Category: 2018

Flame Towers in Baku light up in the colors of the Armenian flag

Frangulian Shushan
Public Radio of Armenia
July 4 2018
10:17, 04 Jul 2018

The Flame Towers – the trio of skyscrapers in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku – lit up in the colors of the Armenian flag during a World Cup fixture between Columbia and England.

The intention was to depict the Columbian flag, after Colombia’s Yerry Mina scored a stoppage time equalizer. However, the sequence of colors was confused.

Azerbaijani users have widely shared photos of the flag on social media.

England won a World Cup penalty shootout for the first time on a night of high drama in Moscow, overcoming Colombia to secure a quarter-final meeting with Sweden.

A mother in the minefields: Women work to make disputed Nagorno Karabakh a safer place

Arbi Tashjian
Global Voices Online
July 4 2018

Posted 4 July 2018 2:11 GMT            

The following is a version of a partner post by Global Voices’ partner Chai-Khana.org. Text and photos by Knar Babayan.

From a distance, the three sappers all look the same – high boots, trousers with deep pockets, a special helmet, protective visor and gloves. Many locals in Nagorno Karabakh, a relatively traditional society, assume they are men. But these are women, and, like men, when they head into potential minefields, they are doing so to help their families survive.

“I’m doing it for my family, to provide my children with a safe and better future,” explains 38-year-old sapper Kristine Khachatryan, the married mother of three boys, ages six to 18.

When Khachatryan comes home on the weekends, her six-year-old son Nairi follows her every step.

For years after its conflict with Azerbaijani forces in the early 1990s, Nagorno Karabakh routinely posted 20 or more annual civilian casualties from landmines and unexploded ordnance.

The Halo Trust, a British mine-clearing organization which has operated here for the last 18 years, now declares Karabakh is 90-percent mine-free, but the potential threat remains. Just this March, a mine explosion in the Martakert region took the lives of three sappers and wounded two villagers.

Taking on demining is no easy decision. But three years ago, when Halo Trust began to recruit its first women sappers, Khachatryan, a village-council accountant from Artashavi, 80 kilometers to the southwest of Karabakh’s main town, Stepanakert, decided to apply.

After checking and finding no mines in one spot on a piece of land near the village of Karegah, Khachatryan marks off a new area for demining.

She did so “out of curiosity” — in 2013, two mine explosions near Artashavi had wounded several locals — but also out of financial necessity.

Khachatryan’s husband, Garik Ohanjanyan, a former school teacher, was unemployed.

Work as a sapper, which pays 225,000 drams (about $464) a month and comes with insurance, roughly quadrupled her income.

”Of course, it’s not easy to be a sapper. Of course, my family worries about me,” says Khachatryan. “I also worry and try to follow all the safety rules. If you are following the safety rules, you can keep yourself safe. The golden rule of doing a dangerous job is to be safe.”

Once certified, though, she did not expect to stay on the job for long. She accepted the post since the first demining field was close to Artashavi, within easy reach of her family.

“Of course, I was worried in the beginning,” she recounts, “but later I understood that there is no bad work. There are just bad people. And now I’m proud that I’m doing a big and important humanitarian job.”

Even in the field, Khachatryan makes a point of painting her nails, wearing makeup and tending to her hair. Women should always look feminine, no matter what work they do, she says.

The fact that she also was a pioneer never occurred to her.

“Before becoming a sapper, I never thought that this was a ‘man’s job’ or about how I should work in a man’s world,” Khachatryan continues.

“You have completely different things on your mind when you enter a minefield,” such as routine daily matters or your family, she adds.

Halo Trust’s 11 female sappers work in three teams, each with a male lead. The organization intends to train women as team leaders and drivers, says project coordinator Anna Israelyan.

Very often, sappers work in fields far from their main base, usually a rented house in a nearby village or town. For this reason, sometimes a small, demined part of a field is turned into an open-air kitchen where they can eat and relax. On cold, rainy days, they also dry their clothes there.

They spend Monday through Friday in the field. Getting to the field station, a rented house in a village or town, can take time on Karabakh’s rough roads – over two hours to travel 65 kilometers by taxi, for instance. Public transportation does not always exist.

Khachatryan’s day starts at 7am each Monday. Already dressed for fieldwork, she quickly checks her mine-clearance equipment and drinks a cup of tea or coffee while running out the door.

Most of this territory near the village of Karegah in the Kashatagh region had already been demined when Khachatryan and her team came to the spot, shown here in the winter of 2016. During their week of work here, Khachtryan found one mine. She says that she feels nothing in particular when she finds a mine; the emotions hit after it has been deactivated.

In her absence, her husband and sons — 18-year-old Gor, 16-year-old Tigran and six-year-old Nairi — have had to learn how to clean the house, cook, wash dishes and use the washing machine.

Khachatryan’s husband and three sons handle all the housework while she is away during the week de-mining.

Next year, when her oldest son, Gor, 18, heads to Stepanakert for two years of compulsory military service, she wants her two younger sons to follow him so that they can see each other and have access to more sports.

During her breaks on the Karegah field, Khachatryan made a sapper snowman to photograph and email to her sons.

The boys still do not think that demining is appropriate work for a woman, but they are proud of their mother when she appears in news stories.

Khachatryan herself concedes that “I don’t always feel myself in harmony as a woman, as a mother and as a sapper.” She would like to organize her work so that she has more time for her family; particularly, her youngest son, who was just three when she began demining.

Nonetheless, she believes that “women are not inferior to men professionally.”

To make up for her absence during the week, Khachatryan tries to buy something tasty for her sons on the weekends. Here, with her husband, Garik, reflected in the mirror, she warms up French fries for lunch.

For some people, though, the mine explosion this March was a warning that it was time to change her profession. Many friends and relatives began to phone and ask whether she would leave her work, Khachatryan says.

“Honestly speaking, I had no sense of fear entering a minefield after that accident,” she elaborates. “It was deeply painful to me as a human being and I had a sense of huge responsibility to continue the work of my friends.”

She intends to stay on the job.

https://globalvoices.org/2018/07/04/a-mother-in-the-minefields-women-work-to-make-disputed-nagorno-karabakh-a-safer-place/




National Security Service detains director of Hayastan all-Armenian fund

Emil Lazarian
ARKA, Armenia
July 4 2018

YEREVAN, July 3. /ARKA/. Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) detained July 2 the executive director of “Hayastan” All Armenian Fund on suspicion of embezzlement and misuse of funds. According to an NSS statement, under the pressure of facts, Vardanyan has confessed to misappropriating the charity’s funds, including using Armenia Fund money for online gambling.

According to the statement, Vardanyan used a Hayastan Fund credit card with a limit of 25 million drams (approximately $5,500) for online gambling. He then used donated funds to replenish the credit card account. According to his own testimony, Vardanyan then placed his own money into the charity’s accounts to compensate for the wasted money.

NSS said during the last week alone, Vardanyan used nearly 14 million drams ($29,000) from the Hayastan Fund credit card for online gambling. From 2016 to 2018 Vardanyan reportedly misappropriated approximately 130 million drams (around $270,000) for personal use.

The Hayastan pan-Armenian Fund is a tax-exempt, non-governmental, non-political corporation, established in 1994 in Los Angeles, California to carry out national projects in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. -0-

Russian Politicians Say Armenia Must Return Nagorno-Karabakh And Surrounding Regions To Azerbaijan

Eduard Nalbandian
Caspian News
July 4 2018


By Nazrin Gadimova July 4, 2018                                

    • In 1991, a military campaign against Azerbaijan was launched by Armenia following the fall of the Soviet Union and lasted until 1994, ultimately resulting in Armenia occupying 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territories – the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

  • One of the world’s long-standing conflicts, widely considered the remnant of the legacy of the USSR, came into the spotlight on Sunday when Russian and Azerbaijani officials and experts met in Jojug Marjanli, the village located in Jabrayil – Azerbaijan’s southwestern district occupied by Armenia together with six other districts and Nagorno-Karabakh region.

  • Though Jabrayil is not still liberated, Jojug Marjanli has been thriving since 2016 when the Azerbaijani armed forces retook the strategic hill, which overlooks the village. International community believes Armenia should give back all territories belonging to Azerbaijan.

    Dmitry Saveliev, the Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Security and Anti-corruption, said Armenia should relinquish its hold on Azerbaijani land that was captured during a war in the early 1990s and shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

    “Karabakh and seven [surrounding] regions should be liberated and returned to Azerbaijan without any additional stipulations,” Azerbaijan’s Trend news agency quoted Saveliev as saying, referring to Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven adjacent districts that are kept under occupation by Armenia since the early 1990s.

    The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has threatened peace and stability in the South Caucasus region since the late 1980s when Yerevan launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against Azerbaijanis living in Armenia.

    In 1991, a military campaign against Azerbaijan was launched by Armenia following the fall of the Soviet Union and lasted until 1994, ultimately resulting in Armenia occupying 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territories – the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The war claimed the lives of over 20,000 Azerbaijanis, while one million more were internally displaced and 4,000 went missing.

    In 1994, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) launched the Minsk Group. Co-chaired by representatives of the U.S., Russia and France, the group is charged with finding a peaceful, unarmed solution to the conflict. While it means well, the arrangement has resulted in over two decades of gridlock, much to the consternation and disappointment of leaders in Azerbaijan. Some say the group is ineffective and blame it for the ongoing occupation of Azerbaijani territories.

    “Russia’s position must be active in the OSCE Minsk Group for an early settlement of the conflict,” Saveliev said while addressing Sunday’s conference.

    The one-day event, held in Jojug Marjanli, has brought together Russia’s some of the influential politicians and experts, including deputy speaker of the State Duma, Vladislav Kalkhidov, a parliamentarian representing the ruling “United Russia” party, Alexei Ezubov, as well as Alexander Dugin, who leads the International Eurasian Movement, and many others.

    One of the attendees, Yevgeny Bakhrevsky, a political scientist, and the head of the Moscow-based “Heritage” Institute, believes that more than one million of Azerbaijani refugees and IDPs should return home.

    “For the South Caucasus, it is normal when different ethnic and religious communities peacefully coexist with each other, and from this point of view, it is necessary to return Azerbaijani refugees to their native towns and villages,” he told in an interview with Haqqin.az news agency.

    Azerbaijan has one of the highest ratios of IDPs per person in the world, as nearly 1.2 million out of the country’s population of ten million are IDPs and refugees.

    Though the full-scale war ended when a ceasefire agreement was inked in 1994, violations along the frontline are not uncommon. In 2010, 2012 and 2014, a series of skirmishes between Armenia and Azerbaijan broke out; the largest major flare-up since the full-scale war in the early 90s ended took place from April 1-5, 2016 following Armenian shelling of Azerbaijani villages.

    As a result of these more recent clashes, later dubbed the April War, or Four Day War, Azerbaijan retook about 2,000 hectares (approximately 5,000 acres) of its land, including a village, and two strategic hills.

    The village of Jojug Marjanli, which hosted the conference on Sunday, laid in ruins roughly one year ago, but after Azerbaijan’s army retook Leletepe hill, which overlooks the village, it was rebuilt. Reconstruction consisted of building 50 new houses in an area of 3,850 square meters; a secondary school that now serves 96 students; a mosque; a hydro-meteorological station; gas and power lines; and pipelines for potable water. The reconstruction served as a pilot project, described by the central government in Baku as part of a “great return” program to restore and rehabilitate remaining lands that are under Armenian occupation.

    “It is symbolic that we are holding this meeting in Karabakh,” said Alexander Dugin, a Russian philosopher, political analyst, and strategist.

    “This once again emphasizes that Azerbaijan is a strategic partner of Russia. From a legal point of view, Karabakh is the territory of Azerbaijan,” Dugin said. “Russia regards Karabakh as the territory of Azerbaijan . . . in accordance with international law.”