The US is committed to working with Russia and France in the settlement of the Nagorno Karabakah conflict.
“In meetings in Washington the Co-Chairs heard from the US that we are committed to working with Russia and France on Nagorno Karabakh settlement,” US Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group James Warlick said in a Twitter post.
The Co-Chairs were in Washington on June 6 to hold meetings at the US Department of State the Department of Defense and the National Security Council.
The Foreign Affairs Committee of the Belgian House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a draft resolution on the commemoration of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, Belgian websites report.
The resolution must now be voted in a plenary session of the House. Three coalition parties abstained from voting.
Head of the MR group Denis Ducarme welcomed the vote.
A few weeks ago the tragic events committed between 1915-1917 in the Ottoman Empire should be “considered a genocide.”
Russian businessman, billionaire German Sterligov has moved to Nagorno Karabakh, Russian media report.
The Russian News Service claims the businessmen is selling his property. His assistant Polina Sirota has said Sterligov left for Karabakh on July 4.
“He has left for Nagorno Karabakh, and it’s not known when he’s going to return. Serious circumstances have made him leave Russia. But it’s not bandits, it’s on a higher level,” she said.
The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry has already announced it will investigate the fact of ‘illegal stay’ of the Russian businessman German Sterligov and his family members in Nagorno Karabakh.
A number of foreign-backed Takfiri terrorists, who have been arrested by the Syrian army, have confessed that they were trained in Turkey by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, reports.
The Takfiri militants, who were caught recently in the northwestern Syrian city of Aleppo, confessed in interviews broadcast by the Syrian state TV on Sunday that military personnel from the US, Saudi Arabia and Qatar had trained them on Turkey’s soil.
One of the terrorists, identified as Ahmad Mustafa Mastari, said that he, along with other members of a terrorist group, had been sent to Aleppo after received military training in Turkey for 30 days.
He added that the foreign personnel had trained them for 45 days in the city of Salqin in the Syrian province of Idleb before the training in Turkey.
“I was among the force that attacked Jam’yat al-Zahraa in Aleppo, we were about 250 persons, but the operation failed and we were arrested by the army” Mastari said.
Another terrorist, called Mohammad Aqel Akk, said a group of terrorists, including himself, had been trained for 45 days in Salqin, adding that they were later sent to Turkey to complete their training.
He went on to say that besides receiving training, every trainee was given USD 200 in Turkey.
“We then returned to Aleppo and commenced a huge attack on army posts in Aleppo, but our operation was a failure and we got caught,” he added.
Qasem Abdullah, a terrorist who was caught by the Syrian army in Aleppo, said that he received five months of training in Turkey where he was receiving about USD 80 per month.
He added that he was among a group of 50 gunmen who took part in a failed attack in Aleppo.
“A number of us, including me, were injured in the attack and we decided to surrender to the army” he said.
The Russian military base in Armenia was alerted on Tuesday in a sudden combat readiness check, the press office of Russia’s Southern Military District said on Tuesday, TASS reports.
“The commission of the Southern Military District headed by the District’s Deputy Commander, Lieutenant-General Igor Turchenyuk has started a sudden combat readiness check of the military base located in the Republic of Armenia,” the press office said in a statement.
“During the sudden check, the commission will study the readiness of on-duty forces in the aviation unit in Erenbuni and the military base in the Gyumri garrison for the accomplishment of the tasks for switching to full combat readiness,” the press release said.
Special attention will be paid to practical actions from an alarm call to the deployment of the base’s units in the designated areas for accomplishing combat training tasks in the Kamkhud and Alagyaz training ranges.
The military drills will be monitored with the help of the Navodchik-2 drones.
Asbarez – Last week, articles appearing in various Lebanese press outlets, in several languages, reported that the historic Bird’s Nest Orphange was being sold to make room for a beach-front development.
One of the last vestiges of the Armenian Genocide, the Bird’s Nest facility, which was run by the efforts of Near East Relief and founded by Danish missionary Maria Jacobson, was a refuge for orphans who survived the Genocide and today continues to operate as a safe-haven for underprivileged children under the auspices of the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia.
The Board of Directors of Bird’s Nest issued an announcement on Sunday refuting those claims, with its executive director Seta Khedeshian, in an interview with CiliciaTV, also criticizing the press for irresponsible reporting that has created furor in the community, as well as on social media.
The focus of the controversy is a beach front portion of the Bird’s Nest property that has not been is use for decades. Given the rising costs of maintaining the facility, the board has leased that portion of the property, which will be developed by the lessee. After the completion of the lease, the ownership of that developed property is slated to revert to the Catholicosate.
Currently, an old building on the soon-to-be-leased portion of the property, which was a dining hall, is being used as a church. That building, which is in poor condition, will be demolished and a new Armenian church will be constructed, through a $1 million pledge by the lessee on the perimeter of the current facility.
The development on this portion of the property will provide Bird’s Nest with much-needed income to continue to serve the children of the community.
“The income generating project currently under construction at the bottom half of the orphanage (under the supervision of the Lebanon’s directorate of antiquities) is to help with the maintenance of the Orphanage, the Museum, the Armenian Church and the community as a whole,” said the Bird’s Nest announcement.
“The project was carefully selected out of many proposals, because the maintenance of our space (30,000 square meters of land) needs special attention and funding. The financial income will serve to repair many of the old buildings within the orphanage that would cause a threat to the inhabitants as well as visitors. Furthermore, the land in question is not public, it is private and not located within the perimeters of the Byblos archeological site. All claims that this land is public and that the implementation of this project restricts the public access to the sea, are absolutely false and intended to create problems,” added the announcement.
Khedeshian clarified that no edifice within the facility will be demolished. In fact, she pointed to additions and renovations to the current facility, which will greatly enhance Bird’s Nest and make it a focal point for community service, as well as it historic significance.
One of those improvements is related to an abandoned cemetery on the site of the proposed development. The remains of those interred at the cemetery, which include some orphans of the Genocide but mainly of Bird’s Nest staff members, will be exhumed and transferred closer to where founder Maria Jacobson—known as Mama—is interred, making it a focal point of the facility.
“The abandoned cemetery which is currently in very bad shape and in an insecure location, is carefully planned to be relocated next to Miss Maria Jacobsen’s grave (The founder of the Orphanage) and the new Museum, in order to showcase the importance of the cemetery,” said the announcement.
A decade ago, the board of directors of the Bird’s Nest embarked on a project to build an Armenian Genocide orphans’ museum on the site of the orphanage to memorialize the surviving orphans and pay tribute to the founders of the orphanage. The museum will have its official opening next week, with an inauguration ceremony to be presided over by His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia.
“The museum design consists of artifacts, photos and a collective cemetery of the children and employees buried within the Bird’s Nest compound to portray to the world the daily life of the orphans,” explained the Bird’s Nest Board announcement.
Khedeshian also discussed the refurbishing of the dormitories, which is being sponsored by benefactor Aleco Bezikian. The completed dormitories will be named for the benefactor’s son, Zareh.
The Bird’s Nest board clarified in its announcement that recent press headlines “are deliberately false, manipulative and intentionally omitting facts intended to provoke unjustified emotions against both projects. Far from being under any threat, the historical Bird’s Nest orphanage is thriving and becoming more important.”
Khedeshian also echoed similar sentiments in her interview.
The Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan has banned Lyubov Kazarnovskaya, a Russian opera singer after she recently took a trip to Nagorno Karabakh.
“Lyubov Kazarnovskaya’s name will be included in the list of ‘unwanted’ persons,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hikmat Hajiyev told RIA Novosti.
The Opera singer visited Stepanakert last week, where she held a master class at the musical college.
Kazarnovskaya has said she’s proud to be in the same list with Montserrat Caballe. “Nagorno Karabakh is a splendid place, and I took young interns there. There will never be pace on the planet as long as there is aggression. There, in Karabakh people do not want war. They want peace, they want to give birth to children and hear the sounds of music,” she told the Russian News Service.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is expected to present new proposals at a eurozone emergency summit on his country’s growing debt crisis, the BBC reports.
The plan is said to include a demand for Greece’s debt to be cut by up to 30%, after voters rejected the terms of an international bailout on Sunday.
Athens has been urged to make “serious” proposals as Greece risks defaulting on its €323bn debt.
Greece’s banks are to stay closed on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The European Central Bank (ECB) is maintaining its pressure on Greek banks, refusing to increase emergency lending and ordering them to provide more security for existing emergency loans.
Eurozone finance ministers will meet in Brussels later on Tuesday before a full summit of eurozone leaders.
With the aim of helping boost computer literacy in Artsakh schools, the Hayastan All-Armenian Fund’s Cypriot affiliate has initiated and sponsored the establishment of computer classrooms at five secondary schools in the Karvachar area, by donating six computer systems as well as computer furniture to each of the schools. The government of Artsakh has given the project additional support by funding the complete renovation of the computer classrooms.
The beneficiaries of the project comprise the William Saroyan School (city of Karvachar), J. Jlavyan School (Nor Verin Shen village), S. Erumyans School (Nor Brajur village), V. Nazaryan School (Nor Getashen village), and P. Ghevondyan School (Yeghegnut village). The five schools have a total of close to 300 students. As Zhora Sargsyan, principal of the P. Ghevondyan School, stated, today it would be hard to imagine the life of children and teenagers without computers, especially at school.
Sebouh Tavitian, chair of the Hayastan All-Armenian Fund’s Cypriot affiliate, said he’s delighted that the small Armenian community of Cyprus was able to help enhance the learning experience of Artsakh schoolchildren. “I’m sure they will take good care of their new computers and enjoy using them to broaden their knowledge and skills,” Tavitian stated.
By Mary Boland in Stepanakert
The blue-and-white bird-like structure of Nagorno-Karabakh’s airport perches in the Caucasus Mountains like a shining, defiant emblem of national pride. The departures screen lists an international flight to Yerevan, the Armenian capital. Members of the airport’s 120 staff stand by to pass luggage through the latest model X-ray machine. Authorities at the facility, which cost $20 million (€18 million) to rebuild, say it has sophisticated satellite navigation technology.
However, there are no passengers – and no aircraft. The flight to Yerevan is aspirational; the only way to get there remains a six-hour drive through the mountains. The reason: any flights that land at or leave this airport will come under fire from Azeri troops.
As a self-proclaimed republic recognised by no country in the world, Nagorno-Karabakh considers itself a nation under siege. Located within Azerbaijan’s official borders but run by ethnic Armenians, the landlocked enclave was the subject of a devastating war between 1991 and 1994, which cost some 30,000 lives and displaced a million people.
Nagorno-Karabakh has kept its de facto autonomy, butAzerbaijan maintains its claim to it.
The airport, destroyed in the war, reopened four years ago. “In 2011 we wanted to start flights, but our neighbours intervened – they said they would shoot down our aircraft,” says Dmitri Atbashyan, head of the statelet’s civil aviation authority.
The threats are not exaggerated. Last year three military personnel died after Azeri troops shot down their helicopter. Troops from both sides have died in sporadic clashes on the border, in breach of a 1994 Moscow-brokered ceasefire.
With a wry sense of humour and a glint behind his aviator sunglasses, Atbashyan is proud to show off the little-used airport – and tout its advantages as a flying school, in which lessons involve close-range sorties safe from gunfire. “You can get your pilot’s licence here for $6,000 [€5,400]; in the US it will cost you $31,000. And we have some of the best pilots.”
As if on cue, instructor Samuel Tavadyan, an ex-military man, starts up a small Zenith plane and takes off. He shoots into the sky, then ducks, weaves and does hairpin bends reminiscent of scenes from a Warner Bros cartoon. After landing, he jumps out and walks away as though he has parked a car.
The airport’s staff are kept on the payroll and all systems remain running “because with such sophisticated machines, it would be too expensive to turn them off”, says Atbashyan. He stresses that every aspect of the facility complies with international standards, so it should therefore be possible to operate it normally.
“The UN Declaration of Human Rights grants everyone freedom of movement,” he says. “This shouldn’t depend on the status of the country of that person.”
No UN member state recognises this enclave of some 147,000 people, despite its national flag, government, public institutions, army and police force. In the eyes of international law, it is a country that doesn’t exist.
This reality is ever present a few kilometres away in downtown Stepanakert, where the president, Bako Sahakyan, faces a lonely challenge on the international stage. As a member of the Commonwealth of Unrecognised States, Nagorno-Karabakh shares a bond of mutual recognition with the club’s three other similarly troubled adherents: South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria.
“Our primary goal is to be integrated into the civilised and international community,” says Sahakyan, a balding, ruddy man in his 50s.
The president is sitting in the boardroom of his presidential palace overlooking the significantly renamed Renaissance Square in the reconstructed capital, with its wide avenues, cafes and fashionable shops. At this comfortable distance from the front lines, it’s hard to imagine that a low-level war is unfolding.
“Being unrecognised always forms the basis of our policies,” he says. “But you must know that everything we do as part of our state-building – our legislation, law enforcement, judicial system, our elections – are all established and operated according to international standards. What we have to do is restore historical justice.”
For Sahakyan, this means righting Moscow’s 1923 designation of Nagorno-Karabakh as an autonomous region within Soviet Azerbaijan. “This entity was itself created artificially when it was forcefully incorporated into Azerbaijan.”
The conflict dates back further, to rivalry between the Christian Armenians and Muslim Turkic Azeris who populated the area for centuries.
Nagorno-Karabakh means “highland black garden”, but locals call it Artsakh, or “strong fortress”. It is nonetheless deeply connected to and dependent on neighbouringArmenia. Its citizens, more than 95 per cent ethnic Armenians, hold Armenian passports, speak Armenian and use the Armenian currency, the dram. And Armenia’s 11 million-strong diaspora is a significant source of funds.
As Sahakyan concedes, it is not easy to run a nation at war over its very existence.
“Of course we think we have to settle this issue with our neighbour,” he says. “We want to discuss, we want to negotiate. Unfortunately, the other side is rejecting our proposals.”
The centuries-old rivalries behind this decades-old conflict are far from resolved. This country that doesn’t exist will likely remain in limbo for some time yet.