Author: Karakhanian Suren

Cuban President Raul Castro and US President Barack Obama sparred over human rights issues including the American prison at Guantanamo Bay and Cuba’s political prisoners, the BBC reports.

At a historic news conference, Mr Castro said if he was given a list of political prisoners, he would “release them tonight”.

The White House has said it has given Cuba lists of dissidents in the past.

Mr Castro does not view the prisoners as dissidents, US officials said.

That disagreement is central to the conflict between US and Cuban officials.

More needs to be done to lift the US embargo on trade with Cuba, Mr Castro said, adding that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp must close.

Mr Obama, the first serving US president to visit Cuba since 1959, said the trade embargo would be fully lifted.

 

 

 

On March 21 – the Day of Vernal Equinox– 1,500 French chiefs will present the French culinary art in the five continents of the world. Seven restaurants in Armenia will join the event and will offer traditional dishes from the French cuisine to visitors.

The French Embassy in Armenia supports the initiative held within the framework of the Francophonie Days.

Have you ever tried mushroom pate, cheese fondue, mandarin cake or French lavaret? French Ambassador to Armenia Jean-Francois Charpentier urges Armenians to avail of the unique opportunity to discover new tastes and have a nice time.

Ambassador Charpentier, who has been in Armenian for a year now, says he’s fond of Armenian cuisine and cannot name a dish he dislikes.

Photos by  Joseph Eid/AFP

 

– The Baron Hotel in Aleppo was once Syria’s grandest and most stylish hotel, a legend in itself due to its high profile guests like Lawrence of Arabia, Charles de Gaulle and Agatha Christie; but since the war arrived in Syria’s commercial hub in 2012, there have been no paying guests and the once-glamourous building is losing its centenary charm.

While passing through Aleppo which was, even at that time, a cosmopolitan centre of commerce, she noticed how uncomfortable Europeans felt when staying at the traditional caravanserais.

Eventually, she decided to build something modern in Aleppo and the result was the Ararat hotel, named after the mountain revered by Armenians, the first hotel in the region, at the end of the 19th century.

A few years later the Mazloumian Brothers enlarged their business by setting up the new Baron’s Hotel.

His wife, Rubina Tashjian, is now the only person left to watch over the decaying walls, which hold so many memories.

In the Baron’s lobby, on a yellowing wall, an advert from the 1930s can still be seen. ‘Hotel Baron, the only first-clAass hotel in leppo,’ it proclaims.

“Central heating throughout, complete comfort, uniquely situated. The only one recommended by travel agencies.”

The hotel hosted so many famous people that the full list would hardly fit into a little article.

Many of the hotel’s rooms are forever linked to the famous guests who once stayed in them.

Room 201 is linked to  Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, while Room 215 was where King Faisal I of Iraq and Syria declared Syria’s independence from the balcony in room back in 1918. Lawrence of Arabia stayed in Room 202 and Agatha Christie preferred Room 203 for her visits.

Rubina Tashjian confirms that Christie wrote much of her celebrated mystery Murder on Orient Express while staying at the Baron with her archeologist husband Max Mallowan, who did excavations at Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak in northeastern Syria.

Aleppo was the key transport center and the termination point of the Orient Express in the Middle East.

​“I met her in 1959, but I was too young to know why she was important, I only learned that later,” once recalled Armen Mazloumian.

Upon request you can even see the invoices and registration documents for famous guests such as Lawrence of Arabia, who was a regular visitor to the hotel.

It was common gossip that he was there conducting espionage for the British government. The hotel has his book on display with a magnifying glass. The inscription says, “I am writing my letters from the terrace of Hotel Baron.”

Every Syrian president except Nureddin al-Atassi has stayed at the hotel.

Presidential Suite was occupied in turn by Charles de Gaulle, King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syria’s former President Hafez Al Assad, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (the founder of the United Arab Emirates), and the American billionaire David Rockefeller.

​Other notable guests include Dame Freya Stark, Julie Christie, Mr and Mrs Theodore Roosevelt, Lady Louise Mountbatten, Charles Lindbergh and the first man in space, Soviet Yuri Gagarin.

“The history of Syria was written in here,” Rubina Tashjian says in her interview with RT news channel.

Two years ago some rfeugees started coming, and they didn’t have a place to go to. Rubina recalls that Armen said, ‘OK, you’re welcome, get some rooms.’”

This explains how war-fleeing refugees had become the Baron’s latest tenants at her husband’s invitation.

Rubina also recalls that regardless of all her requests to close down the hotel, her husband firmly refused to do so, because it has become a part of the heritage and history of a city that has already lost so much.

The Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) has passed a resolution to mark April 24th as a “Day of Commemoration for the Armenian Genocide,” the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) reports.

GUSD will be the first school district in the nation to have all of its schools closed in honor of that day.

“This is a great day for ‪HyeTad and all those who fight for justice and the memory of those we lost during the ‪‎Armenian Genocide,” ANCA said in a Facebook post.

Photo: AP

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the military to withdraw the “main part” of their forces in Syria, saying they had largely achieved their goals, the BBC reports.

He told a meeting at the Kremlin that the pullout would start on Tuesday.

The comments come amid fresh peace talks in Geneva aimed at resolving the Syrian conflict.

Russia is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Kremlin said he had been informed.

Mr Putin also said that Russia’s Hmeimim airbase and the its port at Tartus would continue to operate as normal.

He said both must be protected “from land, air and sea”.

“Our bases — the naval base in Tartus and the airbase at the Khmeimim airfield — will operate in a routine mode. They are to be safely protected from the land, from the sea and from air,” he told the defense and foreign ministers, according to TASS.

Those Russian servicemen who will stay in Syria will be engaged in monitoring the ceasefire regime, Putin added.

The Russian president said he hopes the start of the withdrawal of Russian troops will become a good motivation for launching negotiations between political forces of that country and instructed the foreign minister to intensify Russia’s participation in organization of peace process in Syria.

“I hope today’s decision will be a good signal for all conflicting parties. I hope it will sizably increase trust of all participants in the process,” the president said.  “I ask the Russian Foreign Ministry to intensify Russia’s participation in organizing the peace process to solve the Syrian problem,” he added.

Nike has suspended its relationship with Maria Sharapova after the five-time Grand Slam tennis champion admitted failing a drug test, the BBC reports.

The company said it was “saddened and surprised” at her admission that she tested positive for a banned substance at the Australian Open in January.

“We have decided to suspend our relationship with Maria while the investigation continues,” it said.

“We will continue to monitor the situation.”

Ms Sharapova’s relationship with Nike stretches back to when she was 11 years old.

 

 

The military-political leadership of Armenia maintains efforts to reach the settlement of the Karabakh conflict through peaceful means, Armenian Defense Minister Seyran Ohanyan said at a meeting with the presidency of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences.

The Minister added, however, that the rival refuses to work constructively and continues to violate the ceasefire agreement.

“The rival is consistently aggravating the situation to solve certain domestic problems on one hand, and to exert pressure on the Armenian side on the international arena in order to grab unilateral concessions,” Minister Ohanyan said.

“We’re afraid of war, but we’re not afraid of fighting, i.e. we are ready to protect Armenia and Artsakh – a sacred part of our country. The Armenian Ministry of Defense is preparing for war every day,” the Defense Minister said.

Seyran Ohanyan added that the current military-political conditions and the international development do not indicate to the possibility of large-scale military actions or war, since everything is being done to prevent all those intentions and goals through creation of international guarantees.

The Republican Party of Armenia and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation signed an agreement on cooperation today. The document was signed by Vice-President of the Republican Party of Armenia Armen Ashotyan and representative of the Supreme Body of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Aghvan Vardanyan.

Under the agreement, the parties agree to implement the urgent steps deriving from the Constitutional changes adopted on December 6, 2015.

They agree to continue to improve the system guaranteeing human rights and freedoms, to ensure the organization and conduct of free and reliable elections, implementation of the constitutional norms of democracy.

They pledge to raise the competitiveness of the Armenian economy, to implement an active anti-monopoly policy and ensure free entrepreneurship, economic activity and competition, to promote investments, create jobs, review the tax policy.

The parties also pledge to purse the protection and popularization of the national cultural legacy, develop and reinforce the security systems of the Republic of Arenmia and the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, to take steps to improve Armenia’s international standing, reinforce Armenia’s statehood and deepen the role and participation of the Armenian Diaspora in the preservation of the Armenian national identity and repatriation.

– Approximately 60 people filled the chapel at the Granoff Family Hillel Center last night to hear survivors of genocide share their stories as a part of Tufts Against Genocide’s (TAG) 6th annual Survivors Speak panel. The event was held as a component of the Cummings/Hillel Program for Holocaust and Genocide Education.

Senior Shoshana Weiner and sophomore Mariel Kieval, both interns for the Cummings Foundation, introduced the event with a joint speech about the importance of remembrance. Weiner and Kieval organized the event in conjunction with TAG President Caroline Atwood. In their speech, they said that while the phrase “never again” is often used while discussing such atrocities, events of genocide continue to happen to this day.

The first panelist to speak was sophomore Nairi Krafian, the great-granddaughter of Hagop Madoian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide.

“My experience is so different from [his],” she said.

Krafian shared snippets of her great-grandfather’s fractured childhood working as a forced gravedigger, who recorded the surreal experience of living among the dead in a journal. “Nobody would pay any attention,” she shared from his journal. “People died, and deaths went unnoticed.”

Krafian said that the repercussions of the Armenian Genocide, where masses of Armenian people were murdered in 1915 by the Ottoman government, have been passed onto her, and “that discomfort influences [her] life.” She said she maintains a deep connection to her Armenianidentity, and takes pride in what she describes as the failure of the Turkish people to extinguish her own.

The next panelist, Holocaust survivor Jack Trompetter, said that genocide stems from a process of demeaning and dehumanizing another people.

“To have a genocide, you need to have ‘the other.’ Once you have that other, the path is clear for an atrocity to occur,” he said.

Trompetter was born in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1942, and was separated from his family as they split up to avoid persecution, ultimately reuniting with his family at the close of the war.

“When people went into hiding in those days, nobody had any idea how long it would be,” he said. “I was one of the lucky children.”

The next panelist, Edina Skaljic, spoke about living in constant fear during the Bosnian Genocide, where ethnic cleansing in the late 1990s took the lives of thousands of Bosniaks. Skaljic said she remembered being given a shopping bag by her mother, and being told to pack only what she needed while leaving their home.

“I didn’t understand. Why did I have to choose?” she said. “That was the moment my childhood ended.”

Skaljic said out of fear of danger, she was forced to assume a new name and hometown to shield the truth of her heritage. She recalled arguing with her mother at the time about pretending to be something she was not.

“Your name could actually mean life or death in Bosnia at that time,” she said.

The last panelist to speak was Claude Kaitare, a survivor of the Rwandan Genocide, where the Tutsiswere being targeted and slaughtered by the Hutu majority in 1994. Kaitare said the conflict began without warning; suddenly, neighbors were turning on neighbors, and weapons and checkpoints were sprouting up everywhere.

He recalled a time when a Tutsi boy went up to

a checkpoint and was beat by the guards with the blunt ends of their machetes. One guard hit the boy with the wrong side of the blade, drawing blood, he said.

“Once they start seeing blood, it’s like open season,” Kaitare said.

After the boy fell to the ground, the guards announced they were taking him to the hospital, which was really “a mass burial place,” he said.

The survivors on the panel all spoke about the importance of remembering genocide.

“In telling you these stories, that makes you witnesses,” Trompetter said.

Students should now carry the burden of preserving his history, he said. Skaljic echoed this sentiment, expressing her fears that their stories of death and survival would go untold.

“Silence is betrayal,” she said. “We say we have to forgive, but not forget.”

The panelists also discussed the difficulty in the healing process after surviving genocide. All of them said that no survivor can ever fully recover, but that educating the next generation helps survivors personally come to terms with their difficult histories.

“There is nothing more amazing, there is nothing more healing for a genocide survivor than to see people who actually care,” Skaljic said.

Forward Yura Movsisyan tallied the day’s only goal in Real Salt Lake’s 1-0 win over their South Korean opponents, who finished fifth in the most recent K-League season, according to MLS soccer.

Movsisyan, a recently signed Designated Player, converted a slip pass from Juan Manuel Martinez after a clever dummy from Joao Plata.

RSL, who played in a 4-3-3, are now 2-2-0 in their four preseason matches. Each game has ended 1-0.