Category: 2022

Armenian Christians have written to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to say they are dissatisfied with his Islamo-nationalist government not making good its promise to non-Muslims by giving them freedom to establish and run their religious and social institutions.

Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople Sahak II Masalyan in a letter to Erdogan, expressed discomfort and growing dissatisfaction among Armenians in Turkey following a new regulation on the administrative management of foundations linked to non-Muslim faith communities.

Patriarch Sahak's letter was published by the local media, the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos .

In that letter Patriarch Sahak proposes to provide all foundations with clear guidelines setting out the criteria for submitting electoral lists on a regional basis in accordance with the approved regulations.

The text of the new regulation for the election of the governing bodies of the foundations have already been published in Turkey's Official Gazette. 

The publication of the new rule was intended to end a long period of deadlock and legislative uncertainty that in recent years hampered and partially prevented the normal functioning of these bodies for the benefit of non-Muslim communities in Turkey. 

This regulation is an issue of vital importance for local Christian communities such as Armenians and Assyrians, whose places of worship — many of them historic –, other real estate and public institutions are entrusted to and managed by foundations.

This new initiative aims to alert Turkey's highest civil authority to the possibility that the growing unease among Turkey's Armenian communities could lead to an outright boycott of the electoral procedures used to allocate managerial and administrative posts within each individual foundation.

Representatives of the local religious communities of religious minorities, had since the first draft, criticized the new provisions. 

They had objected to the new territorial subdivision of the constituencies for the elections for the renewal of the boards of each foundation and for the requirement that foundations that manage hospitals and other health facilities are subject to the control of the Ministry of Health.

The previous electoral regulation for the top management of foundations had been suspended in 2013, after the government chose to establish new procedures to make the management of real estate more functional and transparent. 

The system of foundations is the legal instrument through which Turkish institutions regulate their relations with non-Muslim religious communities. 

It is still based on the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923 by Turkey and the Entente powers (British Empire, France and Russian Empire) victorious from the First World War. 

AEBU Southern California Chapter grants these annual scholarships to undergraduate students of Armenian descent who are enrolled at accredited four-year universities across the U.S. This year, the scholarship was also made available to Armenian students studying in Lebanon and Armenia.

The new U.S. scholars received the awards Sunday, Aug. 14, during a benefit brunch held at the AEBU center in Pasadena, where AEBU scholarship donors and friends and family members of the recipients were present. Those in Armenia and Lebanon will receive the awards in separate events in their countries. 

The recipients include Maral Gurgenian of Los Angeles, Gregory Mazmanian of Sierra Madre, Karina Messerlian of Fresno, Edgar Sahakian from North Hills, and Macyn Topoozian from Fresno. 

In Armenia, Arousiak Seropyan and Misak Kouyoumjian, both from Yerevan, were chosen as the new AEBU scholars for 2022-2023. 

Gassia Norshahian from Bourj Hammoud in Lebanon and  Karine Tankian from Beirut were selected as scholars. 

Before the awarding ceremonies, a large pool of highly qualified candidates in the U.S. and overseas sent applications to the AEBU Scholarship Fund Committee, which reviewed these in a “rewarding but very challenging” selection process, an AEBU statement said.  

At the event, Dr. Gagik Melikyan, Professor of Chemistry at the California State University of Northridge, delivered the keynote speech where he shared his insights about the Armenian presence in scientific international communities, and the social/political impact that Armenians can have through scientific work and research.

The program included a brief history of the mission of the AEBU in general and the Scholarship Fund in particular. It also featured a violin performance by Dikran Melikian, a promising young artist who played Minuets 1 and 2 from “Partita No. 3” by Bach.

Dr. Linda Guergerian-Meguerditchain also gave a recital of an Armenian poem, “Dariners” (My Years) by Hamo Sahian.

The Armenian Educational Benevolent Union is a California-based charitable organization. For more information and to donate, visit www.aebu.org. 

A digital platform dubbed ECOS Free Economic Zone brought positive news from Armenia, a nation that doesn’t often make waves on the world crypto map, towards the end of August. ECOS announced expanding the facility’s capacity by 60 megawatts (MW), which has been in operation since 2018.

The mining operation, which is located near one of the hydropower facilities on the Hrazdan River, uses the site’s infrastructure to power containers while receiving its electricity straight from the high-voltage system. Representatives of the platform mentioned that ECOS might grow to produce 200 MW more of renewable power. In contrast, the Berlin Geothermal Plant in El Salvador distributes 1.5MW of the 102MW it generates to cryptocurrency miners, but the Greenidge Generation near Seneca Lake in the State of New York should have generated roughly 44MW.

Perhaps it is high time to evaluate the industrial potential of this post-Soviet country, standing 1,850 meters above sea level, given the developments with crypto mining laws in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region — nations of the former Soviet Union.

The most definite thing we know about Armenia in terms of crypto is that it doesn’t provide us with a lot of information. In 2018, the Armenian Blockchain Association filed a lawsuit against digital behemoths including Google, Twitter, and Facebook for prohibiting advertisements linked to cryptocurrencies, together with its counterparts from Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Russia, China, and South Korea. Although there have been some recent improvements to the prohibitions on crypto advertisements, it is unclear where the case will go from here.

The inauguration ceremony of a new mining farm, which billed itself as one of the biggest in the world, is said to have been attended by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and other prominent figures in the same year. According to estimates from the local media, some $50 million had been spent on building the farm, which now has 3,000 Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) mining machines with an eventual capacity of 120,000. The farm is a joint venture between Omnia Tech, a contentious multinational mining company, and Multi Group, a significant Armenian conglomerate led by businessman and politician Gagik Tsarukyan. Since the very first press releases, there have been no updates about the farm’s operations.

Greek and Armenian organizations in the US have joined forces to prevent Dr. Mehmet Oz, an ally of former President Donald Trump, from winning a Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

The #StopOz campaign was launched by the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) and the Hellenic American Leadership Council (HALC) recently. The campaign includes a video that has gone viral and has been viewed over one million times in its first forty-eight hours online.

“We’re seeing growing alarm across Pennsylvania—driven in large part by ANCA coalition advocacy with the Hellenic American Leadership Council—over Dr. Oz’s troubling ties to Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan,” said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian.

“Dr. Oz’s candidacy has been defined by false pretenses—pretending to be a Pennsylvanian when he actually lives in New Jersey, pretending to dispense medical advice when he is actually peddling snake oil,” said Hellenic American Leadership Council Executive Director Endy Zemenides.

Zemenides said that “that serial dishonesty is what raises the red flags with regards to Oz’s ties to the Erdogan autocracy. The Washington Post first raised these issues in February, and the fact that Oz has failed to address them is alarming. People all over America—who know full well what influence a single senator can have—are rightly asking: ‘Who is Oz?’”

Dr. Oz, is a Turkish–American television personality, author, professor emeritus, and retired cardiothoracic surgeon. If elected, he would be the first Muslim to serve in the U.S. Senate, the first Muslim to serve in the United States Congress as a Republican, and one of the wealthiest members of Congress.

The son of Turkish immigrants, Oz was raised in Wilmington, Delaware and graduated from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. A dual citizen of the U.S. and Turkey, Oz served in the Turkish Army during the 1980s to maintain his Turkish citizenship.

Oz’s ties to Turkey, including his dual citizenship, were criticized by his Republican primary opponents. Oz called these issues a “distraction” and said that he would renounce his Turkish citizenship if elected while his campaign called the attacks “pathetic and xenophobic.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Oz’s television appearances influenced Trump’s decision-making, and he became an informal advisor to the Trump administration.

Oz had promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, as a cure for COVID-19 on more than twenty-five Fox News broadcasts in March and April 2020.

Trump claimed to be taking the drug in May 2020. In June 2020, the Food and Drug Administration revoked emergency use authorization of hydroxychloroquine, saying that it was “no longer reasonable to believe” that the drug was effective against COVID-19 or that its benefits outweighed “known and potential risks.”