Category: 2018

Necessary investigatory and other procedural actions are conducted in the Investigative Division of Malatia-Sebastia administrative district of Yerevan Investigative Department of the RA Investigative Committee to find out all circumstances of newly born baby’s death.

On October 28, 2018 a report was received from a citizen in Malatia Division of RA Police informing that his newly born baby died in the result of improper implementation of duties by doctors during childbirth.

On October 29, 2018 a criminal case was initiated in Prosecution Office of Malatia-Sebastia administrative district according to the Part 2 of the Article 130 of RA Criminal Code which on was received in the proceeding of the Investigative Division of Malatia-Sebastia administrative district of Yerevan Investigative Department of the RA Investigative Committee.

Forensic medical examination was commissioned to find out circumstances significant for the criminal case.

Preliminary investigation is ongoing.

Additional information about procedural decisions made on the base of the obtained evidence will be provided.

Note; Everyone charged with alleged crime offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law.

Head of the Special Investigative Service Sasun Khachatryan commented on the issue of declaring wanted former head of the investigative group over March 1 case Vahagn Harutyunyan and his statement that he told the SIS about his location and there was no need to declare him wanted.

“Declaring someone wanted not only aims at revealing his location place, but also presenting him to the body conducting the investigation. The fact that his location place is known doesn’t mean that he cannot be declared wanted”, the SIS chief told reporters after today’s Cabinet session.

He said Vahagn Harutyunyan left Armenia in July 2018. Asked why he was not invited for questioning before that, the SIS chief said: “Questioning cannot be an end in itself, it should have efficiency, in other words, a person is invited for questioning if we have questions to ask or there is a need to question him over some circumstances. These circumstances were unknown in July”.

Asked whether the charge against Vahagn Harutyunyan justifies the involvement of the Army in the 2008 March 1 events, Sasun Khachatryan said that fact is more than justified, without a disclosure of this case.

Special Investigative Service (SIS) director Sasun Khachatryan refused to comment or give any information about an unnamed lawmaker who Nikol Pashinyan said is under a criminal investigation in the most massive bribery case in the history of the Republic of Armenia.

Reporters asked Khachatryan today after the Cabinet meeting to identify the lawmaker.

“No comment”, he replied.

The economic activity rate or the structure of economic growth existing in Armenia for many years, is not accepted by acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

During today’s debate of the PM’s election in the Parliament, Pashinyan, who is the only candidate for PM, talked about the economic situation in Armenia in his remarks. “Our economic growth is mainly formed of components which allow us to say that our country is a mining-producing, agrarian country, a country, in fact, conducting bets, which is completely unacceptable. For instance, let’s look what happened in June when our economic activity rate reached an unprecedented high figure – 11.1%. The following took place: the World Cup was taking place that time, and it turns out that our people were busy in doing bets. These figures were recorded in our statistical service as a drastic growth in services, and we had nearly 5% economic activity rate growth within a month thanks to betting. Moreover, I want to draw your attention on the fact that the state revenues didn’t increase from this according to our tax code”, the acting PM said.

The next component, according to the acting PM, is the mining industry which has always been one of the pillars of export and production. “In fact, we have carried out this irrespective of any economic policy. If the international prices of metals, in particular those of copper and molybdenum, were high, we have demolished and exported our subsoil. And in fact, no added value has been created by this”, he said.

Commenting on the decline of the economic growth activity in September, Pashinyan said this decline occurred compared to the September of the previous year. “What happened during this period? The following took place: the Teghut mine, which was the pillar of our export and production, has just shut down. I didn’t and don’t consider it a positive pillar. But why it closed? Because many economic, engineering and management problems emerged. One of the greatest problems of our economy is that the situation, the activity of a company can bring fluctuations in our economic indicators”, Pashinyan said.

Agriculture is the next component forming Armenia’s economic growth. The acting PM said a great decline was also recorded in agricultural sector this year in September compared to the September of 2017. “But I want to draw your attention on the fact that during the 9 months of this year we recorded 20% export growth. This means that this year fruit-vegetables were exported from our country by more than 20% compared to the same period of the last year. But in general, there are major problems with agriculture statistics in our country that no one can confidently state that the figures presented in the agriculture sector are in accordance with the reality. Because we have multiple mechanisms for additions”, the acting PM said, adding that these additions are linked with the brandy production. “You know that an Armenian brandy is a brand, but, unfortunately, there are still companies in Armenia which produce non-Armenian brandy under the Armenian brandy brand”, he said, adding that this leads to inconsistencies in numbers.

Pashinyan also stated that there is a problem of under-fulfillment of the state budget spending. “The reason of this is very concrete and linked with our political line of anti-corruption fight, since in our opinion many programs are being implemented improperly, inefficiently, and our policy of anti-corruption fight has forced program implementers and the government to pay special attention to each program, which, of course, somehow restrains the expenditure part, which brings some economic effect with it”, Nikol Pashinyan said.

Armenia will most likely recall Yuri Khachaturov from the position of Secretary General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Armenian President Armen Sarkissian told reporters in Minsk, Belarus, according to Interfax.

“Armenia will most likely recall its representative”, Interfax quoted Sarkissian as saying.

According to Interfax, Sarkissian has emphasized that Armenia is entitled to recall or not recall Khachaturov, since he is the representative of Armenia.

“At this moment certain legal processes are underway in this direction,” Sarkissian said, according to Interfax.

The New York Times has published an article by Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature Orhan Pamuk about Ara Guler, the late Turkish-Armenian photojournalist who died on October 17 at the age of 90.

Guler, who was a friend of Pamuk, was nicknamed “the Eye of Istanbul” or “the Photographer of Istanbul”.

Below are excerpts from the article:

“I first heard of Ara in the 1960s when I saw his photographs in Hayat, a widely read weekly news and gossip magazine with a strong emphasis on photography. One of my uncles edited it. Ara published portraits of writers and artists such as Picasso and Dali, and the celebrated literary and cultural figures of an older generation in Turkey such as the novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. When Ara photographed me for the first time after the success of my novel “The Black Book,” I realized happily that I had arrived as a writer.

Ara devotedly photographed Istanbul for over half a century, continuing into the 2000s. I eagerly studied his photographs, to see in them the development and transformation of the city itself.

My friendship with Ara began in 2003, when I was consulting his archive of 900,000 photographs to research my book “Istanbul.” He had turned the large three-story home he inherited from his father, a pharmacist from the Galatasaray neighborhood in the Beyoglu district of the city, into a workshop, office and archive”, Pamuk says.

“In the early days of our friendship, we never spoke about Ara’s Armenian heritage and the suppressed, painful history of the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians — a subject that remains a veritable taboo in Turkey. I sensed that it would be difficult to speak about this harrowing subject with him, that it would put a strain on our relationship. He knew that speaking about it would make it harder for him to survive in Turkey.Over the years, he trusted me a little and occasionally brought up political subjects he wouldn’t raise with others”, Pamuk writes in the article.

“In 2005, I gave an interview where I complained that there was no freedom of thought in Turkey and we still couldn’t talk about the terrible things that were done to the Ottoman Armenians 90 years ago. The nationalist press exaggerated my comments. I was taken to court in Istanbul for insulting Turkishness, a charge that can lead to a three-year prison sentence.

Two years later, my friend the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was shot and killed in Istanbul, in the middle of the street, for using the words “Armenian genocide.” Certain newspapers began to hint that I might be next. Because of the death threats I was receiving, the charges that had been brought against me and the vicious campaign in the nationalist press, I started spending more time abroad, in New York. I would return to my office in Istanbul for brief stays, without telling anyone I was back.

On one of those brief visits home from New York, during some of the darkest days after Hrant Dink’s assassination, I walked into my office and the phone immediately started ringing. In those days I never picked up my office phone. The ringing would pause occasionally, but then it would start again, on and on. Uneasy, I eventually picked up. Straight away, I recognized Ara’s voice. “Oh, you’re back! I am coming over now,” he said, and hung up without waiting for my response.

Fifteen minutes later, Ara walked into my office. He was out of breath and cursing everything and everyone, in his characteristic manner. Then he embraced me with his huge frame and started to cry. Those who knew Ara, knew how fond he was of swearing and forceful masculine expressions, will understand my amazement at seeing him cry like that. He kept on swearing and telling me, “They can’t touch you, those people!”

His tears weren’t slowing down. The more he cried, the more I was gripped by a strange sense of guilt and felt paralyzed. After crying for a very long time, Ara finally calmed down, and then, as if this had been the whole purpose of his visit to my office, he drank a glass of water and left”.

Hrant Dink was the editor-in-chief of the Turkish-Armenian Agos newspaper. He was shot dead outside his office in 2007. Although the gunman was apprehended, the court proceedings resume up to this day as the investigation hasn’t revealed the sponsors behind the murder.

“I no longer felt the urge to ask him about his grandfathers and grandmothers. The great photographer had already told me everything through his tears.

Ara had hoped for a democracy where individuals could speak freely of their murdered ancestors, or at least freely weep for them. Turkey never became that democracy. The success of the past 15 years, a period of economic growth built on borrowed money, has been used not to broaden the reach of democracy but to restrict freedom of thought even further.

And after all this growth and all this construction, Ara Guler’s old Istanbul has become — to use the title of one of his books — a “Lost Istanbul”,” Pamuk concludes.

President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian on November 1 participated in the meeting discussions of the Core Group of the Munich Security Conference in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

The President delivered remarks during the discussion relating to regional conflicts, stating that he wants to share his views just as a participant of the discussion and is not going to make an official statement about the situation in Armenia, the relations with Turkey, Azerbaijan, as well as the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, although the discussions are being held in Minsk, and the OSCE Group, dealing with the peaceful negotiation process for the settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, is called Minsk Group. “I hope one day we will achieve a peaceful settlement by the help of this Group”, the Armenian President said.

Commenting on the opinions voiced and in particular the issue of stability as mentioned by President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, President Armen Sarkissian said if there is no stability, one cannot predict what will happen tomorrow. One of the topics discussed related to the bipolar, unipolar and multipolar world. “This speaks about the fact that we are entering into a period where many voices, rather than one or two, will be decisive”, he said and also commented on the view of MSC chairman Wolfgang Ischinger what are the roles of small states in cooperation, partnership and competitiveness processes, whether the small states are deprived from the right to voice, or in any case they can contribute to ensuring security. “In order to answer this question, I want to state that today the world is rapidly changing”, Sarkissian said. “The world is changing so rapidly that the ongoing technological changes will drastically become one of the challenges, and we need to understand what behavior we need to show in this field. I think the predictability will be the main one here”.

According to the Armenian President, the voices of all must be heard in the new world. “In the 21st century, when we face numerous dangers and risks, the small, even frozen conflicts, can become source of major problems. They can turn into regional conflicts and even go beyond the boundaries of regions. We witness this today for instance in Donbass.

We must be careful while talking about small, frozen conflicts. They may become very dangerous. This also relates to the conflict, my country met with: the talk is about the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Unfortunately, what is taking place in the region, can be characterized as a high level of tension.

I think 20 years ago we could more rely on stability. I want to call on all participants, representatives of big states to stop the militarization of small conflicts, including the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. It’s a small land, but Armenia and Azerbaijan increase their armaments as a result of this. Of course, it’s not a nuclear arsenal, but complicates the situation, as today the technologies are developing more and more, and weapons today become more dangerous.

The most important thing in our life is the time. We can buy everything, however, unfortunately, we can’t stop the time”.

Commenting on the role of time factor in the NK conflict settlement, the President said: “We know that the time is a relative concept. If it works in favor of peace, we can wait, but if it works in favor of war, it’s very short. I am deeply concerned over the militarization of the Azerbaijani side, and how much money is invested in this process. This shows that a great military potential is accumulated here. If you look at this, you will see that the time is not working in favor of peace. Is there a possibility that there will be a chain reaction, then yes. We should start not only talking, but also acting during the time of peace.

Elections will be held in Armenia soon, based on which legitimate government and parliament will be formed, there will people who will be able to sit around a negotiation table with Azerbaijan. In fact, everything depends on the will of the people”.

Calling on to listen to the people of the Republic of Artsakh, the Armenian President once again thanked the OSCE for the efforts it makes for the sake of the settlement of the conflict. “There is only one way, a peaceful way for the conflict settlement, there are no military ways”, President Sarkissian said. “If the military operations resume, all, everyone living in Artsakh, Azerbaijan and Armenia and the whole world will be affected. In other words, there is only one way, the peaceful settlement way, which can be done through the OSCE Minsk Group”.