Category: 2017

Tehran: Iran-Armenia-Russia amity helps fight on extremism: Armenian president

Karakhanian Suren
Press TV, Iran

Aug 1 2017
Tue Aug 1, 2017 10:1AM
Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan speaks to a reporter from IRNA in this undated photo handed out by the Iranian news agency.

The friendship among Armenia, Iran, and Russia serves the fight against extremism in the region, says the Armenian president.

President Serzh Sargsyan made the remark in an interview with IRNA in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, which the Iranian news agency published on Tuesday.

Armenia, Iran, and Russia, he said, were friendly with one another both on bilateral and trilateral levels, he said, adding that the pacifist policy of the three countries contributed significantly to peace and stability in the region.

“Given the current circumstances in the region, it is of importance that Armenia and Iran and Russia — which is Armenia’s strategic ally — combine their efforts to reinforce regional peace and security and form a strong barrier… [to] extremism,” Sargsyan said.

‘Islamophobia unacceptable’

The Armenian president was asked about attempts to spread Islamophobia by certain countries in the region and the world.

“Islamophobia is unacceptable, as is whatever phenomenon in which a feeling of hatred toward others is concealed,” he said.

Any such attitude deepens rifts among people who follow different faiths and who have different cultures and ideologies and can have “catastrophic and irreversible consequences,” Sargsyan said.

As a case in point, he cited the 1915 mass killing of Armenians by the-then Ottoman forces, and regretted that some parties continued to exercise a policy of “Armenophobia,” which he said had turned into a main obstacle in the way of the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.

Thanking Iran’s stance on Nagorno-Karabakh dispute

The Armenian president said relations between Armenia and Iran served as a model of good-neighborly ties and lauded the peaceful co-existence of Armenians and Muslims in Iran.

The Armenian head of state, who is to travel to Tehran to attend President Hassan Rouhani’s inauguration ceremony for a second term on Saturday, also thanked Iran for its principled policy on the disputed region.

“The Islamic Republic has always supported a peaceful resolution of all conflicts and differences between countries,” he said.

Azerbaijan and Armenia have quarreled over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. A territorial war between the two sides claimed nearly 30,000 lives in the early 1990s.

The two neighbors, however, never signed a peace pact despite several ceasefire deals.

Woe betide the Kurds of northern Syria when the war is over by R. Fisk

Emil Lazarian
The Independent (United Kingdom)
July 31, 2017 Monday 11:01 AM GMT

Woe betide the Kurds of northern Syria when the war is over
One Syrian told me, ‘These Kurdish groups are liars. We gave them weapons to fight the terrorists – now we no longer give them weapons to protect themselves. We did not give them weapons so that they could make states. Now they are fully supplied by the Americans.’

by Robert Fisk

This is the sixth piece in Fisk’s series from Aleppo.

It was a tree-lined street – the white acacias are blooming in Aleppo at this time of year – and the apartment block was, as we journalists used to say, unassuming. But on an upper floor, the Syrian men sitting round the air-conditioned room were deadly serious until a voice shouted on the recording which was being played to them from a desk opposite the door. Then they laughed very loudly indeed.

“Al-Nusrah has brought dishonour on the head of my son and children,” the voice wailed, angry and frightened. “Just tell Nusrah to stop fighting – they must obey the teaching of God and not harm people. The have attacked my family, bullets have destroyed my home and my car.” The voice belonged to an official of Ahrar al-Sham, a Salafist militia once allied to al-Nusrah-al-Qaeda, the fiercest armed opponent of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the same organisation which, in its original form, perpetrated the 9/11 crimes against humanity. But for the past four days, Ahrar al-Sham and Nusrah are fighting and killing each other. That is why the Syrians in the Aleppo room are laughing.

There are more recordings from cell phones now, of men trying to arrange ceasefires across Idlib province, the vast dumping ground into which the Syrian regime is sending its Wahabi enemies when they agree to abandon their city enclaves. But the local truces between these groups do not work and there is now inter-guerrilla fighting across the triangle formed by the provinces of Hama, Idlib and Aleppo. As the voices continue, an official enters the room carrying a CD disk in a transparent plastic bag with two pages stapled to it, one of which appears to carry a photograph of a man. The pages are signed and left on the desk.

You do not need a PhD in intelligence to understand what is happening. Ahrar al-Sham, largely supported by Qatar and Turkey, is at war with al-Nusrah whose support has come from Saudi Arabia (and Qatar in the past) and, so far as the Syrians are concerned, from the United States. For the Syrians, the Qatar-Saudi dispute is now being fought out on the ground between the two sides’ proxies in the Syrian war. The first battles broke out in Tel Torgan in Aleppo province and then expanded to Saragib in the countryside round Idlib. In Saragib, it appears, Nusrah killed every Ahrar man they found. Now Ahrar al-Sham have an alliance with the Turkmani groups and the gloriously named ‘Nureddin Zinki’, local fighters who once played a role in the capture of eastern Aleppo. The real Nureddin al-Zinki – or Zengi as he would have been called at the time – was a 12th century Seljuk emir of Damascus and Aleppo who fought the Crusaders but who, ironically, was also trapped in a series of internecine battle with regional Arab rivals.

Shocking images show Aleppo before and after the conflict

All of this makes the Syrian regime – and the army which is watching its enemies fighting each other – quite content. Another recording, another voice, this time a Facebook audio – the militias are obliging enough to give away their secrets since they are obsessed with technology – which announces that 2,500 fighters have now deployed on the Turkish border to fight Nusrah. Prominent local civilian and tribal leaders who have appealed for an end to the fighting are being ignored. The western side of the Aleppo governorate is peaceful – but is not under government control. Isis and Nusrah are maintaining an alliance.

The men in the room treat this more like vaudeville than tragedy. They have followed the slippery loyalties of the armed groups for months and know that the names of their enemies change as quickly as the trust which these groups demonstrate towards their supposed allies, how al-Qaeda became Nusrah and then – after its leadership staged a propaganda interview on al-Jazeera to display their ‘moderation’ towards minorities – to Fateh al-Sham. Isis still has a small pocket of territory in the desert north of Khanaseer – I know this to be true because I travel the Khanaseer desert road to Aleppo and can see on each trip the burned out oil tankers and occasional army tanks which Isis has wrecked during its raids. But elsewhere, Isis have been driven at least 70 miles from the desert highways which lead to eastern Syria.

There are intriguing historical observations made in the room, which are – as tourist guidebooks might say – worthy of note. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the men in the room agree, the local Arab population on Golan had supported the Syrian army and many Israeli soldiers were killed. But now these people did not support the army and instead killed many Syrian soldiers. “In 1973,” one man says, “the enemy were at our borders. Now they are inside.”

There is also much talk of weapons, especially the American TOW anti-armour rockets which Nusrah brought into Syria in large numbers. The Syrian army had paid a heavy cost in these battles, until they received new Russian weapons. The Syrian 11th Brigade at the Syrian-Turkish border had been repeatedly attacked. There are still Muslim Brotherhood units near Dera’a in the south. If Syria was fighting just one state, there would be a quick victory, “but it is fighting states from all around the world”, one man says. This statement might smack of propaganda – even self- pity – if it did not bear an element of truth. One rebel unit calling itself Jund Mohamed was led by an Egyptian army officer – since fired by his commanders – and the Syrians eventually targeted the man in an ambush after information from a source inside the rebels. Their first rocket attack killed their own source. The second wounded the Egyptian and 35 others.

Then came a quite remarkable comment from one of the men which – whatever its veracity – should be recorded if only because it is believed in Syria. “The most criminal fighters are the Tunisians,” he said. “The reason is that [the late] President Bourguiba gave freedom to women and as a result, there were many Tunisian women who had illegitimate children. All of these children were taken to Islamic schools as orphans and taught Islamist teaching. They ‘converted’ them to their own extremist [Salafist] ideology and taught them to wear beards when they were teenagers, and to kill those who don’t obey their teachings.”

But it was the Kurdish fighters who enraged the men in the room almost as much as ISIS and Nusrah. “The Kurds think they can form their own canton in northern Syria,” said the man beside the desk. “They are like the Israelis – they are telling the world that they are alone, surrounded by enemies and must be protected. But 80 per cent of the Kurdish people do not want to be separated from Syria. The Kurds like to think they can link up with the Americans, the Germans, the French, the Turks, with all of these big states.

“But Russia was betrayed by them. These Kurdish groups are liars. We gave them weapons to fight the terrorists – now we no longer give them weapons to protect themselves. We did not give them weapons so that they could make states. Now they are fully supplied by the Americans.”

Much nodding of heads around the room. The Kurds will clearly get no state in the north of the country if Syria has its way. “The Kurds are very afraid from Turkey,” the man beside the desk continued. “You know how the Kurds after the First World War lost everything. They did not get a state. They were the first losers, they were like a doll in the game of powers. They killed half the people of Cilicia, Armenians and Cilicians. Now they are trying to play the game again in the politics of the region – but they will lose.”

The rebels will surrender or die. This was the mood – hopelessly simplistic or true, depending on your point of view – in the air-conditioned room in that Aleppo apartment block. But woe betide the Kurds of northern Syria when the war is over.

The Smithsonian: Armenian villagers monitor storks’ breeding process

Kajoyan Gevork
PanArmenian, Armenia

Aug 1 2017
August 1, 2017 – 12:34 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net – The Smithsonian has published an article about the more than 650 pairs of breeding white storks who are hosted by Armenian villages each year, settling into numbered nests where they will hatch nestlings and teach the babies to feed.

The storks—common in worldwide folklore for bringing babies to families—use Armenia as a stopover point to breed on their long journey south from western Europe to their winter grounds in Africa. At the same time, more than 1,000 families in those Armenian villages will take pen to paper and monitor the storks’ progress as part of a program called Nest Neighbors.

The Smithsonian reveals the story of how Dr. Karen Aghababyan started the program in Armenia in 2006 as a nationwide survey of white storks, with the goal of tracking the health of the nearby wetland ecosystems. He and his team mapped every stork nest in the country, then—since white storks prefer nesting sights that are often near people, like on top of homes or electrical poles—they provided locals with questionnaires in the form of a calendar. The villagers write down important facts on the calendars and report information back to Aghababyan: the nest number they’re monitoring, what date the storks arrive, how many nestlings appear and if any incidents with the nest occur, such as it falling down.

In 2007, the Nest Neighbors program received a Whitley Award, the top conservation award in the U.K., and continued to receive research funds from Whitley in 2010 and 2014.

According to the publication, the Nest Neighbors program has made its way to schools as a model for environmental education. Also, the program led to changes in agricultural practices in local villages.

The storks are also starting to attract a small number of tourists who stop to seeing the hundreds of nest-topped houses and swooping birds on their way to visit regional monasteries. Those who want to be honorary Nest Neighbors can tour the small villages near the Ararat Valley wetlands, including Surenavan and Hovtashat.

RFE/RL Armenian Report – 08/02/2017

Garnik Tadevosian 
                                        Wednesday, August 2, 2017
Jailed Oppositionist Goes On Trial
 . Sisak Gabrielian
Armenia - Opposition activist Andrias Ghukasian goes on trial in
Yerevan, 2Aug2017.
The trial began on Wednesday of an Armenian opposition activist
accused of aiding gunmen that seized a police station in Yerevan last
year to demand President Serzh Sarkisian's resignation.
The arrested activist, Andrias Ghukasian, was one of the organizers of
demonstrations held in support of the gunmen affiliated with a fringe
opposition group. The charges levelled against him stem from one of
those rallies that was organized on July 29, 2016 in Yerevan's Sari
Tagh neighborhood close to the besieged police base.
Riot police used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the protesters
after they refused to march back to the city center. Several
organizers of the protest were arrested and charged with provoking
"mass disturbances." All of them except Ghukasian were subsequently
released from custody.
Armenia's Special Investigative Service (SIS) claims that Ghukasian
urged supporters to throw stones at the police officers in Sari
Tagh. The 47-year-old also stands accused of planning to have the
protesters break through a police cordon, join the gunmen and thus
prolong their standoff with security forces, which left three police
officers dead.
Ghukasian denies the accusations as politically motivated. His lawyers
say that they are based on false testimony given by a man linked to
the police. They say the testimony runs counter to videos of the July
2016 protests featuring Ghukasian.
Ghukasian has also accused SIS investigators of committing numerous
violations of the due process during their nearly yearlong criminal
inquiry. At the opening session of his trial, the presiding judge did
not allow to read out a statement detailing the alleged violations.
The judge went on to adjourn the hearing, citing the absence of the
oppositionist's lawyers. He said the trial will resume after they
return from vacation.
Armenia - Riot police disperse protesters in Yerevan's Sari Tagh
neighborhood, 29Jul2016.
Two other opposition activists arrested in connection with the Sari
Tagh violence, Davit Sanasarian and Davit Hovannisian, also attended
the first court hearing that lasted for only several minutes. Both men
decried the criminal case against their comrade. Hovannisian, who was
freed on bail in June, claimed that the Sari Tagh crowd could have
easily broken through the police cordon had the protest organizers
indeed planned to join the gunmen.
More than 60 protesters were injured and hospitalized in the Sari Tagh
violence. The police say that 36 of their officers were injured by
stones thrown from the crowd shortly before the violent breakup of the
protest.
In a January report, Human Rights Watch said that the use of force
against the protesters was "excessive and disproportionate." The
crackdown has also been criticized by Armenian human rights activists.
A former business executive, Ghukasian was a maverick candidate in
Armenia's last presidential election held in 2013. He garnered about
0.6 percent of the vote, according to the official election results.
Despite being held in pre-trial detention, Ghukasian ran in the April
2 parliamentary elections as a candidate of the opposition ORO
alliance led by former Defense Minister Seyran Ohanian and former
Foreign Ministers Raffi Hovannisian and Vartan Oskanian. ORO polled
only 2 percent of the vote, falling well short of a 7 percent
threshold for having seats in Armenia's current parliament.
Armenian Village Shooting `Linked To Money'
 . Anush Muradian
Armenia - Forensic experts inspect a dining hall in the village of
Shamiram where four men were killed and seven others wounded,
1Aug2017.
A mass shooting in an Armenian village, which left four people dead,
was the result of an unpaid debt, a leader of Armenia's Yazidi
community claimed on Wednesday.
The killings were committed in Shamiram, a Yazidi-populated village 50
kilometers west of Yerevan, on Tuesday during a gathering of several
hundred local men marking a religious feast. Four of them were shot
dead and seven others wounded by a gunman who fled the scene.
The Armenian police identified the presumed shooter as Telman
Kalashian, a 50-year resident of another village. Kalashian remained
on the run as of Wednesday evening.
Aziz Tamoyan, who leads the largest organization of Armenia's ethnic
Yazidis, attributed the carnage to $100,000 which he said was long
owed to Kalashian. In his words, Kalashian shouted that "I won't shoot
you if you give me my money" moments before opening fire. Three of the
four murdered men were related to each other, said Tamoyan, who
visited Shamiram earlier in the day.
"I know that Telman's father very well," Tamoyan told RFE/RL's
Armenian service (Azatutyun.am). "He is a kind and good person, a
wonderful individual. I can't understand why that guy took such an
action."
Meanwhile, the mayor of Kalashian's village of Miasnikian said that
the fugitive suspect is a herdsman who was not known for violent
conduct. "He is a normal working man who has raised livestock," Tigran
Baghdasarian told RFE/RL's Armenian service (Azatutyun.am). "He has a
wife, three daughters and one son."
The mayor also said that the homes of the Kalashians and their
relatives were placed under police guard shortly after the shootings.
Russia To Suspend Gas Supplies To Armenia
Russia -- A logo of the Russian Gazprom company during the 16th
Neftegaz International Exhibition in Moscow, April 18, 2016
Supplies of Russian natural gas to Armenia will be suspended on
Thursday due to capital repairs on a pipeline in Russia, the Armenian
national gas distribution network announced on Wednesday.
The Gazprom-Armenia operator said they will resume 30 days later,
after the completion of "construction works" at a North Caucasus
section of the pipeline transporting Russian gas to Armenia via
Georgia. Gas supplies to individual and corporate consumers will
continue "without limitations" in the meantime, it added in a short
statement.
The company owned by Russia's Gazprom energy giant will presumably tap
its massive underground gas storage facilities north of Yerevan during
that period. It might also use additional volumes of natural gas which
Armenia imports from neighboring Iran.
Armenia already asked Iran to supply it with much more natural gas
during a similar month-long suspension of gas imports from Russia last
summer. A Georgian section of the pipeline underwent major repairs at
the time.
Armenia has imported up to 500 million cubic meters of Iranian gas
annually ever since it built in 2008 a gas pipeline connecting it to
the Islamic Republic. By comparison, Russian gas supplies to the South
Caucasus country total around 2 billion cubic meters.
With Armenia paying for Iranian gas with electricity, Iran is due to
at least triple the gas supplies after the construction of a third
power transmission line connecting the two states. Work on the $120
million line is slated for completion in 2019.
Natural gas generates more than one-third of Armenia's electricity. It
is also used, in liquefied or pressurized forms, by most car owners in
the country.
Press Review
Panorama.am reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin's press
secretary, Dmitry Peskov, has expressed concern over reports that the
United States is considering supplying weapons to Ukraine. "The
Kremlin believes that countries aspiring to a role in the resolution
of the conflict in Ukraine must avoid actions that could provoke a new
period of tension in Donbass," Peskov said. The online publication
finds this argument disingenuous. It points out that Russia itself has
sold weapons to Azerbaijan despite being a mediator in the
Nagorno-Karabakh peace process.
"The sales of Russian weapons to Azerbaijan are the main reason for a
transformation of Russian-Armenian relations," writes Lragir.am. It
says that not only Armenia's government and opposition forces but even
the parents of soldiers serving in the Armenian army criticize Russian
arms sales to Baku. It also argues that neither the United States nor
France, the two other co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, has signed
major arms deals with Azerbaijan.
"Aravot reports on President Serzh Sarkisian's statement that
unspecified "experts" are now looking into the possibility of
supplying Iranian natural gas to Europe via Armenia. Artyom Tonoyan,
an expert on Iranian affairs, tells the paper that Yerevan has already
made clear before that it would welcome such an ambitious project. He
suggests that the project is still far from being implemented due to
"technical issues" such as the small capacity of the existing pipeline
in Armenia transporting Iranian gas and the high cost of delivering
that gas from Georgia to Europe via the Black Sea. "Generally
speaking, the area of energy is at the center of Armenian-Iranian
relations and is one of the most dynamically developing directions,"
he says, pointing to the ongoing construction of a third
Armenian-Iranian electricity transmission line.
(Tigran Avetisian)
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
Copyright (c) 2017 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc.
1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
www.rferl.org

BAKU: Azerbaijan’s defense industry booming

Jhanna Virabian
AzerNews, Azerbaijan

Aug 1 2017
1 August 2017 13:47 (UTC+04:00)

By Rashid Shirinov

Azerbaijan’s defense industry is booming, while defense production exports are on the up. Azerbaijan is now building its own snipers, UAVs, armored vehicles and etc seeking to ensure self sufficiency. And more foreign countries are keen to purchase kit. 

Over the past years, the country has embarked on a defense equipment policy which puts the emphasis squarely on indigenous manufacturing and development.

Defense Industry Minister Yavar Jamalov stressed that Azerbaijan exports locally made defense production to more than 10 countries.

The volume of defense products handed over to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry and other power structures grew by 1.3 times within these six months of 2017 compared to the same period last year, the minister said addressing a board meeting on the results of the first half of 2017.

 “Enterprises of the [Defense Industry] Ministry have increased the volume of defense production by 33.8 percent in the first half of this year,” said Jamalov.

The minister added that the range of defense products manufactured by the Ministry enterprises has reached 1,200 items.

Jamalov also noted that the Ministry enterprises have successfully completed the preparation and production of the mine-resistant national armored vehicle Tufan, and currently get ready for serial production.

Azerbaijan leaves behind many CIS and regional countries to take its place among the first 60 strongest militaries of the world, according to the U.S.-based Global Firepower survey center.

The country, which is in war with neighboring Armenia over the latter’s groundless territorial claims during more than 20 years, keeps in focus the armament. Azerbaijan creates its own armament and works closely with leading companies and firms in various fields of military industry.

The Azerbaijani-made products transferred to the security forces include such weapons as mortars of various caliber and their ammunition, 5.45-millimeter machine guns, 7.62-mm general-purpose machine guns, sniper rifles of special purpose, Matador and Marauder armored personnel carriers. Moreover, Azerbaijani military factories produce 30-mm automatic grenade launcher complex, sight for ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft installation, ammo of various calibers, PG-7V grenade launchers, unmanned aerial vehicles, aerial bombs for a training exercise and many other weapons.

Last year, the Azerbaijani Defense Industry Ministry increased the volume of defense industry products by 1.6 times compared to 2015, while the product assortment rose by 1.8 times. Currently, twenty-eight military factories are operating within the Ministry.