Author: Tambiyan Samvel

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh Karen Mirzoyan sent a congratulatory message to Rex Tillerson on his appointment as Secretary of State of the United States of America.

The Foreign Minister expressed his confidence that Tillerson would definitely facilitate the mediation efforts of the US, as one of the co-chair countries of the OSCE Minsk Group, to find a long-term and peaceful settlement to the conflict between Azerbaijan and Nagorno Karabakh.

The Foreign Minister also expressed his gratitude for the assistance the US renders to the Artsakh Republic and its people.

“We are looking forward to continued cooperation, built on shared values of democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms as well as a vision of stable and peaceful South Caucasus”, reads the congratulatory message of Karen Mirzoyan.

AFP – Ten years after campaigning Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was shot dead in Istanbul, Armenians and Turks have still not achieved the reconciliation of which he dreamt.

The murder of Dink by a teenage gunman on January 19, 2007, near the offices of the Agos newspaper which he founded, sent shockwaves through Turkey. Thousands of Turks flooded onto the streets after Dink’s death declaring “We are all Armenians” in an unprecedented show of solidarity.

“Hrant made two great endeavours. To encourage dialogue between Turkey and Armenia. And to tell Turkish society about the Armenian issue in Turkey,” said Yetvart Danzikyan, who holds Dink’s former job of Agos editor-in-chief. But the dark ages of history cast a long shadow.

 

Born in the Anatolian city of Malatya – which once had a large Armenian population but now almost none – Dink moved to Istanbul and in 1996 sprung to prominence by founding Agos. Agos was not the first or only Armenian newspaper in Turkey but it was the first to be published in Turkish as well as Armenian, allowing a debate of issues that had long remained taboo.

“Hrant Dink gave the chance of telling Turkish society of the major problems of Armenians stemming from 1915,” said Agos’ Armenian language chief editor Pakrat Estukyan who knew Dink. “He made huge contribution and, unfortunately, paid for it with his life.”

Dink’s death became a symbol of the peril of such moves. The photograph of his corpse covered by a sheet, with just the soles of his shoes complete with a hole showing, underlined the tragedy. And although his assassin, just 17 at the time, was rapidly arrested and sentenced, the trial into the killing still grinds on with Dink’s supporters losing confidence on its ability to shed light on the plot.

In subsequent years, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sought to build bridges with Armenia, a reconciliation process encouraged by the United States. But that process hit the buffers due to the simmering row over 1915, although analysts have long called for the historical dispute to be decoupled from more practical issues like border opening and trade.

The atmosphere became all the more poisonous during the 2015 100th anniversary, with Turkey cranking up the nationalist rhetoric in an election year and making clear it would never acknowledge genocide. “With his murder, he (Dink) also came to represent the peril of the process of normalisation,” Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Center (RSC) independent think tank in Yerevan, told AFP.

Underlining the acute sensitivity, an Armenian lawmaker for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Garo Paylan, was suspended from the Turkish parliament last week for declaring in a debate the events of 1915 were “genocide”.

Dink’s assassin, Ogun Samast, is still behind bars but the trial into dozens of police accused of covering up the plot rumbles on.
The police on trial have been linked to Erdogan’s arch enemy, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen. Anger was caused by a video that emerged showing Samast bantering with police officers after his arrest and even holding up a Turkish flag.

“After 10 years, this court has still not shed light on the murder. We don’t have expectations from this process,” said Estukyan. Yet the taboos that Dink smashed remain broken. A few years before it would have been inconceivable to even have an Armenian in the Turkish parliament, let alone even utter the word “genocide”. Analysts hope that reconciliation is still possible.

“The man may be gone, but his mission continues and his spirit lives on, inspiring a new generation to look forward,” said Giragosian.

– Poet and teacher Arto Vaun studied literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and for the past three years the Watertown native has been living in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where he’s been launching the Center for Creative Writing at the American University of Armenia.

Vaun says his primary goal is to help reinvigorate the cultural potency of the struggling former Soviet republic. “We need to champion public intellectuals,” he said. “We need to be reinvesting in and re-emphasizing the high level of literary discourse, intellectual discourse, and public discourse” in a country that, because of its size, economic woes, and isolation, has been stagnating.

In the process of developing the new program, Vaun discovered there wasn’t a high-quality English literary journal in that part of the world, so he started one. The first issue of the recently launched Locomotive (which will be available at Harvard Book Store) showcases work by writers from Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, the UK, as well as by a few local poets including Stephen Burt and Gail Mazur.

The journal’s mission is clear: “to showcase innovative writing from established and emerging global voices and eventually connect those voices with the vibrant but isolated literary community of Armenia.” It dovetails nicely with Vaun’s views “that art can change the world. Literature can change the world. Because it does that all the time.”

Photo: Timur Abdullayev/News Team/TASS    

Turkey and Russia have reached an agreement on the plan of a comprehensive ceasefire in Syria, the Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Wednesday.

The agreement envisages establishing ceasefire from midnight on December 29, does not cover the terrorist organizations and is in the framework of the UN Security Council’s Resolution 2254.

The plan will be in force in all areas of Syria where the fighting is underway between the government forces and armed opposition groups. It will be presented to the parties to the Syrian conflict.

According to the report, if the ceasefire deal is implemented, the talks on political settlement of the conflict will be held in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana. Moscow and Ankara will act as guarantors of the settlement.

Over the past several days, the Russian and Turkish foreign ministers, Sergey Lavrov and Mevlut Cavusoglu, have held intense phone conversations devoted to the Syrian crisis and the meeting of representatives of the Syrian government and the opposition in Astana.

An Ankara court on Dec. 26 issued a temporary broadcast ban on media coverage on news related to the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov who was gunned down on Dec. 19 in Ankara, according to a judicial source, the Hurriyet Daily News reports.

Ankara’s 7th Court of Peace declared the media ban upon a request from the constitutional crimes investigation bureau of the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media.

The court declared the broadcast ban would continue until the completion of the police investigation.
The ban includes footages from the time of the attack and afterwards, and news related to suspects believed to have links to the incident.

Karlov died after being shot multiple times at an art exhibition in Ankara. He was delivering a speech when 22-year-old Turkish policeman, Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, opened fire. Altıntaş was later gunned down after an exchange of fire with security personnel.

Photo: EPA

 

A huge search operation is continuing “round the clock” in Russia, after a Russian military plane with 92 people on board crashed into the Black Sea, the BBC reports.

Some 3,500 people on ships, jets, helicopters and submersibles are involved in the operation near Sochi.

The Tu-154 plane – carrying soldiers, members of a famed army music ensemble and reporters – was heading for Syria.

All those on board are feared dead after Sunday’s crash. Monday has been declared a national day of mourning.

Search teams – including 139 divers – worked through the night in three shifts, and the operation “did not stop for a minute”, Defence Ministry spokesman Maj Gen Igor Konashenkov said at a briefing on Monday morning.

He said that 11 bodies and “154 fragments” have been found since the operation began.

Overnight, he added, powerful spotlights were used to search the crash area.

The 10.5 sq km search area just off the coast had been extended, the spokesman said.

“Fragments of the Tu-154 plane of the Russian defence ministry were found 1.5km  from the Black Sea coast of the city of Sochi at a depth of 50m to 70m,” the defence ministry said on Saturday.

Former Manchester United defender Gary Neville says that he has been very impressed with Manchester United signing Henrikh Mkhitatyan, according to The Sports Review.

Neville believes Mkhitaryan looks like a very good signing following his performance against Spurs.

“He had a large price tag and people expected he would come straight in. But we have Lingard, Martial, Rashford and Mata in the wide areas. He looks very, very good. It is very early days,” Neville told Sky Sports.

Neville added: “He has been good. He looks like he is clever and sees a pass.”

Henrikh Mkhitaryan can help to inspire Manchester United to a top-four finish in the Premier League this season, Arsenal legend Ray Parlour says.

Speaking to Sky Sports News HQ, ex Arsenal midfielder Parlour insisted that he isn’t surprised to see Mkhitaryan come into his own at Old Trafford.

“Mkhitaryan scored the goal. At the start of the season, I said he’d be a real good signing. He hasn’t featured too often for Manchester United,” Parlour said.

“In recent weeks, he has shown how good he is. If they can keep him in the side and get the best out of him as well, Jose knows that he has a good squad of players there and they will be hoping they can get a real good run going and threaten that top four.”

Armenian Deputy FM has lashed out at his Azeri counterpart for attempts to politicize the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization.

Addressing the 35^th meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of BSEC member states, Armenian Deputy FM Ashot Hovakimyan said “the attempts to politicize the organization are unacceptable.”

He noted that “BSEC is not the platform where one can try to raise issues in no way related to the mandate of the organization and.”

During the meeting in Belgrade the Council summed up the six months of the Serbian presidency.

Ashot Hovakimyan noted in his speech that “over the past six months Armenia has kept making efforts to promote multifaceted economic cooperation, implement the programs on the agenda of the organization, encourage investments.”

On November 28, 2016, in accordance with the arrangement reached with the authorities of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, the OSCE Mission conducted a planned monitoring of the Line of Contact between the armed forces of Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan in the eastern direction of Talish settlement of the NKR Martakert region.

From the positions of the NKR Defense Army, the monitoring was conducted by Field Assistant to the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Ghenadie Petrica (Moldova) and staff member of the Office Peter Svedberg (Sweden).

From the opposite side of the Line of Contact, the monitoring was conducted by Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Ambassador Andrzej Kasprzyk and his Field Assistant Jiri Aberle (Czech Republic).

The monitoring passed in accordance with the agreed schedule. No violation of the cease-fire regime was registered.

From the Karabakh side, the monitoring mission was accompanied by representatives of the NKR Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defense.

Armenian Defense Minister Vigen Sargsyan has a courtesy meeting with Seyed Kazem Sajadi, the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Islamic Repiblic of Iran to Armenia.

During the meeting the parties discussed issues related to Armenian-Iranian bilateral cooperation, as well as regional and international developments.