Author: Kalashian Nyrie

RALLY IN FRONT OF TURKISH EMBASSY IN MOSCOW
MOSCOW, APRIL 25. ARMINFO. A traditional April rally of the Armenian
community in front of the Turkish Embassy in Moscow this year exceeded
all the previous rallies as to its scales. The Moscow authorities
allowed gathering of 300 people and not 100 as it was during the
previous years.
According to ARMINFO’s special correspondent to Moscow, this time
Chairman of the Russian-Armenian Commonwealth organization Yuri
Navoyan led the rally. In his words, this year the community managed
not only to achieve permission for more number of participants in the
rally, but also to block the street in front of the Embassy. The
police officers inspected the rally-participants at special
checkpoints. As soon as 300 people had passed the checkpoint, the
access to the rally was closed. The participants occupied the whole
square approaching the building of the Embassy. To note, the Armenian
community has not been allowed to approach the Embassy before.
All the Armenian organizations in Moscow – Russian Armenian
Commonwealth, the Union of Armenians of Russia, Moscow Armenian
Community, the Club of Armenian Culture Ararat, and the National Club
“Miabanutyun” participated in the rally. Youth organization –
Association of Armenian Students “Mitk,” UAR Youth Organization,
Students Organization of Armenian Apostolic Church Diocese were
especially active. Among the flags of Armenia and the Armenian
organizations in Moscow, were also flags of Russia and Germany. A
group of German volunteers also participated in the rally as well as
the organization Young Lawyers of Russia who bore with them silk
posters condemning the vicious crime in Ottoman Turkey against the
Armenian people and the whole humanity.
According to preliminary calculations, if allowed, the rally
participants would number 1,000 people. They observed the demand of
the police in the course of the rally and displayed civil
consciousness.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Pan Armenian News
NATO DID NOT DECIDE ON DEPLOYING FORCES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS
25.04.2005 03:57
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ NATO did not decide on deploying its forces on the
territory of either of the South Caucasian states, Special Representative
for the Caucasus and Central Asia Robert Simmons stated in Tbilisi. `NATO is
not going to commit troops in South Caucasus for the defense of a gas
pipeline or any other economic objects. However I do not rule out that the
issue may be discussed in future’, he stated in response to the reports of
some media on the alleged decision by NATO to deploy forces in Azerbaijan
for the defense of the Azeri sector of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

Pan Armenian News
CANADIAN MISSION IN ARMENIA TO GIVE NEW IMPULSE TO COOPERATION
25.04.2005 04:57
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Today Armenian President Robert Kocharian met with the
delegation of Canadian parliamentarians and representatives of the Armenian
community of Canada, RA President’s press service reported. During the
meeting the parties discussed the Armenian-Canadian relations and noted that
with establishing of Canadian diplomatic mission in Yerevan the economic
cooperation between the two states will considerably activate. According to
the representatives of the Armenian community of Canada, even though they
call on the historic homeland rather frequently they every time witness
changes, which testify of Armenia’s progress. They assured that the Armenian
community of Canada is ready to develop cooperation with Armenia. The
parties also touched upon the international recognition of the Armenian
Genocide.

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
April 24, 2005 Sunday
French Armenians commemorate genocide anniversary
By Nikolai Morozov
PARIS
The French Armenian community, which is the largest in Europe,
commemorated the 90th anniversary of the beginning of Armenian
genocide by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
There are meetings and marches throughout France. French Armenians
are demanding the Turkish recognition of the large-scale killings.
Churches prayed for the slaughtered Armenians, and a stone was laid
in the foundation of a memorial marking the genocide anniversary in
Marseilles, where about 80,000 French Armenians live.
On Friday French President Jacques Chirac and visiting Armenian
President Robert Kocharyan laid wreaths to the monument to Armenian
genocide victims in Paris.
According to Yerevan, the large-scale killings of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire in 1915-1917 claimed 1.5 million lives. France
recognized Armenian genocide by the then imperial authorities in
2001. The French Armenian community has about 500,000 members.

Pan Armenian News
LVOV: RALLY ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE 90-TH ANNIVERSARY
24.04.2005 07:19
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Some 1 thousand Lvov resident, mostly Armenians, rally in
the city center on the 90-th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 1915.
The rally participants went along Lvov central streets to the monument to
Taras Shevchenko. Priests were in the forepart of the procession, whose
participants have red carnations and lighted candles in their hands. They
carry transparencies: `All those not censuring the genocide are its
participants,’ `Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Empire awaits for its
«Nuremberg»’, `Non-acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide cannot be
justified by any national interests.’ Honorary President of Akhtyur Armenian
Association of Lvov Karapet Bagratuni said those gathered demand that Turkey
and other countries of the world, which have not recognized the Armenian
Genocide, to properly acknowledge it. In his words some 3 thousand Armenians
live in Lvov. Militia does not hamper those gathered. It should be noted
that April 22 unknown people again wrote offensive expressions on the walls
of the Armenian church situated in the center of Lvov.

Turkish Press
April 24 2005
Erdogan: I Have The Chief Negotiator’s Name In My Heart

ANKARA – Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that the
Kardak incident in the Aegean is nothing new. ”Let us not pay much
attention to the Kardak issue,” said Erdogan.
Erdogan attended a reception held by the Turkish parliament’s speaker
Bulent Arinc to celebrate the National Sovereignty and Children’s
Day.
Erdogan talked with the diplomats of several countries one of which
was the Dutch ambassador Sjoerd Izaak Hendrik Gosses. Erdogan told
Gosses that the end of economic isolation in the Turkish Republic of
Northern Cyprus would bring a lasting solution in the island. ”We
expect the assistance of all friends on this matter. I will make
certain contacts after the new government is established in the
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus,” told Erdogan.
Ambassador of Iraq in Ankara Sabah Cemil Umran has informed Erdogan
that efforts are being made to form the cabinet in Iraq. ”Iraqi
prime minister Ibrahim Caferi will soon visit Turkey,” mentioned
Umran. Erdogan said no specific date had been set for the arrival of
the Iraqi prime minister.
Erdogan met the Polish ambassador Grzegorz Michalski at the
reception. Erdogan conveyed his administration’s disappointment with
the decision of the Polish parliament that recognized the so-called
Armenian genocide. ”Our Polish friends should not have taken such a
decision. The Polish people have been tricked by certain groups. A
very small group of people made Poland take such a decision,”
stressed Erdogan.
Asked by journalists about who will become Turkey’s chief negotiator
in the European Union process, Erdogan replied that he has the chief
negotiator’s name in his heart.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Agence France Presse
April 24 2005
Leaving Iraq to settle for separatist Karabakh — an Armenian story

24/04/2005 AFP
LACHIN, Azerbaijan, April 24 (AFP) – 4h29 – Turkish massacres of
Armenians which began 90 years ago on Sunday have a lot to do with
why a pretty 29-year-old from Iraq is now living on one of the most
contested chunks of land on earth in the Caucasus.
An ethnic Armenian whose grandparents fled to Baghdad when Ottoman
forces began their campaign against Armenians in eastern Anatolia,
Anakhit Petrosyan once dreamed of coming to Armenia to work in the
Iraqi embassy in Yerevan.
But when a US bomb killed her father last year her plans changed and
like her grandparents before her, she fled her birthplace to settle
in the Lachin district of Azerbaijan which is controlled by
pro-Armenian forces of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh republic.
“I didn’t know much about Karabakh, all I knew was that there had
been a war here and these were our territories, we hoped to get help
here,” Petrosyan said.
Armenians around the world mark April 24 as the day Ottoman Turks
began the genocide of their people in 1915, something Turkey denies
ever happened.
But the events of the early 20th century are today overshadowed by
Armenia’s ongoing conflict with its other Turkic-speaking neighbor,
Azerbaijan.
In 1994, Armenia and its proxies captured Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic
Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, as well as seven surrounding
Azeri regions, through a gruelling six-year war that cost 25,000
lives and displaced about one million people, 250,000 of them
Armenians.
Turkey closed its border with Armenia in solidarity with Azerbaijan,
dealing a crippling economic blow to the former Soviet republic from
which is has yet to recover.
But Azerbaijan still claims the territories and 750,000 Azeri
refugees remain in camps on the ready to return.
A shaky ceasefire is often punctuated by increasingly frequent
shootings that have taken at least a dozen lives this year.
The escalation prompted the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE) which is charged with mediating the conflict to
express concern about the breaches as well as recent public
statements about the possibility of war.
Azerbaijan charges that Karabakh and Armenian authorities have put in
place an Israeli-style settlement plan in the occupied regions
outside of Karabakh itself, so that they can lay future claims to
them.
The Azeri claim is highlighted by cases like Petrosyan’s who like
other Armenians from the diaspora outside the former Soviet Union
settled in the territory.
The focus of those concerns has been the mountainous area in which
Petrosyan and her family now live, the strategically important Lachin
corridor, renamed Verdzor by the Armenians, which represents the only
land route between Karabakh and Armenia.
Unlike Karabakh, which had a 75-percent ethnic Armenian population
before the war, Lachin was predominantly Azeri.
A recent OSCE mission sent to the separatist republic to verify
Azerbaijan’s claims said in its findings that up to 12,000 people,
mostly Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan, had been resettled in the
area.
This is immediately obvious to any visitor to Lachin where the only
sign of it ever having been in Azerbaijan’s hands are the
eastern-style window portholes in some of its war-gutted
administration buildings.
Petrosyan, whose husband was wounded in the Iran-Iraq war of the
1980s and taken prisoner by US forces in the Gulf war in 1991 said
the possibility of another war with Azerbaijan would not deter her
from staying in Lachin.
“If we could fight for Iraq, then we can surely fight for our own
homeland,” she said.
Lachin’s authorities deny any “foreign” Armenians have settled in the
area, or in fact that any live there at all.
“We don’t see our job as settling as many people as possible, our aim
is to give the refugees a place to live and secure the corridor,”
said Gagik Kosakyan, the deputy head of Lachin’s administration.
Securing the corridor has meant rebuilding much of the area’s
infrastructure and housing, so much so that the area looks more
prosperous than the adjacent region within Armenia proper.
Armenian officials have said any settlement over Karabakh would have
to include an Azeri concession of Lachin, an area that saw some of
the heaviest fighting during the war because of its strategic
importance.
Kosakyan estimated that the separatist republic had invested one
million dollars (765,000 euros) a year to rehabilitate the region
since 1994, with many extra funds coming from Armenia’s influential
diaspora in the West.
And like many other refugees in the region informally polled by AFP
Petrosyan she said she was intent on staying. “They can say what they
want, but we know this is our land,” she said.

Posted on Sun, Apr. 24, 2005
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Turkey faces up to dark legacy
Armenians mark the 90th year since the start of genocide at Turkish hands.
By Louis Meixler
Associated Press
ANKARA, Turkey – When a leading Turkish novelist said earlier this
year that one million Armenians were murdered in his country during
World War I, he broke a deep taboo.
Three lawsuits were filed against Orhan Pamuk, accusing him of
damaging the state. “He shouldn’t be allowed to breathe,” roared one
nationalist group. In Istanbul, a school collected his books from
students to return to him. On a news Web site, the vote ran 4-1
against him.
Turkey’s mass expulsion of Armenians during World War I – which
Armenians say was part of a genocide that claimed 1.5 million lives –
is a dark chapter rarely discussed in Turkey or taught in its schools.
But slowly the veil is being lifted. One reason is that Turkey is more
open and democratic today. Another is its ambition to join the
European Union; French President Jacques Chirac has said Turkey must
first acknowledge the killings.
Turkey is also eager to counter Armenian diaspora groups that are
pushing European governments and the United States to declare the
killings to have been genocide.
Finally, the approach of April 24 has intensified the focus on the
issue: Today is the 90th anniversary of the date Armenians mark as the
start of the killings.
“We are mutually deaf to each other,” said Yasar Yakis, head of the
Turkish parliament’s European Union Affairs Committee, who invited two
ethnic Armenians in Istanbul to address his committee. “Perhaps if we
can create a climate in which we listen to what the other side has to
say, we might meet in the middle.”
Turkey has long denied the genocide claim, saying the death toll of
1.5 million is wildly inflated and that both Armenians and Turks were
killed in fighting during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Turks
who describe it as genocide have on occasion been prosecuted, and
Turkey often gets into diplomatic tussles with governments it suspects
of taking the Armenian side. It is one of the reasons Turkey and
neighboring Armenia have no diplomatic relations.
Turkey also fears that if the genocide claim is recognized, Armenians
will use it to demand compensation – either money or lost land.
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul insists that to call what occurred
genocide is “pure slander,” and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
has said that all countries should open their archives to scholars to
examine whether the event was genocide.
A Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Committee, partly funded by the U.S.
State Department, first met in 2001, bringing together leading Turks
and Armenians, while intellectuals such as Pamuk, whose novels have
won critical acclaim in the United States, are playing a key role in
opening up the debate.
The taboo is diminishing, said Hrant Dink, editor in chief of Agos, a
weekly Armenian newspaper in Istanbul. “The box has been opened. It
cannot be closed anymore.”
The subject needs to be dealt with gently because “the stubbornness on
both sides is so great,” said Vamik Volkan, a member of the
reconciliation committee. “It was not in the history books.”
Volkan said he grew up knowing nothing about the Armenian tragedy and
first learned of it in the 1950s when he met an Armenian American at a
dinner in the United States. “He turned red and had a seizure when I
told him I was a Turk,” Volkan recalls.
For Turkey, the issue goes beyond the killings of Armenians to the
whole trauma of losing its once-mighty Ottoman Empire.
As the Muslim empire faltered, minority Armenian Christians began
asserting their identity. During World War I, amid fears of Armenian
collusion with the enemy army of czarist Russia, Armenians were forced
out of towns and villages throughout the Turkish heartland of
Anatolia, and many died.
“The Armenians were relocated because they cooperated with the enemy,
the Russians, and they… killed Ottoman soldiers from behind the
lines,” Yakis, the lawmaker, said.
Armenians, however, say the killings were part of a planned genocide.
Volkan, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of
Virginia, said that after the war, the new Turkish republic “wanted to
look forward and not backward.”
Pamuk dropped his bombshell in February in an interview with the Swiss
newspaper Tagesanzeiger, talking of Armenians as well as Turkey’s
modern-day Kurdish minority.
He said, “Thirty thousand Kurds have been murdered here, and one
million Armenians, and nobody dares to mention that. So I do it. And
that’s why they hate me.”
The reaction to Pamuk was largely hostile, but a few newspaper
columnists defended his freedom of speech
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Pan Armenian News
ARMENIAN PRESIDENT CALLED TURKISH PREMIER’S LETTER `NOT ENCOURAGING’
24.04.2005 03:41
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian President Robert Kocharian called the letter
received from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan from the point of
view of solution of the Armenian-Turkish relations. Yesterday in the air of
the Russian TV Company, specifically, in Zerkalo program, he noted that he
would like not to speak of the content of the letter in detail, however he
will answer the letter soon. Touching upon the question what the
acknowledgement of the Genocide means to Armenia Robert Kocharian
underscored Armenians do not have hatred, rather – bitterness. A person can
feel something like that when has lost a friend or a relative and the
culprit who did it is not punished. `The sensation takes the shape of an
all-national one and the vector is rather clearly specified. It is enough to
visit the Memorial Complex of Tsitsernakaberd to understand what Armenians
feel concerning that day,’ Robert Kocharian accentuated.

Providence Journal , RI
April 24 2005
John Avakian grapples with the Armenian Genocide, through art

BY BILL VAN SICLEN
Journal Arts Writer

For years, Massachusetts artist John Avakian ran from his past — ran
from the shadows and silences in his family’s history and from his
own memories of growing up as the only son of survivors of the
Armenian Genocide.
Now Avakian, who’s having a flurry of shows at Providence galleries
this spring, has embraced what he once tried to flee.
“I was in total denial,” he says during a phone interview from his
home in Sharon, Mass. “Deep down, I knew the truth. I knew that my
parents have lived through his horrible massacre. But I couldn’t
admit it to myself.”
Avakian says the turning point came in the mid-1990s, when his
then-girlfriend tricked him into visiting a private therapist.
“She told me the therapy sessions were for her, when they were really
for me,” he says. “She knew I’d never do it on my own. By the end of
the first session, I was crying like a baby. It all just poured out
of me.”
Since then, Avakian’s work has focused almost exclusively on the
Armenian Genocide, which began in 1915 and eventually claimed the
lives of more than a million Armenians. This year marks its 90th
anniversary.
“It’s amazing that it’s been 90 years, and we’re only just beginning
to talk about it,” Avakian says. “In my own case, it took years of
therapy before I could really discuss it. But as a society, we’re
still in denial.”
Avakian hopes his current work, which is on display at the Mathewson
Street Methodist Church through April 29 and in a group show at
Gallery Z on Atwells Avenue through May 28, will help spark greater
awareness of the tragedy.
A printmaking instructor at Northeastern University and the Boston
Museum School, Avakian specializes in one-of-a-kind prints known as
monotypes. Often his starting point is a photographic image copied
from a book or downloaded from the Internet. Typically, the
photographs show mass graves, hooded corpses and evidence of other
atrocities committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians.
“Early in my career, I would have recoiled from using that kind of
imagery,” Avakian says. “It’s just too raw, too gruesome. But now I
think the world needs to see what happened. It needs to see the
horror.”
At the same time, Avakian admits that he tries to tone down the raw
immediacy of the images by adding splashes of color, bits of poetry
and other elements. The result, he says, is a mix of beauty and
barbarity.
“I come from a humanist background, where beauty is the ultimate goal
of art, even if the subject matter is ugly,” he says.
Both the Mathewson and Gallery Z shows feature works from an ongoing
series Avakian calls “Man’s Inhumanity to Man: If I Begin to Cry, I
Will Cry Forever.” The title for the series comes from a confession
Avakian made at one of his therapy sessions.
“At one point, I told the therapist that I felt like I was about to
cry,” he recalls. “The therapist said, ‘Then why don’t you?’ I
answered that I was afraid that if started crying that I would keep
on crying forever.”
“They shut me out”
Born in Worcester, Avakian grew up in a family where memories of the
Armenian Genocide were unspoken yet ever-present. He says his parents
rarely talked about their experiences, and when they did, they often
went to great lengths to make sure their son never understood what
they were saying.
“Every now and then, I’d stumble in while they were talking about
it,” Avakian says. “Immediately, they’d switch from speaking
Armenian, which I understood, to Turkish, which I didn’t. They shut
me out.”
By the time he graduated from high school, Avakian says he had
internalized his parents’ habit of not speaking about the past.
Though already active as an artist, he says he never considered
exploring his family’s history.
The silence continued at Yale University, where Avakian earned
undergraduate and graduate degrees in painting, and at Boston’s
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he studied printmaking from
1990 to 1994.
Avakian says the first sign that something was amiss came when he saw
a photograph of an electric chair and couldn’t get the image out of
his mind.
“At the time, everything I was doing was totally abstract,” he
recalls. “No pictures or images of any kind. But once I saw this
picture, I just couldn’t shake it. I had no idea why it affected me
that way, but it did.”
Then came the therapy sessions with his girlfriend. Suddenly, the
picture of the electric chair made perfect sense.
“It was a symbol of state-sanctioned death,” Avakian says. “In a
sense, it crystallized all the feelings I’d learned to bury.”
Immersed in history
Since then, Avakian has immersed himself in Armenian history,
including the campaign of mass killings now known as the Armenian
Genocide or holocaust. Concentrated mainly in the Anatolian region of
present-day Turkey, the violence resulted in the death or expulsion
of an estimated 2 million people.
He’s also learned more about his own parents’ backgrounds, including
the horrific story of how his mother, as a child, had been forced to
watch as Turkish soldiers slaughtered most of her family.
“No wonder she didn’t want to talk about it,” Avakian says. “The pain
must have been overwhelming.”
Note: In addition to the Gallery Z and Mathewson Street Church
exhibits, Avakian is also the focus of two other Providence-area
shows. From May 4 to 3, his prints will be on display at the Jewish
Community Center at 401 Elmgrove Ave., and from May 19 to June 30 at
the Hunt-Cavanagh Gallery at Providence College.