17:31,
YEREVAN, 28 JANUARY, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs “Armenpress” that today, 28 January, USD exchange rate stood at 518.16 drams. EUR exchange rate stood at 628.06 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate stood at 6.89 drams. GBP exchange rate stood at 711.59 drams.
The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.
Gold price stood at 30929.52 drams. Silver price stood at 423.14 drams. Platinum price stood at 18408.45 drams.
18:40,
YEREVAN, JANUARY 27, ARMENPRESS. According to Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, Secretary of State to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs of France, they raise the issue of the Armenian war prisoners during their conversations with Azerbaijani leadership, whenever there is such an opportunity, ARMENPRESS reports Lemoyne said in Yerevan.
”Naturally, we raise that issue in conversations with the Azerbaijani leadership, whenever we have such an opportunity. The ICRC has the main mandate over the issue of the war prisoners and they work in that direction, but we also raise that issue in case of any opportunity”, he said.
AL-Monitor By Amberin Zaman Jan. 21, 2021 With the inauguration of Joe Biden as US president, Turkey’s designated nemesis, Brett McGurk, has formally taken over his new position as the National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa. “The McGurk thorn in Turkish-American relations,” fumed English-language government mouthpiece Daily Sabah in a Jan. 18 op-ed. The headline summed up the mood in Ankara, where McGurk is widely expected to use his power to undermine Turkey at every opportunity. “McGurk was the chief architect of the United States’ relationship with the Syrian offshoot of the [Kurdistan Workers Party] PKK terrorist organization, the [People’s Protection Units] YPG. The appointment has dealt a heavy blow and could impact the mending of ties between Ankara and Washington. McGurk’s appointment has sullied the picture,” complained the op-ed’s author, Batu Coskun. Will it really? The narrative being pushed by circles close to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stems from McGurk’s role as counter-Islamic State envoy under two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. McGurk, together with the US Central Command, oversaw the highly successful partnership with the Syrian Kurdish YPG to defeat IS. Turkey remains incensed by the alliance because of the YPG’s close links with the PKK, which has been waging an armed insurgency against Turkey since 1984. The reality is, though, that Ankara treats any arrangement empowering the Kurds, be they in Iraq, Iran, Syria or Turkey, as an existential threat. By May 2017, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was openly campaigning for McGurk to be dismissed. “It would be beneficial if this person is changed,” he told the private broadcaster NTV. While it’s easy to see why having its NATO ally arm, train and decorate members of a group that was established as the PKK’s Syrian wing would drive Turkey mad, the reason the partnership grew is not McGurk. It’s Turkey’s failure to come up with an alternative force and its laissez faire attitude toward the thousands of foreign fighters who poured into Syria through the Turkish border to expand the “caliphate” that gave rise to Turkey’s image as a patron of the jihadis. In truth, McGurk worked closely with the Turks for many years traveling to Ankara, meeting with Erdogan and striking up an amicable relationship with his intelligence chief Hakan Fidan, among others, to work on a range of knotty issues including Iraq and its oil trade through the Kurdistan Region. Yet the anti-McGurk growls from Ankara suggest that Turkey continues to pin US policies that it doesn’t like on individuals and claim those individuals have gone rogue. “McGurk is not a rogue actor. He’s someone who’s deeply committed to advancing the missions assigned to him by his commander-in-chief and he’s done it for three presidents,” said a Western source with close knowledge of McGurk. “He’s never believed in carving up Syria, just like he’s never believed in carving up Iraq. He’s trying to cultivate strong local partners to advance US interests. He’s driven by matching means with ends and he’s often given few resources to accomplish significant tasks,” the source added. One of his notable successes was negotiating the 2016 prisoner swap with Iran that saw four Americans of Iranian descent including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian freed in exchange for seven Iranians who were held on charges of violating sanctions. A defining characteristic of McGurk is the ease and single-mindedness with which he shapes the missions that he’s assigned. He’s a master at navigating power — a strategist, not an ideologue. As such, if Ankara were to turn a new page, as it keeps claiming it wants to do, it may well find a constructive partner in McGurk, be it in Syria, Iraq, Iran or Libya, over which he now holds sway. And the Syrian Kurds may discover as their Iraqi brothers did that McGurk does not always pick their side. He was among the fiercest critics of the Iraqi Kurds’ 2017 referendum on independence. In the first year of the war against IS in 2014, McGurk spent more time in Turkey than any other country in the region. He negotiated the deal to get Turkey to let the coalition carry out airstrikes against IS. It took almost a year. It was again McGurk who secured Turkish agreement to let Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga warriors transit through Turkey to help the YPG end the IS siege of Kobani, the Syrian town on the Turkish border where the US partnership with the Syrian Kurds was first forged. Yet even after Kobani, Washington’s plan A was to use the Turkish-backed Syrian opposition against IS. Massive US air support helped those forces cross the so-called Marea line and move east to Manbij. The mixed Arab-Turkish town where IS had planned the Paris attacks would soon become the locus of Turkish-US tensions in Syria. However, when Turkish-backed forces failed to capture Manbij, where IS had planned the deadly Paris and Brussels attacks, the Pentagon gave the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) the green light on Manbij, allowing them to seize territory west of the Euphrates River for the first time, something Turkey was viscerally opposed to. The same pattern was repeated in Raqqa. Turkey was given over a year to come up with a rebel force to seize the jihadis’ capital. Ankara instead demanded that the Pentagon provide more US forces — some 10,000 of them — than it was willing to deploy of its own. Once again the SDF stepped in. Raqqa fell in 2017. The emerging consensus was that Turkey was more motivated to attack the Syrian Kurds than to clear IS from its border. “Ankara did seek to build with the United States an alternative force through the Train and Equip program. The program failed,” said Aaron Stein, research director for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank based in Philadelphia. He was referring to a now defunct CIA program to arm and train Syrian opposition rebels inside Turkey. The US plan then became to defeat IS and “given the reality of geography and the need to work through a proxy, the YPG was the only option. Whereas it was a secondary priority for Ankara, as they focused first on the clandestine program to push [out Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad and then to frustrate the YPG’s efforts,” Stein added. Domestic politics also played a big part in deepening the US-Turkish divide. The Kurds’ dizzying gains in Syria spooked Turkey into pulling the plug on peace talks with the PKK. Up to this day, Erdogan remains convinced that the United States had a finger in the failed attempt to bloodily unseat him in July 2016. It is frequently cited as one of the reasons the Turkish leader decided to acquire Russian S-400 missiles that are designed to shoot down US-made F-16s, which the coup plotters used to bomb the Turkish Parliament. The move has pushed Turkish-US relations to the brink. Caving to congressional pressure in December, the Trump administration slapped sanctions on Turkey’s state defense procurer under the Countering America’s Adversaries Act. Turkey has already been kicked out of the F-35 consortium and will not receive any of the fifth generation fighter jets until it's removed the S-400s, or as Stein puts it, “verifies nondeployment” and “nonuse” through a credible monitoring mechanism. Antony Blinken, the Biden administration’s pick for secretary of state, made clear that there will be no shift during his confirmation hearing on Jan. 19. “The idea that a strategic — so-called strategic — partner of ours would actually be in line with one of our biggest strategic competitors in Russia is not acceptable,” he said, hinting that further sanctions might follow. Erdogan remains adamant, however, that Turkey will take delivery of a second shipment of S-400 batteries. Might he believe that the Biden administration will seek his ouster? His legendary paranoia will have been fed by Biden's refusal to indulge his request for a telephone conversation, as initially reported by the Middle East Eye. Turkey’s assault against the YPG in October 2019 offered a glimpse of what might follow, with Biden lashing out at Trump for greenlighting the invasion. Biden said he would have never allowed it and called Erdogan an "autocrat." In December 2019, McGurk quit the administration in protest at Trump’s announcement that he was pulling all US troops out of Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria. (Faced with a congressional outcry, Trump didn't follow through.) Freed of his bureaucratic straitjacket, the 47-year-old former lawyer began publicly taking aim at Turkey over its lax attitude toward IS. How else did Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi find sanctuary so near the Turkish border, McGurk mused in a series of tweets. In sum, Turkey’s real and self-inflicted problem is with a bipartisan consensus in Congress and with the new president that it's Ankara, not McGurk, that is going rogue. The priority, certainly as far as Syria is concerned, will be to undo the damage Trump appointees wrought by silently condoning Turkish aggression against the Kurds and turning a blind eye to the horrific abuses by its rebel proxies. As of Jan. 20 the message from Washington will likely be, “No more free rides."
On Nov. 9, 2020, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia signed a peace deal to end the fighting over the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh, a region internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory but controlled by ethnic Armenians.
Since the war broke out on Sept. 27, 2020, Russian officials estimate 5,000 people have been killed and more than 100,000 civilians have been displaced. As the two sides reached an agreement, with Azerbaijan keeping several territories it gained control over during six weeks of fighting, there seems to be more than one winner and loser of this peace deal.
The ethnic and territorial conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh dates back to the 20th century. In 1920, when modern-day Armenia and Azerbaijan became constituent states of the Soviet Union, Armenians were the ethnic majority in Nagorno-Karabakh, but Moscow gave control to the Azerbaijani authorities. When the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late 1980s, Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional parliament voted to become a part of Armenia. This decision, backed by the Armenian government and opposed by Moscow and Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, sparked a fierce war that displaced around a million people, mostly Azerbaijanis, and killed tens of thousands. Ethnic cleansing and massacres by both sides were reported.
The war came to an end when Russia negotiated a ceasefire in 1994. However, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Minsk Group, an establishment founded in 1992 by France, Russia and the United States, failed to get the two sides to negotiate on a comprehensive peace agreement. Since then, Nagorno-Karabakh has been controlled by separatist ethnic Armenians backed by the Armenian government despite remaining a part of Azerbaijan.
The 2020 armed conflict over the region extends beyond Armenia and Azerbaijan, as it has geopolitical and strategic implications for many other countries. So who are the winners and losers of the peace deal that ended the fierce fighting?
Azerbaijan
The peace deal consists of terms indicating a clear victory for Azerbaijan, which will hold onto several districts of Nagorno-Karabakh that it gained control of during the conflict, including the strategically important city Shusha. Additionally, a transit corridor will be established along the southern border of Armenia with Iran, which will connect Azerbaijan with its exclave – the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic.
Since the conflict began, Azerbaijan’s battleground performance proved a significant military superiority. Deep cooperation and intelligence ties with Israel and overt support from longtime military ally Turkey played a key role in Azerbaijan making territorial gains.
Armenia
Russia is traditionally seen as an ally of Armenia: it has a military base in Gyumri, Armenia, and both countries are primarily Orthodox-Christian. They are both members of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, which dictates that Russia is expected to send military assistance in case Armenia is attacked. But Nagorno-Karabakh is not considered a part of Armenian territory.
The terms of the three-way pact is far from favorable for Armenia. Although the country will keep Stepanakert, the de facto capital of Nagorno-Karabakh and receive a Russian-controlled corridor linking Karabakh and Armenia, it lost several key territories like Shusha. After the peace deal was signed, protestors rallied in Armenian capital Yerevan, dissenting to the agreement and demanding that Prime Minister Pashinyan resign.
Russia
As a political science Ph.D student at Northwestern University with a professional interest in International Relations, Miruna Barnoschi said that Russia threw Armenia under the bus for strategic gains and regional dominance.
“Although one would expect Russia to support Armenia, Russia wanted to get ahead in terms of having control over the South Caucasus region that is geopolitically strategic,” Barnoschi said.
Two oil pipelines, Baku-Tbilisi-Supsa and Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, as well as the South Caucasus natural gas pipeline Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum, were key to Russia’s decisions throughout the conflict.
“Russia wants to make sure it has control over this corridor that is the gateway to Europe and the world market in terms of energy, and it was willing to leave Armenia in the dust,” Barnoschi said. “Armenia didn’t have the kind of economic development in terms of its energy like Azerbaijan has had.”
Not giving a military hand to either side, Russia’s diplomatic efforts to end the conflict increased when the Azerbaijani military captured Shusha – the second-largest city in Nagorno-Karabakh. Moscow got the two sides to agree on a peace deal that would boost Russia’s influence and control in the region, authorizing it to send about 2,000 peacekeepers.
Alexander Gabuev wrote in a BBC article that these peacekeepers will “protect the remaining Armenian population, separate the two adversaries and patrol a corridor that will connect Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh: something the Kremlin has wanted since 1994, but couldn’t obtain at the negotiating table before this war.”
Finally, Russia will also control the land corridor that will connect mainland Azerbaijan with its landlocked exclave Nakhchivan.
Turkey
Turkey, the third-largest supplier of military equipment to Azerbaijan after Russia and Israel, has been training Azerbaijani military officers for decades. Soon after the conflict broke out in September, Turkey vowed to support Azerbaijan on the battleground if requested.
But the relationship between the two countries goes beyond military and economic cooperation. Azerbaijan and Turkey share strong ethnic, historic and cultural ties observed not only in diplomacy, but through the affinity they hold towards one another on the public level. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey was the first to recognize Azerbaijan’s independence in 1991. The transit corridor connecting Azerbaijan with the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, which borders Turkey, would provide Ankara with easier access to the strategically important South Caucasus. The territorial gains Azerbaijan made are also a victory for Turkey, signaling its rising influence in the region, particularly in Turkic Azerbaijan.
United States
The United States had largely remained silent regarding the conflict except for two statements, one U.S.-only statement and one joint statement with Minsk Group Co-Chairs Russia and France calling for a ceasefire. For many, this attitude reflects international disengagement under the Trump administration. But with Russia intensifying its strategic gains and alliances in the region, the U.S. may get involved in the peacemaking process soon.
“Russian peacekeeping doesn’t have a check, and it is more about advancing the Russian interest, less about peace,” Barnoschi said, adding that this peace deal was a loss for the United States. “The U.S. doesn’t exert its political will and its global reach in a region that is super important economically and politically considering its proximity to the Middle East, to Russia as well as the energy market it can influence. Whoever has control of this region has political and economic gains and the U.S. doesn’t at the moment.”
Iran
Iran shares borders with both Armenia and Azerbaijan and is home to ethnic Azerbaijanis and Armenians, making the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict especially important for the Iranian foreign policy.
The Russian-brokered agreement poses a great threat to Iran’s foreign policy and its long-term interests in the South Caucasus. As Azerbaijan gains full control over its border with Iran along the Aras River, Tehran may be alarmed by the possibility of an increased Israeli military presence in the border.
The Nagorno-Karabakh peace deal was signed only by three parties, but the region’s strategic importance and the interests of several countries may bring further complications to the peace process. Barnoschi was pessimistic that the issue could be easily erased or solved.
“Frozen conflicts that relate to ethnic tensions are the worst in terms of being able to be solved,” Barnoschi said. “Memory lives on, and history is particularly important to the people living there and to the countries at war. There has to be a lot of mutual understanding of that history and recognition of each other’s respective memory, which may or may not happen in the future.”
*Article Thumbnail “Flag of Azerbaijan 1918 variant” by J. Patrick Fischer is licensed under public domain via Wikipedia Commons. “Flag of Armenia – Coat of Arms” by Sahakian is licensed under CC BY 3.0. Image edits done by Trent Brown.
17:25,
YEREVAN, JANUARY 20, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian side has reached an agreement with the Russian and Azerbaijani sides over the security of the Yerevan-Kapan road, Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan said during a Q&A session in the Parliament.
“As of this moment, we have concrete agreements with both the Azerbaijani and Russian sides over the section of the road you mentioned, the Russian border troops are also stationed there. No incident with the transport passing through that road has been registered as of now. We do not have problems in Syunik and over the Armenian-Azerbaijani border line in general, we haven’t recorded any incident and I hope we will not have any in the future as well”, the deputy PM said.
Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
From February 1 to February 12, the Turkish and Azerbaijani Armed Forces will be conducting joint military exercises in Turkey’s Kars Province. The exercises are to be the most comprehensive winter drill in recent history and will feature Turkish-made weapons and equipment.
According to the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan Tofig Zulfugarov, the winter military exercises in Kars are meant to prepare the armies to conduct operations in severe weather conditions. Tank divisions, heavy artillery operators, sniper teams, special forces personnel, helicopters, and commandos will all be part of the training.
Turkey and Azerbaijan conduct joint military exercises regularly. The last such exercise was held in the summer of 2020, primarily in Baku and Nakhichevan, two weeks after Azerbaijan Armed Forces unsuccessfully attacked Armenia’s Tavush Province.
After the completion of that joint military exercise, Turkey left military personnel as well as equipment, including fighter jets, in Azerbaijan, which was used during the eventual full-scale war on Karabakh launched on September 27, 2020.
On November 9, a trilateral ceasefire statement was signed between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia, which effectively ended the Nagorno Karabakh War 44 days after it began. The agreement granted large amounts of territory inside and around Karabakh to Azerbaijan.
As for the status of Karabakh, this issue was not mentioned in the November 9 agreements; this was done knowingly. This was stated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a press conference on the results of Russian diplomacy in 2020.
“The area where the Russian peacekeepers are stationed [in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh)] is the zone of responsibility of the Russian peacekeeping contingent; this is the basis of our contacts with Yerevan and Baku. Now the nuances, details are being worked out in connection with the organization of transport communication, the supply of the responsibility zone of the Russian peacekeeping contingent, the provision of humanitarian assistance to the people who returned there; 50,000 Armenians have already returned.
And, of course, we want international organizations to have the opportunity to work there (…). We are now coordinating with Baku and Yerevan on the format of their mission. … There are issues there related to the status dispute; this is why the topic of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh is such a controversial topic, and a decision was made by the leaders to bypass the issue, leave it for later. The OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs should also deal with it. Now they have renewed contacts with the parties and are going to visit the region again.
However, the status issues will be resolved more easily and quickly than the assurances of Yerevan and Baku that the important thing is the normalization of daily life of all communities—ethnic and religious—, and that peaceful good-neighborly coexistence must be restored,” Lavrov added.
10:38, 13 January, 2021
YEREVAN, JANUARY 13, ARMENPRESS. The YouTube video sharing platform has removed US President Donald Trump’s latest video and suspended him from uploading content for seven days, TASS reports citing the Axios news website.
“After careful review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to the Donald J. Trump channel and issued a strike for violating our policies for inciting violence”, YouTube’s statement reads. “As a result, in accordance with our long-standing strikes system, the channel is now prevented from uploading new videos or livestreams for a minimum of seven days – which may be extended”, YouTube added.
Twitter earlier permanently suspended Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”. In addition, Trump was banned from posting on his Facebook and Instagram accounts at least until the end of his presidential term.
On January 6, Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington DC to stop lawmakers from officially certifying the results of the November presidential election in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Democrat Joe Biden from becoming the new president.
Biden’s inauguration is scheduled for January 20.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
“Aftershocks,” a memoir by Nadia Owusu, opens with an earthquake. She hears about it over the radio and over pancakes when she’s 7 years old, growing up in Rome with her sister, being cared for by her father, whom they love, after their mother has left their family but has returned to see them just for a day while she’s passing through town. The earthquake is in Armenia a long ways off, but Nadia Owusu says my mind has a seismometer inside it.
“Aftershocks” is a memoir of a tough, interesting, multinational, multiracial upbringing and adulthood that ranges around the world, from Rome to Kampala to New York and dozens of stops in between. It’s the first book from Nadia Owusu, a writer and urban planner, who joins us from Brooklyn. Thanks so much for being with us.
NADIA OWUSU: Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: You say, early on, it’s always been difficult for me to say the word home with any conviction. Moving on was what we did. Your father was a U.N. official. Where did you and your family live? How many places?
OWUSU: (Laughter) So I was born in Tanzania. My father was from Ghana. My mother is Armenian American. And because my father worked for the United Nations, we went back and forth between the headquarters of the agency he worked for, which was in Rome, Italy, to different countries in East Africa, mostly. So I lived in Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and then also went to boarding school for a while in the U.K.
SIMON: You loved your father. And having read your book, if I may, I love your father.
(LAUGHTER)
OWUSU: I’m glad.
SIMON: And alas, he died when you were 14. And – oh, this is hard to bring up with you, but your stepmother told you something that sounds like it meant it was – like it was meant to cause another earthquake in your life.
OWUSU: Yeah. So I have a very complicated relationship with my stepmother. It still is complicated. There was a lot of tension and sort of competitiveness for my father’s attention. And she – I moved to New York when I was 18 for college. And, you know, she would come and visit occasionally. And we had kind of a petty argument. But through that petty argument, she sort of revealed to me that my father had not died of cancer, as I had always believed, but that, in fact, he had died of AIDS.
And I, still to this day, don’t know whether that’s true. But I kind of decided that it shouldn’t matter. But at the time, I think, for so many reasons, it really was an earthquake in my life because my love for my father and my story of him, in which we had a very open, honest relationship that I could return to, was so important to me. And this revelation sort of made me question that story. And it really did sort of set me off on a tailspin to sort of try to understand what I could believe and what I could hold on to if I didn’t have that story.
SIMON: Reading the book, I had the impression that you might have felt that way because AIDS might suggest promiscuity in your father as he traveled the globe, which just didn’t fit up with the father you knew. Now, without giving anything away – I mean, if that was true, A, it’s got nothing to do with his love for you, and, B, I – yeah, I can see why your stepmother – she can’t hurt him anymore. But I don’t know. Somehow in her mind, she thought she had to hurt you with that knowledge.
OWUSU: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a very self-centered thing that I thought I – in my story of my father, that I was the most important person in his whole world and that he couldn’t possibly have had a life outside of the life that he had with me. And looking back on it as a grownup, you know, that’s ridiculous. Of course he had a life (laughter) outside of the life that he had with me. And, you know…
SIMON: But he did love you and your sister.
OWUSU: Exactly. And he loved us so much. And no revelation changes that. And I think that that’s ultimately where I came to and realized that no story anyone can tell me can change that love and that experience and that connection that we had with him.
SIMON: Yeah. A lot of this memoir is written from the confines of a blue chair that you got out on the street. How did that happen?
OWUSU: Yeah. So after that revelation – and I was also going through a breakup at the time and really just going through a period of depression and anxiety. And I would go on these really long walks around New York. And on one of those walks on my way back to my apartment, I saw this blue chair. And something drew me to it. And I dragged it home with me. And then ultimately it ended up being sort of a whole country for me that I retreated to for seven days while I went through this period of depression and anxiety but also sort of reckoning with this grief that I hadn’t really dealt with and spent much of that time sort of sitting in that blue chair.
SIMON: Yeah. When you’ve sought professional help for what you even refer to as panic attacks, it strikes me that some well-meaning people don’t quite understand why it’s not helpful to say, it’s not your heart. Don’t worry. It’s all in your head.
OWUSU: (Laughter) Yes. Yes, I ended up going to the hospital because I didn’t know what was happening to me. And I’ve actually learned since that this is very common for people who suffer from panic attacks. The first time it feels like a heart attack, and you feel that something is definitely seriously physically wrong with you. But I do think that there often is that reaction. Like, just calm down. You know, but it is very different from like, I’m just having a little bit of worry. It’s a very different, kind of much more physical experience.
SIMON: Jazz helps, doesn’t it?
OWUSU: (Laughter).
SIMON: I was interested to read about that. I like jazz, too.
OWUSU: Oh, nice. Yeah, so my father listened to a lot of jazz and always did when I was growing up. And he was always trying to get me to listen to jazz and teach me about jazz. And particularly, the more avant-garde jazz I always kind of rejected because it’s so dissonant. And it didn’t make any sense to me. And my father would say…
SIMON: Hard to hum along with John Coltrane, you mean? Yeah.
OWUSU: Yeah, exactly. And I would – you know, my father would always say, you just have to listen differently. You know, it’s like learning a new language. And I was like, I don’t want to learn this language. But then later in life, you know, particularly as I was going through this difficult period, the dissonance just made so much more sense to me in terms of how I was experiencing the world. And I found myself sort of drawn to my father’s music and actually ended up marrying a jazz musician. So there’s still that connection (laughter).
SIMON: Oh, my word. Your father must be endlessly delighted.
OWUSU: I think he would love it.
SIMON: Yeah. Nadia Owusu – her memoir, “Aftershocks” – thanks so much for being with us.
OWUSU: Thanks so much for having me. This is lovely.
Closed discussion on the issues of return of Armenian captives in Azerbaijan took place today in the National Assembly organized by deputies Gor Gevorgyan and Sofya Hovsepyan.
Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan, human rights advocates Artak Zeynalyan and Siranush Sahakyan, deputies from Bright Armenia faction participated in the discussion.
Issues impeding the return of the captives have been discussed during the meeting. The participants also voiced a number of proposals, clarified the future actions.
The efficiency of joint work has been highlighted.