Author: Tambiyan Samvel

Late in the evening of May 9th, the day before the birth of former Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev, graffiti found its way onto a statue dedicated to the same man, in a park in Baku,  Meydan TV reports.

The inscription read: “Happy Slave Day!”

The unknown author took the Azerbaijani phrase, “Gül bayramınız mübarək!”, changed the first two letters of the first word and thereby completely changed the meaning of the phrase from, “Happy Flower Day!” to “Happy Slave Day!”

Flower Day is celebrated every year in Baku and other large regional Azerbaijani cities on the 10th of May to coincide with the birthday of the former president of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev.

Every year in preparation for the holiday, the government spends tens of millions of dollars on flowers from Holland, Italy, France, Turkey, China and other countries. This has elicited criticism and contempt from civil society.

The government opinion on the bill on recognition of Artsakh was a message to the world, a warning that Armenia will recognize the Nagorno Karabakh Republic if Azerbaijan unleashes new aggression, journalist and expert Tatul Hakobyan told .

He said it’s hard to find any Armenian in the world that would not rejoice for the recognition of Artsakh, but pointed to several challenges the decision could bring about.

Tatul Hakobyan said it will serve a justification for Azerbaijan to start new war. “Azerbaijan has long been trying to foil the Minsk process and transfer the issue to other platforms. In case of recognition, Azerbaijan will accuse Armenia of taking a unilateral step and frustrating the Minsk process,” he added.

He said recognition will “intoxicate” the Armenian-Russian relations, Russia will be one of the first countries to condemn the move. “Anti-Armenian Russia is more dangerous than Azerbaijan and Turkey together,” he noted.

“In case Armenia recognizes the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, the UN Security Council will convene a sitting and adopt a resolution that will not be favorable to Armenia,” he said.

“We live in a world where we are not alone, and different interests have to be taken into consideration.”

“It’s not the best time to recognize Artsakh,” Tatul Hakobyan concluded.

Photo: Getty Images

Borussia Dortmund have announced that Mats Hummels has asked to leave the club to join Bayern Munich this summer.

The defender’s future at Signal Iduna Park has long been up in the air, with speculation he would request a transfer in the close-season.

And the club have confirmed he has made an official plea to move across the Bundesliga.

“Mats Hummels has informed us of his wish to leave the club in the summer and he wants to join league rivals Bayern Munich,” a statement published on the BVB website reads.

Dortmund add that they would only consider selling Hummels to the Bavarians if an offer of “extraordinary value” was made.

At the present time, the statement affirms, there has been no formal offer for the centre-back.

“The club would like to point out that Mats Hummels, as is the case of the rest of the Borussia Dortmund team, has no agreed release clause,” Dortmund explain.

The Armenian community of Sydney will #MARCHFORJUSTICE in Sydney’s CBD (Central Business District) this Sunday, April 24th in remembrance of the 101st Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian National Committee of Australia reports.

Participating in the March for Justice will be clergy from all Armenian churches, Armenian political, youth, relief and cultural organisations, as well as schools, dance groups and the entire Armenian community. The March will be led by the Homenetmen Scouts Band.

Marchers will meet at the iconic Hyde Park Fountain at 2pm. They will walk through Hyde Park, then Macquarie Street, which will be partially blocked to traffic by local police. Wreaths will be laid by organisations at the NSW Parliament House Khatchkar (Cross Stone), erected in 1997 to honour the memory of the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide and victims of all genocides.

The march will continue through to the Royal Botanic Gardens, where a short program will be held with the backdrop of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

A statement from the organisers read: “This is an historic opportunity to express our united voice for justice as descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, and remember what took place 101 years ago.”

“It is time, with Artsakh recently repelling another attack by Azerbaijan, for our community to join in numbers, show our solidarity with those in the motherland, and participate in what is a unique event that will be remembered for the ages.”

A number of Buses have been organised to transport participants to and from the City. They will depart from the Armenian Cultural Centre in Willoughby (1pm), the Armenian Apostolic Church in Chatswood (1pm), the Ararat Scout Hall in Ryde (1pm) and the Navasart Scout Hall in Smithfield (12:30pm).

The Sydney #MARCHFORJUSTICE is being held under the auspices of the joint Armenian Genocide Commemorative Committee, and is being organised by Homenetmen, the Armenian Relief Society, Hamazkaine, the Armenian Youth Federation, the Armenian National Committee of Australia, Armenia Media Inc. and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, with the participation of the entire Sydney Armenian community.

By Robert Fisk

All week, the G-word has been rattling around the foreign ministries of the world. Ever since John Kerry – he of Israeli-Palestinian peace “in six months” fame – announced that Isis was committing genocide against Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims, we’ve been trying to work out just what he’s talking about. Even the poor old Canadians and their super-liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau, have since been refusing to recognise the Isis atrocities as “genocide” – the attempt to exterminate an entire race of people – preferring instead to talk about “crimes perpetrated…against religious and ethnic minorities.” Could this be, ask Canadian critics, because Canada last month withdrew the last of its clapped out CF-18 fighter jets from the battle against Isis?

More likely the Canadians have caught on to the whole genocide trap. But first: yes, Isis have indeed committed horrific crimes against minorities under their control. Their massacre of Shia Muslims and the murder and enslavement of Yazidi and Christian women and children are all real – perhaps 10,000, perhaps 100,000, the figures are as numbing as they are vague. The Isis magazine Dabiq admits all this – perhaps the closest anyone has come to self-incrimination since Pol Pot listed his crimes in Cambodia.

But there’s a problem. These terrible atrocities are being committed on the very land and deserts upon which a far more terrible genocide was perpetrated just over a hundred years ago by the Turks who head-chopped and knifed and shot to death a million and a half Armenian Christians, raping their women and throwing so many of their dead men into the waters of Anatolia that the very rivers changed course. And Turkey – heaven be praised – is now our good friend, Nato ally and, since this month, our bastion against the Muslim refugee “invasion” of Europe. Back in 1915, the Brits and Americans had no problems in naming the guilty party, along with the Turks’ militia ally – again, take in your breath – the Kurds, now our brave allies against the forces of Isis darkness.

All this, you see, is a bit embarrassing. The Yazidis and Christians of Iraq have certainly been massacred – including a few Armenian grandchildren of the 1915 survivors, although that hasn’t cut much ice in the US – although the Shia Muslims of Iraq were being slaughtered in Iraq by the thousand during the latter half of America’s military occupation.  The Shia, I suspect, have been given a bloodbath upgrade to genocide because Shia Iran agreed to a nuclear deal with the rest of the world. But back to Yazidis for a moment.

One of the worst genocides against this forlorn, centuries-old religion occurred in 1892 when the Turkish Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II targeted them for mass extermination. But the Sultan included among his victims tens of thousands of 19^thcentury Armenians – whom Mr Kerry cannot bring himself to declare victims of genocide in the 20^th century (although he did so for many years when he was a mere Senator). So earlier references to Yazidi extermination have to be left out of the Kerry narrative of history. The current Kerry mantra for the Armenian genocide is “one of the worst atrocities of the 20^thcentury”.

La Clinton is going to be no help in all this. She regularly condemned the Armenian genocide until she became Secretary of State to Barack Obama and discovered that the frightful persecution of the 1915 Christians – a teaching forum for future Nazis who witnessed the genocide as young German army officers and later put their lessons into practice against the Jews – was now “a matter of historical debate”. Donald Trump has not yet entered this particular blood-boltered ‘debate’ although his Trump hotel in Azerbaijan – a country which, like Turkey and (to its shame) Israel, denies the Armenian genocide – suggests that we shall be hearing from him soon.

Much of the rest of the world – governments and parliaments of 29 countries up to last year – have recognised the Armenian genocide. For 20 years, The Independent has regularly referred to the Armenian Holocaust – with a capital ‘H’, the very same word (‘Shoah’ in Hebrew) used by many ordinary Israelis to describe the slaughter. But not the Americans.

Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose Sukhoi jet had of course not yet been shot down by the Turks, attended the official genocide memorial day in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, declaring the genocide a fact of history – to the fury of the Turks — while President Obama skulked in Washington, still too fearful of offending his Nato ally whose airbases – ironically built, in many cases, on lands stolen from murdered Armenians – were so important to the US Air Force which was already supposedly destroying Isis.

All in all, then a pretty mess. Kerry tells us that Isis is “genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology and by actions…” as if the destruction of the Armenian people in 1915 was not – and is perfectly happy to label the dark forces of the ‘Islamic Caliphate’ as genocidal themselves – which they clearly are. But it raises another frightful question. Since we know that Isis sells Syrian and Iraqi oil to the Turks – Russian bomber pilots have seen miles of Isis oil convoys running to the horizon towards Turkey – and since Turkish journalists have been imprisoned for reporting on secret Turkish arms transfers to Islamists in Syria – the Americans are, in effect, blaming Isis for the genocide of a hundred thousand or more human beings while being too frightened to label the Armenian massacres of a million and a half souls as genocide lest it offend Isis’ sinister chums in Turkey.

It’s not difficult to accuse the bad guys of genocide – Colin Powell had no problem over Darfur in 2004 – but shouldn’t we stand up to the real bullies who prevent us honouring the memory of those million and a half Christians who were treated just as Isis treats the Yazidis and Christians and Shia today: the Turkish government and the Turkish army and the Turkish institutes of state? And all this at a time when an increasing number of brave Turks are themselves acknowledging the Turkish genocide of 1915?

Forget it: 75 million visas to Turkey in response to their $3-billion European bailout to block those refugees is enough to keep the Armenian mass graves of 1915 well and truly closed. Just ask John Kerry

There was an emotional reaction to the Brussels bombings from “European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, according to Euronews.

Fighting back tears, she cut short a news conference saying: “It’s also a very sad day for Europe, as Europe and its capital are suffering the same pain that this region has known and knows every single day, be it in Syria, be it elsewhere. We are still waiting for more precise news on the dynamics of the attacks in Brussels, but it is quite clear that the roots of the pain we are suffering around our region are very much the same, and that we are united, in not only [the] suffering of our victims, but also reacting to this act and preventing radicalisation and violence together.”

Painful day for Brussels and all Europe. In Jordan with FM working together on counterterrorism

— Federica Mogherini (@FedericaMog)

She then said: “I will stop here, you will understand this, today is a difficult day.”

Mogherini was speaking at a joint news conference with Jordan’s Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh.

After calling a halt to questions, she started crying and was comforted by Judeh, who earlier had expressed his country’s strong condemnation of what he called “these criminal, terrorist acts”.

He also said: “We stand with you today and with our friends in Europe and with all peace loving nations.”

Title chasers in England and Germany meet on Thursday night as Tottenham Hotspur travel to Borussia Dortmund for the first leg of their Europa League last-16 tie.

Spurs and Dortmund find themselves five points behind the current leaders – Leicester City in the Premier League and Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga – but still in the running.

The first leg in Germany will be head coach Mauricio Pochettino’s 100th game in charge at Tottenham.

“Borussia Dortmund have very good players, a very good team, a great coach – Thomas Tuchel is fantastic and he has showed that from the beginning of the season,” Pochettino said ahead of the match.

“I like the way they play but I think that it’s a good challenge for us. I think we play against one of the best teams in Europe,” he added.

“The strikers they have – Aubameyang, (Henrikh) Mkhitaryan, Gundogan in midfield, Hummels – they’re internationals and big players. They can stay here or go to Real Madrid or Barcelona,” the Tottenham manager said.

The Europa League last 16 draw has been made in Nyon. The two legged-ties will take place on March 10 and March 17. Borussia Dortmund have been drawn against Liverpool in the Europa League’s last 16.

Europa League draw in full

Shakhtar Donetsk v Anderlecht
Basel v Sevilla
Villarreal v Bayer Leverkusen
Athletic Bilbao v Valencia
Liverpool v Manchester United
Sparta Prague v Lazio
Borussia Dortmund v Tottenham
Fenerbahce v Braga

Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian had a meeting with the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs and the Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

During the meeting the parties continued discussions on the process of peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict.

Referring to the negotiation process, Minister Nalbandian noted: “Ignoring the targeted messages of the international community, Azerbaijan continues to severely violate the trilateral agreements on establishment and reinforcement of ceasefire, turns down the proposal to create a mechanism of investigation of border incidents, attempts to take the discussions on the settlement of the issue to other formats and criticizes the Minsk Group co-chairmanship format. This comes to prove that Baku is doing its best to frustrate the settlement process. Furthermore, these actions of the Azerbaijani side and the refusal to meet with the Co-Chairs contribute to the maintenance of the status quo, something Armenia and the co-chairing countries have always stood against.”

Edward Nalbandian reiterated that Armenia would continue to work together with the Co-Chairs towards an exceptionally peaceful resolution of the Karabakh conflict.