Armenia conducts great works to reveal and prevent crimes, President Serzh Sargsyan said in an interview to ARMENIA TV, commenting on the work of law enforcement agencies.
“Firstly I want to state that the work of each agency, even it is sufficient enough, needs improvement. This is not only my approach, this is a normal logical approach, one should not remain on the same path, it’s always necessary to have a progress”, the President said, adding that it’s necessary to be cautious on different indexes. “Unfortunately, crimes, murders, of course, are taking place in any country, including Europe, the United States. Unfortunately, I must say that the same is taking place in Armenia. The problem is how the system manages to reveal these crimes and most importantly to prevent them. In this sense I think a great work is being done in our country, and if we just look at the numbers, for instance, the murders in Armenia decrease every year. For example, this year the intentional murders, let me not mention numbers to avoid speculations as the year has not ended yet, have decreased by nearly 15-20%, and all scandalous murders, almost all, have been revealed and the murderers have been arrested. God willing, we will have a situation one day that there will be no murders in our country, but no country is insured from crimes”, the President said.
Talking about Yerevan’s security, the President said the most accurate approach is our own feeling and the opinion of our guests. “It would be better to go out in the evening, thanks God, although it is mid-December, but there is no shortage of tourists in Yerevan, ask how he/she feels in Yerevan and whether he/she will be able to reach, for instance, from restaurant to hotel alone at night of 1, 2 o’clock. In this sense, I think, our situation is satisfactory, although we have no right to be satisfied with these achievements, we should really be a very safe country inside and within our borders”, Serzh Sargsyan said.
Armenpress News Agency , Armenia
December 7, 2017 Thursday
New book reaffirms Armenian ethnicity of master architects behind
Istanbul's look
YEREVAN, DECEMBER 7, ARMENPRESS. Hundreds of buildings have been built
in Istanbul by the Balyan family.
For many years Turks were denying the fact that the Balyans were
Armenians, but today, this fact is being accepted already in Turkey
itself.
Ashot Grigoryan’s “Treasures of the gardens of the Armenian People:
Balyans” book once again affirms the Armenian ethnicity of the Balyan
family.
Head Scientific-Secretary of the A. Tamanyan National Museum-Institute
of Architecture Ashot Grigoryan told ARMENPRESS that collecting an
archive about Armenian architects in foreign countries has been on the
museum-institute’s agenda.
“Upon collecting materials on architects who lived or still are living
in Turkey, it turned out that there is a big gap about the Balyan
architect generation. The Balyan’s were very famous architects in
Turkey, but their Armenian ethnicity was rejected for many years”, he
said.
The book shows facts, how the Balyan’s appeared in Istanbul, who they
were, whether or not it was a coincidence that Armenian architects
were also working in Istanbul even before the Balyans. “And it turned
out that before the Balyans, architect Sinan was working in Istanbul,
and Turkey again denies his Armenian background”, he said.
Grigoryan says materials about the Balyans were found in Italy upon research.
Grigoryan said the Balyan’s have hundreds of works in Istanbul, both
Ottoman and Armenian buildings. “These are palace and military
buildings, residential homes, towers, bridges, dams. The Balyan’s are
also the architects of many districts. They also built churches and
hospitals for the Armenian community. Nearly 90% of their buildings
are preserved today”, he said.
Grigoryan says the DolmabahçePalace of Istanbul is among the most
famous works of the Balyans.
President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan who is in Artsakh since December 1 on a working visit in the sidelines of the partnership between the two Armenian republics visited “Asparez” training center together with his Artsakh counterpart Bako Sahakyan, where the tactical and technical characteristics of new military equipment of Armenian production were presented to them. Afterwards, the Presidents followed the process of their application from a command post.
The President of Armenia presented servicemen distinguished for best service with encouraging gifts, after which attended the opening ceremonies of new barracks and a military club in the eastern and central parts of Artsakh. Presidents Serzh Sargsyan and Bako Sahakyan toured in the newly opened barracks, got acquainted with the social and living conditions of the servicemen. President Sargsyan awarded the best officers, contractual and conscript soldiers of the regiment.
On the occasion of the 120th anniversary of Marshal Hovhannes Baghramyan the Presidents of the two Armenian Republics visited the monument to the prominent commander in Stepanakert, laid flowers and paid tribute to his memory.
ARPA Institute Presentation & Panel Discussion on “Armenian preservation and the need for Armenian schools in the Diaspora“, on December 14, Thursday at 7:30 pm, In the Aram and Anahis D. Boolghoorjian Hall of the Merdinian School: 13330 Riverside Dr. Sherman Oaks, CA 91423
Please view the ARPA Institute 25th Anniversary Celebration Conference on “Armenia in the 21st Century: Strategy for Long-term Development”. You will enjoy it. Here are the Youtube links: 1. Part I: https://youtu.be/5cEpNtiW1os ; 2. Part II:
Also view the presentation on: “ Railway Politics: The Effect of Recently Inaugurated Baku-Tibilisi-Kars Railway“:
Armenia’s Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan has become a grandfather of twins – his daughter gave birth to a boy and a girl.
Hayk Harutyunyan, deputy minister of energy infrastructures and natural resources, who is the son-in-law of the Prime Minister, said on Facebook that his twins have been born.
‘Intent To Destroy’ director Joe Berlinger: ‘Armenians deserve their ‘Schindler’s List”
Michelle Lanz | The Frame|
Joe Berlinger’s documentaries, which include “Paradise Lost” and “Brother’s Keeper,” have often focused on the justice system.
His new film, called “Intent to Destroy,” takes an unusual angle about what many people consider to be a miscarriage of justice. The film looks at how Hollywood has depicted the Armenian Genocide, and how it also has been pressured — and agreed — to ignore that story.
The Turkish government refuses to acknowledge — and even denies — what historians broadly agree was the Ottoman Empire’s extermination of about 1.5 million Armenians starting in 1915.
Berlinger takes an interesting approach to telling this story. He frames his documentary around the making of another movie — last year’s historical drama, “The Promise,” directed by Terry George and starring Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac. The film is set in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I and follows Isaac as a young Armenian medical student.
The Frame’s John Horn recently spoke with Berlinger.
On what a documentary can do that a narrative film can’t:
In the documentary, I have a lot of the real actors — some of whom are of Armenian descent — telling me how they feel and they’re in absolute tears. Along the way, I’m able to intercut actual survivor testimonies of those who survived those massacres and to bring in documentary elements and photographs from the time. So the documentary becomes much more graphic than a feature film could be, but the two work together and reflect off of one another. One of the concerns of mine is, how do you represent atrocity on screen, as well as the underlying theme that whoever controls the narrative actually controls the history? And how the story has been depicted over the years has determined why we’re in a situation where there’s been this terrible slaughter of the majority of Armenians living in Turkey in 1915, and yet it’s considered contested history today.
On framing his documentary through the film “The Promise”:
Even though I’ve been fascinated by the Armenian Genocide … I never felt like I had anything to add to the dialogue. I never thought about making a film until I heard that “The Promise” was being made and I thought that would be a great way, from a filmmaking standpoint, how to bring a historical subject to life. So I thought that by embedding with the making of a big budget film on the subject, I could then pull the frame out wider and tell the historical context and give the audience a digestible way to consume all of this information by being in the present tense and telling an unfolding story. But there’s a larger thematic reason that embedding with “The Promise” really made a lot of sense to me. That’s because the basic facts of the genocide as a documentary has been done before. That’s not what’s interesting to me. What’s interesting to me as a filmmaker, where I feel like I’m adding to the dialogue, is to paint a portrait of denial — the aftermath of denial, the impact of denial, how denial works.
On what embedding with “The Promise” allowed him to achieve:
It allowed me a perfect device to tell that story, because part of the denial is that any time Hollywood has, over the decades, attempted to tell a story that has the Armenian Genocide as its backdrop, generally speaking, the Turkish government complains to the State Department and the State Department has persuaded Hollywood studios to drop these projects. Most notably, as early as 1935, Irving Thalberg at MGM was making the film, “40 Days of Musa Dagh,” which — at the time — was one of the most popular novels in the world and it was the story of Armenian resistance … during the Genocide. That movie was in pre-production at MGM and the State Department convinced MGM to drop the project. It’s been a taboo subject over the decades.
This is just a partial transcript. For the full interview please press the play button at the top left.
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Joe Berlinger doesn’t mind taking on some powerful forces.
He squared off with oil giant Chevron in Crude. In the Paradise Lost trilogy, he went up against prosecutors in the notorious case of the West Memphis Three. With his latest film, Intent to Destroy, he’s running afoul of the government of the Republic of Turkey.
“Bring it on, that’s my attitude,” Berlinger tells Deadline.
RadicalMedia
Intent to Destroy, which recently qualified for Oscar consideration, recounts the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915 — the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians that most historians believe was planned and implemented by the Ottoman state in its waning years. The film likewise explores the policy of genocide denial vigorously maintained by modern-day Turkey, which rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
“I was not really interested in just telling the story of the genocide. But I wanted to tell the story about denial,” Berlinger says. “To me only part of the film is about the actual facts of the genocide. The rest of the film is about the aftermath of denial, the mechanism of denial.”
There is a film within Berlinger’s film—the 2016 historical epic The Promise, starring Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac, that dramatized the events of the Armenian Genocide. Berlinger spent considerable time documenting the production on location in Portugal, Spain and Malta. In Intent to Destroy he interweaves archival recollections from actual genocide survivors, interviews with historians and prominent Armenian-Americans with clips from The Promise and behind-the-scenes footage.
RadicalMedia
Berlinger captures a powerful moment off set when Oscar-nominated actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, cast in The Promise as a genocide victim, breaks down after filming an emotional scene. And he interviews actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, who nervously explains that a Turkish ambassador tried to convince him — after learning Cacho had been cast in The Promise — that a genocide never occurred.
“The making of The Promise provided that perfect vehicle to tell that story,” Berlinger explains. “For me as a filmmaker who’s much more comfortable telling a present-tense story, it gave me some present-tense narrative thread to hang all the history on.”
Berlinger includes scenes from The Promise that reenact what continues to be a cherished memory for Armenians today, when thousands of their ancestors escaped slaughter by Ottoman forces on the mountain of Musa Dagh. The story was told in Franz Werfel’s 1933 novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and and shortly after its publication, MGM acquired the rights for an adaptation that was to star Clark Gable. But the film never came to be.
RadicalMedia
“Anytime in Hollywood an Armenian Genocide movie’s been attempted to be made, it’s been canned because of Turkish pressure,” Berlinger asserts. “[Producer] Irving Thalberg was going to make The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and was told by the State Department, ‘Drop the project.’”
Berlinger says The Promise only got made because it was independently financed by the estate of Kirk Kerkorian, the Armenian-American billionaire who died in 2015.
“It was actually Kirk Kerkorian’s wish to make The Promise,” Berlinger notes.
The Turkish government cast aspersions on The Promise and feels similarly about Berlinger’s documentary.
RadicalMedia
“We believe that such productions hurt the potential reconciliation process,” reads a statement emailed to Deadline from the Turkish Consulate in Los Angeles.
The consulate attached a four-page document outlining the official government position on the mass killings which states, in part, “Turkey does not deny the suffering and the losses of Armenians during World War I… While it is true that hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenian citizens died or were relocated within the Ottoman territories, it is also true that 2.5 million Ottoman Muslims died, 5 million of them were relocated during the same period. The suffering under war conditions affected all of the Ottoman citizens. Therefore, if we are going to talk about justice, the memory of all those who died during World War I should be respected.”
The document adds, “Turkey does not agree that the events were tantamount to genocide.” And it points out that genocide is a legal term: “Genocide implies that there is a perpetrator and a victim and the two are separated clearly in black and white manner. Such was the case during the Holocaust. The same cannot be said for the events of 1915…”
RadicalMedia
Indeed, the title of Berlinger’s documentary, Intent to Destroy, comes from Article II of the U.N. convention on genocide, which provides a legal definition of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
In 2016 Pope Francis used the term “Armenian Genocide” to characterize the slaughter. U.S. presidential administrations from George H.W. Bush onward have tiptoed around the issue, fearful of antagonizing Turkey, a vital strategic partner and NATO ally.
“The U.S. has kind of made a deal with the devil to help this country deny its genocide so that we would have access to air force bases and listening posts during the Cold War and later all of the unrest in the Middle East and the two Iraq wars,” Berlinger maintains.
Intent to Destroy opens Friday in New York, Pasadena and Glendale, California—the latter city, home to a large Armenian-American population. The film will later be released on iTunes and will play on the Starz cable channel in 2018.
Director Joe Berlinger joins us to discuss his new documentary “Intent to Destroy,” which is about the Armenian Genocide. ( Photo courtesy of Armenian Genocide Museum Institute )
An appeal adopted by the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly (PA) Bureau, which includes heads of the delegations of the European Parliament and the parliaments of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, to the heads of state and government, who will participate in the Eastern Partnership summit, reflects a single approach to the issue of occupied lands, Fuad Muradov, head of the Azerbaijani delegation to the Euronest PA, told Trend Nov. 4.
Recalling that the fifth summit of the Eastern Partnership will be held Nov. 24 in Brussels, Muradov said that in anticipation of such a summit, all European international structures send an appeal to the heads of state and government of the participating countries.
“The appeal covers many issues,” the head of the Azerbaijani delegation said. “There is a single approach regarding occupied territories, including those occupied in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The appeal says that peace must be restored in the occupied territories of any country.”
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.
The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
DAMASCUS, Syria (Public Radio of Armenia) – An open screening of the Armenian Genocide film “The Promise” was held at Al-Kindi Cinema in Damascus. Attending the event were Armenia’s Ambassador to Syria Arsahak Poladyan, Chairperson of the Syria-Armenia Friendship Group in the Syrian Parliament Nora Arissian, Syrian Cinema workers, religious leaders, journalists, and representatives of the Armenian community.
Ambassador Poladyan briefed the audience on the Armenian Genocide and referred to the policy of hatred towards Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. He drew attention to present-day Turkey’s anti-Armenian stance and its policy of denial, noting that the Armenian Genocide recognition has entered a new stage despite Turkish provocations.
Chairperson of the Syria-Armenia Friendship Group in the Syrian Parliament Nora Arissian and Ambassador Arshak Poladian (Photo: Public Radio of Armenia)
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The Ambassador noted that the Armenian Genocide Centennial was a message to the civilized world and attached special importance to the liturgy in Vatican and the Pope’s visit to Armenia.
Poladyan said any dialogue with Turkish authorities on the Armenian Genocide is impossible unless Turkey stops attempts to deny the facts, distort the reality and turn it upside down.
The screening of the film was followed by a discussion.