the beginning, I was worried a little bit because, according to Twitter, my account could be recovered within 24 hours; that is to say, on the evening of election day. This would hinder the coverage of elections on that platform. We contacted one American media-security organization [Access Now] and the problem was solved. After four hours, all the suspended accounts were unblocked,” says Gegham Vardanyan.
Blocking Twitter accounts is a classic example of prohibiting journalists from doing their job. But governments as well as outside bots can cut off information.
On March 1, 2008, Armenia got its first taste of what it means to not be able to access reliable information online in the midst of a national news event.
Ten people were killed in Yerevan on March 1, 2008 during street clashes between police and protesters over the results of Armenia’s presidential election, according to official statistics. (Photo: Archive of the Media Initiative Center)
That morning, violent street clashes broke out in Yerevan between police and protesters who rejected the February election of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan as president. A March 1, 2008 order by then President Robert Kocharyan announced a 20-day state of emergency and stipulated that media covering domestic politics and state affairs must only use information from official bodies.
Former Armenian President Robert Kocharyan (Photo: 2rd.am)
For more than 20 days, Armenia’s media sector was paralyzed. No newspapers were printed, and leading independent news websites (notably, A1plus.am, aravot.am, azatutyun.am) were blocked. One of the main sources of information at that time, YouTube, where many Armenians actively watched the opposition’s promotional videos, disappeared as well.
The order put Armenia’s printed press into a coma as well. The Armenian Times Managing Editor Hayk Gevorgyan, 50, remembers the night of March 1. When Gevorgyan took the daily’s March 2 issue to the printers, the first person he met there was an officer from the National Security Service, Armenia’s intelligence agency.
Armenian Times Managing Editor Hayk Gevorgyan. (Photo: Grigor Yepremyan)
“An officer — I guess, a captain from the National Security — was reading and checking the front page of our daily. Then, he would call somewhere for consultation and then prohibit our publishing. For exactly 20 days, we were working like this; taking prepared editions [of the paper] to the printers, [and] then getting a rejection. After several days of this, we lost our hope that we’d be published at all. We were taking the issue to the printers, then getting refused, drinking coffee with the National Security representative, [and] then coming back,” recounted Gevorgyan.
The paper’s website also was blocked. The Armenian Times’ newspaper and websiteonly resumed their work on March 21, one day after the state of emergency was lifted.
The Armenian Times’ first issue after Armenia ended its state of emergency on March 21, 2008
But the state of emergency contributed to more Armenians using the internet, Gevorgyan believes, as people tried to find ways to get around the information blockade and find reliable information about what was going on in their country. Relying on anonymous proxies, many internet users found ways around the blockade. Websites with non-Armenian domain names also were set up to publish materials by registered Armenian journalists, media outlets and citizen-journalists.
Yerevan passers-by survey damage from the March 1, 2008 clashes between police and protesters over Armenia’s presidential-election results. (Photo:Media Initiative Center’s Archive)
Even elderly people, who never before had used computers or the internet, headed to internet cafés to get news and information from sources not just channeling the government’s line.
The 20-day state of emergency contributed to the popularity of blogs as an alternative source of information. Most Armenian blogs on Livejournal, a frequently used blogging platform in Eurasia, actively covered the post-election situation.
Blogger Samvel Martirosyan, 44, an information-security expert, is also known as @kornelij. This nickname comes from his blog, kornelij.livejournal.com,which gained public attention during the March 2008 media-blackout.
“During the 2008 information blockade, traditional media outlets (printed press and websites) were not functioning, TV stations were controlled by the authorities and, according to the order signed by the president, they had to broadcast only official information. And as Livejournal wasn’t blocked in Armenia, many people started to read blogs and create their own. Besides opinions and analyses, on Livejournal one could also find reliable information about the events that were happening during the state of emergency,” recounted Martirosyan.
That trend, though, led to some rivalry. As has happened elsewhere, several journalists started blaming bloggers for infringing on their profession. The accusations stopped, Martirosyan said, when journalists started using bloggers’ posts and Facebook statuses as sources of information.
A screenshot of Samvel Martirosyan’s (@kornelij) LiveJournal account.
Blogger Samvel Martirosyan
Early in the morning on July 17, 2016, an armed group stormed a police station in Yerevan. The group announced on their Facebook page that they had started a revolution and asked users to join them. For about an hour, people within Armenia could not access Facebook.
As elsewhere in the Caucasus, Facebook is one of the main sources of information in Armenia. The social-media site reaches roughly 32% of the country’s more than 2.12 million internet users; the second highest rate in the region after Georgia, according to Internet World Stats.
A “Daredevils of Sassoun” member speaks with media during the group’s July 2016 takeover of a Yerevan police station. (Photo: Photolure Photo Agency)
Most leading Armenian media outlets attract their readers to their websites through Facebook, and rely on the platform’s status updates and postings for their own information.
That dependence on Facebook means that blocking the platform during emergencies can contribute to panic, asserts Civilnet.am Editor-in-Chief Karen Harutyunyan, 42.
The blockage of Facebook and a police attack on journalists livestreaming during a Yerevan protest over electricity prices prompted the Washington, DC-based rights organization Freedom House to downgrade Armenia’s 2016 ranking for internet freedom.
Media analyst Mesrop Harutyunyan, 57, a lecturer in media studies at Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences, believes that, whatever the restrictions, journalists will always find ways to get information to their audiences.
Media expert Mesrop Harutyunyan, a columnist for Media.am, a site that monitors trends in Armenian media. (Photo:Suren Stepanyan)
‘Today, it is useless to block websites. How many of them should you block? It is impossible . . .To disconnect Armenians from online sources of information, a grandmother in Georgia should mistakenly cut through the internet cable which comes to Armenia [a reference to a 2011 event — ed]. Blocking is not a way out. I hope there never will be this kind of situation in Armenia again’, Mesrop Harutyunyan says.
Armenians, including some of the journalists in this story, use a range of free apps and software to get news and information when a blockade is in place.
Arguably the best known, TOR allows users to access blocked websites anonymously by diverting their internet to so-called “virtual tunnels,” a chain of private servers run by volunteers throughout the world. Security is TOR’s most cited weakness. The last connection between its chain of servers and the target destination is not encrypted.
Applications that work with a VPN (Virtual Private Network), which indirectly connects to the blocked website, provide both encryption and anonymity, but security ultimately depends on how the VPN treats its users’ data.
TunnelBear offers a free VPN (for accessing servers in 18 countries), but with restricted data. In a May 2017 review, PC magazine highly rated its security.
In mobile-obsessed Armenia, other options also are common. Veteran VPN Psyphon has been credited for its variety of censorship-dodging options, but is available for Android and Windows phones only. Owners of Apple devices often turn to Opera Free VPN, based in Canada, benefits, as PC World wrote, from strong Canadian privacy laws.
By Suren Stepanyan.