Category: News

Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta has been charged with several counts of corruption in a long-running investigation, prosecutors say, the BBC reports.

He faces charges of fraud, tax evasion and money laundering dating back to when he was a lawyer before he became prime minister in 2012, the country’s anti-corruption agency DNA said.

Some of his property has been seized pending the outcome of the case, the agency added.

Mr Ponta denies any wrongdoing.

Mr Ponta resigned as leader of the governing Social Democratic party on Sunday, saying he needed time to prepare his defence, but will continue to fulfil his duties as prime minister.

He is accused of receiving the equivalent of around €55,000 from a political ally and MP.

The number of refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria to neighbouring countries has now passed four million, confirming that crisis as the world’s single largest refugee crisis for almost a quarter of a century under UNHCR’s mandate.

New arrivals in Turkey and updated data from the Turkish authorities on refugees already in that country have taken the total number of Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries to more than 4,013,000 people.

Furthermore, at least an additional 7.6 million people are displaced inside Syria – many of them in difficult circumstances and in locations that are difficult to reach.

“This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation. It is a population that needs the support of the world but is instead living in dire conditions and sinking deeper into poverty,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres.

Tragically, and with no end in sight to Syria’s war, now in its fifth year, the crisis is intensifying and the number of refugees are rising. The four million milestone comes barely 10 months since the total of three million was reached. At current rates, UNHCR expects the figure to reach around 4.27 million by the end of 2015.

“Worsening conditions are driving growing numbers towards Europe and further afield, but the overwhelming majority remain in the region,” Guterres added. “We cannot afford to let them and the communities hosting them slide further into desperation.”

Refugee outflows in June 2015 saw more than 24,000 people arriving in Turkey from Tel Abyad and other parts of northern Syria. Turkey is now home to around 45 per cent of all Syrian refugees in the region.

The figure of four million comprises 1,805,255 Syrian refugees in Turkey, 249,726 in Iraq, 629,128 in Jordan, 132,375 in Egypt, 1,172,753 in Lebanon, and 24,055 elsewhere in North Africa. Not included, are more than 270,000 asylum applications by Syrians in Europe, and thousands of others resettled from the region elsewhere.

Meanwhile, funding of the Syria refugee situation has become an equally pressing problem. For 2015 as a whole, UNHCR and partners appealed for US$5.5 billion. However, as of late June, only around a quarter of the humanitarian funds requested have been received. This means refugees face tough new cuts in food aid, and struggle to afford lifesaving health services or send their children to school.

Life for Syrians in exile is increasingly tough. Some 86 per cent of refugees outside camps in Jordan live below the poverty line of US$3.2 per day. In Lebanon, 55 per cent of refugees live in sub-standard shelters.

Throughout the region, hope of returning home is dwindling as the crisis drags on. Refugees become more impoverished, and negative coping practices such as child labour, begging and child marriages are on the rise. Competition for employment, land, housing water and energy in already vulnerable host communities is straining the ability of these communities to cope with the overwhelming numbers and sustain their support to them.

The death toll in the collapse of Russian Airborne Troops barracks in the Russian City of Omsk has reached 12 people, another 19 are in hospital, the Defense Ministry’s press service told RIA Novosti.

Rescuers continue searching for 11 soldiers on the site, the press service reported.

“Eleven soldiers are still missing… The debris handling see rescue officers, the military garrison of Omsk, special engineering equipment and a group of dog handlers,” — added spokesman.

Actor Omar Sharif, best known for his roles in classic films Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, has died aged 83, the BBC reports.

Egypt-born Sharif won two Golden Globe awards and an Oscar nomination for his role as Sherif Ali in David Lean’s 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia.

He won a further Golden Globe three years later for Doctor Zhivago.

Earlier this year, his agent confirmed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Omar Sharif is best known to the Armenian audience for his role in Mayrig, a 1991 film written and directed by French-Armenian filmmaker Henri Verneuil.

The movie that also stars Claudia Cardinale is about the struggles of an Armenian family that emigrates to France from Turkey after the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Armenia, and Nepal have been admitted to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on a partner status, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday, Sputnik News reports.

“Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cambodia, and Nepal have joined the SCO family as partners in dialogue,” Putin said during his opening speech at the extended meeting of SCO’s Heads of Governments Council in the Russian city of Ufa.

Earlier, the SCO had three dialogue partners — Belarus, Sri Lanka and Turkey.

The SCO summit launched the procedures to accept new members, India and Pakistan, the president added. India and Pakistan, currently holding observer status in the organization, applied to join the SCO as full members in September 2014.

The SCO is a political, economic and military alliance founded in 2001 by Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Germany now plans to return the skulls of ethnic Herero victims of 19th-century colonialism in south-western Africa. Their skulls were transported to what was then the German Empire for “medical research,” reports. 

Was it murder and expulsion, or should it be called genocide? The terminology becomes political when talking about the victims of German colonial rule in south-western Africa, mainly Namibia, around the turn of the 20th century. The deaths that occurred back then have not yet been clearly defined in the history books.

The proper term has been debated for decades, not unlike the disputed genocide against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. For Israel Kaunatjike from a Berlin NGO against genocide, the Namibian skulls represent a chapter in German history that should have been rewritten long ago. “The first genocide of the 20th century took place in Namibia,” he told DW, “and we are listening carefully to what German politics is saying about that.”

Kaunatjike was born in 1947 as the son of Herero survivors in southwestern Africa. He has lived as a political refugee in Germany since 1970. His family’s past is closely interwoven with Germany’s colonial history. “My grandmother was employed by a German family back then – Otto Möller’s family. And that’s where my mother was born. I found that out much later,” he said.

On July 9, 1915, Germany’s colonial rule in southwestern Africa came to an end. A century later, this forgotten slice of Germany’s history is finally gaining attention. The president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Herman Parzinger, recently commented on the situation, referring specifically to a large collection of skulls which Berlin’s Charité hospital recently gave the Heritage Foundation. The precise origin of the skulls has not yet been determined.

For Parzinger, intensive provenance research is necessary. “It’s especially crucial to separate remains from pre-historic graves in Germany from those that came from German colonial territories in the 19th and early 20th centuries which may have been illegally brought to Berlin,” he told the epd news agency. Parzinger sees the scientific research as the first step to returning the remains. “However, it must be clear who the lawful recipient is,” he emphasized.

Kaunatjike has a different priority. “For us, it’s very important that the remains are brought back home. We estimate that approximately 3,000 Hereros and Namas from Namibia are here in Germany. These people were killed, expelled into the desert, or were put in camps – women, children, men.”

The skulls had likely been sent to the Charité hospital for “racial research” – a disturbing racist practice that was not uncommon in Western Europe at the time. Kaunatjike described exactly how the remains were prepared. “The Herero women had to scrape the skulls with glass shards, and wash and boil them,” he explained. “Then they were brought here – like ostrich eggs. That is inhuman. And we don’t know whether these people were beheaded.”

For Kaunatjike, the provenance research on the skulls is secondary. “These remains don’t belong in the archives of German universities and other medical institutions. They are still being used for research. That hasn’t ended.”

Helmut Parzinger has recommended that Germany’s colonial past – and the crimes committed during that time – be included in the presentation of exhibits of artifacts. “Among the German public, knowledge about these events has been overshadowed by the crime of the century – that is, the Holocaust – and World War II,” he admitted. The forgotten colonial area is to become part of the exhibitions in the planned Humboldt-Forum, which is to be part of the newly reconstructed Berlin Palace. “That has to change if we are to participate in earnest, eye-level discourse with others,” added Parzinger.

For the current generations of Hereros, like Israel Kaunatjike, the decisive point lies elsewhere: Germany’s long-overdue official apology has yet to happen. Nevertheless: “I’m very glad that the President of the Bundestag Norbert Lammert said that it’s high time that this part of Germany’s history be recognized,” said Kaunatjike.

A number of examples of hate speech have turned into hate crimes in Turkey in recent weeks and no prosecutor has so far taken the initiative regarding these statements and crimes, Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Istanbul deputy Garo Paylan has stated, the reports.

“Each hate speech crime going unpunished pushes people targeted by hate speech to the ‘dove’s skittishness’ and lays the ground for hate crimes,” Paylan said  at a press conference at parliament.

“Dove’s skittishness” is a phrase used by slain Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in his final article in his bilingual Agos newspaper, expressing his feeling of being terrorized just days before he was killed on Jan. 19, 2007.

“The recent discourses aiming to create hatred and enmity against the Armenian community in Kars and Ankara and LGBTI individuals in Ankara constitute a clear and imminent threat against the right to life,” Paylan said, also referring to recent attacks against Korean tourists in Istanbul, mistaken by Turkish ultranationalists for Chinese people.

“It is obvious that ‘poisoned’ phrases and discourses have prepared the ground for murders in Turkey’s recent history,” Paylan said, listing a number of incidents including the killing of Father Andrea Santoro in February 2006 as he prayed in his church in the Black Sea city of Trabzon, as well as the killings at the Zirve Publishing House in Malatya in April 2007, when three missionaries were tied up and tortured before having their throats slit.

Paylan also referred to four particular recent incidents, including when the head of the local branch of the far-right “Idealist Hearths” (Ülkü Ocakları), which has close links with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), that his group would “hunt for Armenians” in Kars after world-renowned pianist at the nearby ruins of Ani, on the border with Armenia.

“What should we do now? Should we start a hunt for Armenians in the streets of Kars?” Adıgüzel asked reporters on June 24, three days after the Hamasyan concert.

Paylan said he would file a complaint about Adıgüzel later, while calling on prosecutors to take action against other hate speech.

Meanwhile, on July 2, Adana Mayor Hüseyin Sözlü of the MHP targeted Armenian members of parliament elected in the June 7 election by referring to late Turkish-Armenian brothel owner Matild Manukyan.

“Manukyan’s nephew living in Adana must be happy. The children of their three aunts have also entered parliament from the AKP [Justice and Development Party], the CHP [Republican People’s Party] and the HDP.

No matter how proud they are now, it will never be enough,” Sözlü wrote on his Twitter account.

Along with the HDP’s Paylan, two other Turkish citizens of Armenian origin entered parliament as MPs in the June 7 general election: AKP deputy Markar Esayan and CHP deputy Selina Doğan.

The leader of Armenian Catholics in Eastern Europe has described how the suffering inflicted by the 1915 genocide has echoed down the generations to today.

Armenian Catholic Archbishop Raphael François Minassian of Eastern Europe has praised the Pope’s recognition of the scale of the massacre carried out against Armenians by Ottoman forces during the First World War.

Speaking in April during a Mass at St Peter’s in Rome to mark the centenary of the massacre, the Pope used the word “genocide” in a reference to the killing of nearly 1.5 million Armenian Christians.

In an interview with , and other suffering Christians, Archbishop Minassian said: “We were certain that the Pope would remember the genocide, and his courage has changed the attitude of the entire world.”

The Archbishop gave his ACN interview during his visit to Rome for the plenary annual session of ROACO (Riunione delle Opere di Aiuto per le Chiese Orientali), an international symposium of aid agencies for the Oriental Churches.

Referring to the Pope’s statement during the Armenian Mass at St Peter’s, the archbishop stressed that Francis “had encouraged us to pursue reconciliation – an act of the highest educational, spiritual and human value, which helps us also to recover what we have lost.”

Archbishop Minassian, who is responsible for the Armenian community in Georgia, Armenia and the Russian Federation, described how even Armenians who did not directly witness the massacre of 1915 nevertheless still suffer the consequences.

He said: “Some psychological attitudes, such as the instinctive fear at the sight of an armed guard, have been passed down even to the second and third generations.”

Describing the situation in Armenia, Archbishop Minassian called cooperation with the Armenian Apostolic Church “perfect” despite a notable lack of suitable
infrastructure within the Church itself.

He said: “In the parishes there are no church halls or offices, everything has to be done inside the church itself,” he admitted, “Often the priests are obliged to celebrate the Sacred Liturgies in school halls, with the result that we risk being looked upon as a sect.”

Lusine Avanesyan
Public Radio of Armenia
Stepanakert

Russian billionaire German Sterligov has settled in Shushi, Karabakh. The family does not make the address public, but never refuses to meet journalists. Sterligov and his wife Alyona avoid speaking about the reasons behind their decision to move to Artsakh, but promise to reveal the truth at a press conference Monday.

Speaking to , Alyona Sterligova said they have Armenian friends and were planning to visit Armenia, but never thought the circumstances would change and they would move to Artsakh.

“It was my husband’s decision,” Alyona said. “We were in Belarus. My husband came and said we immediately had to leave for the Caucasus because of some reason. These circumstances do not allow us to return to Russia at this point. I did not ask anything, as this was not the first such case in my life (we moved several times in 1990s).”

The most important thing for Alyena is to see her spouse and children safe and healthy. She’s not upset for being forced to start new life in a new place. Instead, she’s very inspired, and the nature and people of Artsakh are the source of that inspiration.

“I don’t know where else we could feel as comfortable and where our children would feel as safe,”Alyona Sterligova says.

What attracts her most in Artsakh is that everything is natural here: chickens are not vaccinated, products are pure, animals are healthy. “This is what German has been talking about for a few years,” Alyona says. They intend to create the replica of their famous ‘Sloboda’ in Artsakh. They are currently travelling in the country in search for a proper land.

The place, where they intend to found the ‘Armenian Sloboda’ should have beautiful nature, good climate and water and a mountainous river that will operate a mill.

Alyona has aalready opened a fashion house in one of the rooms of the carpet museum in Shushi. She says the future models should be suitable to Armenian taste. Inspired by the carpets, she has decided to copy the prints on fabrics and sew Armenian clothes.

The Sterligovs do not conceal they do not know how long they will stay in Nagorno Karabakh. “The decisions may be sudden,” Alyona says. That does not mean, however, that the ‘Armenian Sloboda’ will stop operating.

Lured by the nature of Artsakh and the Armenian traditions, Sterligova says “it’s possible to restore the ecologically clean economy in Nagorno Karabakh.” “In that case many people will express the desire to come here, and you’ll have a choice whether to allow or not.”

Irrespective of the reasons behind the Sterligovs’ decision to move to Nagorno Karabakah, their presence has aroused great interest. Many of their friends can be seen visiting Artsakh.