Author: Nyrie Kalashian

An Armenian orphanage in Istanbul’s Tuzla district, which was demolished on April 8 to prepare for the construction of a new building, will be rebuilt as a social and cultural facility, the Hurriyet Daily News reports.

The orphanage was built in 1962 by the Gedikpaşa Armenian Protestant Church, as a former building on the site could not host the increasing number of Armenian students arriving from various parts of Anatolia.

Known as the orphanage where Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was murdered in 2007, and his wife, Rakel Dink, studied, it was expropriated by the Turkish state in 1987 on the basis of a 1936 bill preventing minority foundations from acquiring property.

Although the Turkish government signed a historic decree in 2011 to return property taken away from minority foundations, the camp was omitted, alongside hundreds of other properties.

Fatih Ulusoy, the land owner, had initially tried to demolish Kamp Armen in May 2015, but the controversial plan was later shelved as Ulusoy said he would donate it to the Gedikpaşa Armenian Protestant Church and School Foundation.

Efforts to demolish the camp received widespread attention once the news broke on social media. The demolition was subsequently stopped when many people, including activists and leading figures from the Armenian community, rushed to the area to protest the demolition work.

Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s municipal council on May 12 unanimously accepted the construction plan regarding the orphanage, which will be rebuilt taking the original building into account. The Kamp Armen area was taken under “Social and Cultural Facility Area” category in line with the Gedikpaşa Armenian Protestant Church and School Foundation’s will.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, a council member from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Hüseyin Sağ, said Kamp Armen was significant since Hrant Dink was raised there.

“It became a social and cultural facility area. Now, Armenian citizens, non-Muslims or our Muslim citizens, we will all go there and sit. We will benefit from the social and cultural facility. This is a place where a person like Hrant Dink stayed in the orphanage. It’s also important because of that,” Sağ said.

According to the construction plan regarding the plot, which is owned by the Gedikpaşa Armenian Protestant Church and School Foundation and Tuzla Municipality, the area will include vocational courses, movie theaters, exhibition and conference halls, a library, a dormitory, a nursing home and an orphanage.

The plan will also ensure the protection of green areas.

On 13 May Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan received personal representative of the OSCE chairman-in-office, Ambassador Andrzej Kasprzyk.

The meeting addressed a number of issues related to the situation along the contact line between Artsakh and Azerbaijan armed forces.

The Bureau of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), meeting in Strasbourg today, resolved that it has no confidence in Pedro Agramunt as President of the Assembly.

It further resolved that Mr Agramunt is not authorised to undertake any official visits, attend any meetings or make any public statements on behalf of the Assembly in his capacity as President.

“The President chose not to attend the Bureau today, and has not presented a letter of resignation. As a result, and in the context of the current Rules of Procedure under which the President cannot be compelled to resign, the Bureau felt it necessary to take these steps,” said Sir Roger Gale (United Kingdom, EC), Senior Vice-President of the Assembly, after chairing the Bureau meeting.

“The standards and principles of the Parliamentary Assembly are more important than any individual member, and the integrity of our Assembly must be upheld,” he added.

Armenia international Henrikh Mkhitaryan took to social media to commemorate the anniversary of the Armenian Henocide.

“24 April 1915…a dark date in Armenian history. My thoughts are with my fellow compatriots,” Mkhitaryan said in a Facebook post.

– “The Promise,” out tomorrow, is a love story between Mikael (Oscar Isaac) and Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), both Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) during its last days. As World War I erupts, the Turkish government turns on its citizens of Armenian descent, eventually killing more than a million of them in executions, forced labor and death marches.

The official position of the Turkish government is that the Armenian genocide never happened — that the deaths were merely collateral damage from the war, not targeted murders. That made it tricky for director and co-writer Terry George. Luckily, he’d been through similar situations before.

“On ‘In the Name of the Father,’ the British press attacked it for two reasons,” he says, referring to the script he co-wrote for the fact-based 1993 film about the British imprisonment of a group of people falsely implicated in an IRA bombing in the 1970s. “They said [prisoner] Gerry Conlon wasn’t in the same cell as his father, which he wasn’t — he was in the cell next to him, but that’s hard to shoot. The other was, at the end in the court, the judge says, ‘Can you approach the bench?’ and they don’t say that in British court. So those two items became the basis on which the film was attacked.”

For “The Promise,” fact thus became an integral part of fiction. “I was extremely fastidious on the real political moments that the story tells. All these historical moments, I can cite several historians,” he says. “I’ve learned to catalogue and very carefully research all those [real] events. I’ve learned that those little things are very important.”

Sometimes, though, it’s not the little things — just the simple fact that “The Promise” says that the Armenian genocide happened has turned into a very big thing. Users of an online Turkish message board have launched an online campaign to tank the movie’s ratings, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Since the movie debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last year, the film has received more than 120,000 ratings on IMDb — and over 61,000 of them are one-star.

George shrugs off the controversy, seeming more irritated at “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” a short-run movie released earlier this year about an American nurse and an Ottoman officer during WWI that was more sympathetic to the Turkish side. (“They even used our font on the poster!”) But he’s confident his film contains more truth than that one, even if his plot is largely fictional.

Asbarez – The California State Assembly Public Employee, Retirement and Social Security Committee (PERSS) on Wednesday passed AB 1597 by a 5-0 vote, a bill authored by Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian, which calls for divestment by the main state pension funds from Turkey.

Nazarian has championed the issue in recent years, which also enjoyed the support of principal co-author Senator Scott Wilk. Passage by the PERSS Committee is the first step toward enactment of the bill, which if passed by both houses of the state legislature and is signed by the governor, would prohibit new investments or renewal of existing investments in the Turkish government by the pension funds—CalPERS and CalSTRS.

Following an impassioned presentation by Nazarian, and additional testimony by ANCA-WR Chief Legislative Consultant Haig Baghdassarian, the chairman of the committee, Assemblymember Freddie Rodriguez voted in favor of the bill, and was joined by four of his colleagues, Vice-Chair Travis Allen, and Assemblymembers Sabrina Cervantes, Ken Cooley and Patrick O’Donnell.

Photo: Reuters

 

An explosive device has been made safe in a flat in St. Petersburg by Russian police, three days after a suspected bomber on the city’s metro killed 13 people.

A city official said several suspects were held when police raided the flat early on Thursday, Ria Novosti said.

Neighbours were moved away and witnesses said three men were led out in handcuffs, the news agency added.

The main suspect in the metro bombing, Akbarzhon Jalilov, died in the attack.

Aged 22 and from the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, his remains were identified by his parents on Wednesday.

Professors Andrés Serralta and Marcelo Desena by the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the University of Montevideo, have published their educational research book “Teaching Armenian Genocide. Theory, Methodology and Didactics,” the University’s official website informs.

According to the source, the work was presented by national authorities in the area of education and human rights, before a public that brought together personalities from national and international human rights organizations as well as social organizations, community entities, educators and national cultural referents.

This work complements a previous work of historical research, “Armenian Genocide 1915 -1923. Antecedents, perpetration and consequences, “which dealt with general aspects of the Armenian Genocide and its international recognition.

The Armenian “Taron-Avia” air company will start operating regular and  non-regular flights from Gyumri’s Shirak Airport from April, 2017, Press Service of the General Department of Civil Aviation of Armenia reports.

The launching of flights will contribute to the creation of new jobs and intensification of economic development and tourism in the region.